University of Reading

The University of Reading houses the Location Register of 20th Century English Literary Manuscripts & Letters, the Writers, Artists & Their Copyright Holders database (in collaboration with University of Texas), and is the leading repository of publishers’ archives in the UK, with holdings of major literary firms, including Longman, Chatto & Windus and Jonathan Cape. The study of modern literary manuscripts and twentieth-century book and publishing history is an international research strength across the institution. The university holds the world’s largest Samuel Beckett archive and significant papers of Italian writer Luigi Meneghello.

David Sutton

Dr David Sutton has been Director of Research Projects in the University of Reading Library since 1982, having previously worked at Trinity College Dublin Library, the British Library, the Université de Paris VIII-Vincennes and the University of Warwick Library. He is editor of the Location Register of 20th Century English Literary Manuscripts & Letters and UK editor of the WATCH copyright project (Writers, Artists & Their Copyright Holders). He has been awarded the Benson Medal of the Royal Society of Literature for distinguished services to literature (2002), and the Archivist of the Year award (Scone Foundation, New York, 2006). He is an active member of the International Council on Archives (ICA), as Chair of ICA’s Section for Archives of Literature and Art (SLA) and of ICA’s Working Group on Intellectual Property.  He has published extensively on literary manuscripts and on ways of tracing copyright holders, and his other interests include food history (contributor to the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery 2009-2014); local politics (Leader of Reading Council 1995-2008); and urban sustainability (keynote speaker at Expo 2005, Aichi, Japan; Chair of the Board of Reading Buses, 2010- ).

Alison Donnell

Alison Donnell is Professor of Modern Literatures in English.  She has published widely on Caribbean, diasporic and black British writings, including a book-length revision of literary history: Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (Routledge, 2006). She has been involved in a number of collaborative projects and publications with academics based in the West Indies, most recently co-editing The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Routledge, 2011) with Michael A. Bucknor, A Founding Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, she is currently on the editorial boards of Journal of West Indian Literature and MaComere. She directed the Research Theme, ‘Minority Identities: Rights and Representations’ at in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Reading. From September 2017 Alison will be Head of School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Sophie Heywood

Dr Sophie Heywood is lecturer in French at the University of Reading. She specialises in the history of children’s literature and publishing in modern France. She has spoken on this subject in Britain, France, and the USA, and published in both English and French. She has received prestigious grants from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the Institute for Historical Research. Her monograph Catholicism and Children’s Literature in France: La comtesse de Ségur (1799-1874) has recently been published in the new series Studies in Modern French History by Manchester University Press (2011).

Daniela La Penna

Dr Daniela La Penna specialises in modern Italian culture, translation and Italian publishing history.  She is the author of a book on diasporic and multilingual poet Amelia Rosselli (Carocci, 2013), the editor of Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation:  Literary Cultures in Italian and English (Continuum, 2008) and ‘Meneghello:  Fiction, Scholarship, Passione civile’ (Special issue of The Italianist, 2012). She is also co-editor of the international journal The Italianist. She has organised several international conferences and workshops and has presented her work in Britain, Italy, France and the US. Her current research explores the connection between literary journals and publishing houses and their role in disseminating foreign culture in translation in post-war Italy. This research has attracted an AHRC early career grant (£192K, 2012-2015) and draws extensively on archives held in Reading, Pavia, Rome, Naples, and Florence.

Andrew Nash

Dr Andrew Nash is Associate Professor in English Literature. He has written widely on various aspects of book and publishing history of the nineteenth and is currently co-editing the final volume of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, covering the period 1914 to the present. He works closely with the University of Reading’s Special Collections and Manuscripts department, advising on the collection of publishers’ archives.  His books include: Kailyard and Scottish Literature (2007) and the edited volumes The Culture of Collected Editions (2003) and Literary Cultures and the Material Book (2007), as well as numerous editions of nineteenth-century Scottish novels. He is an editor of the Review of English Studies. In January 2016 Andrew joined the Institute of English Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, as a Reader in Book History and Communications.