Since 1990, the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust has organized or hosted a range of conferences and seminar series. Several have led to the publication of edited volumes of papers, including The Practice and Representation of Reading; Free Print: Non-Commercial Publishing in Comparative Perspective, Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity; and Books Between Europe and the Americas.
For information on previous conferences and published volumes, please see the links below:
Understanding Mediation: Knowing about Communication in Enlightenment Europe (2013 and 2015)
Connected by Books (2004 and 2007)
The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (1997)
Print for Free: Non-Commercial Publishing in Comparative Perspective (1996)
Designing the Reading Space (1994)
The Practice and Representation of Reading (1991/1992)
In addition to conferences, the Trust has hosted annual December dinners. Past speakers have included Jean Alexander, Nicolas Barker, Germaine Greer and Christopher de Hamel.
Seminars
Here is a list of all our guest seminars. For full details, please see the Events page.
21/5/26, Prof Ruth Padel, Darwin, Cambridge, Poetry and maybe God
13/2/26, Dr Tom Neuhaus, Joyful Toil’: Solidarity and Emotions in Twentieth-Century British Discourse about China
27/1/26, Rishi Dastidar, Poetry Reading
21/11/25, Prof Liudmyla Sharipova, The Nun who Wanted More: The meaning of personal monastic property in an imperial context
17/10/25, Dr Michelle Taylor, Clique Lit: Coterie Circulation in Modernism’s Print Ecologies?
2/11/23, Simon Keable-Elliott, Robert Keable, from Magdalene scholar to notorious novelist
8/6/23, Dr Manuel Medrano, New horizons in bibliography: the Andean khipu
26/1/23, Dr Peter Taverner, The Materialities of Texts: East, and West
10/12/21, Professor Cynthia Brokaw, Chinese Book Culture in the Early Modern Period
2/10/20, Writing the Oxford Illustrated History of the Book
1/5/20, Spring 2020 Workshop, Science and Enlightenment
20/1/20, Dominic Bridge, Between Culture and Commerce: Music Publishers and their Networks in Eighteenth-Century London
19/11/18, Dr Joanna Maciulewicz, The Story of the Book: Uses of Literary Sources in the History of the Book
15/11/18, Dr Nikita Makarchev, 2 x 2 = 5: Protests and Experiments in Revolution-Era Russian Poetry
29/10/18, Dr Christina Lupton, Reading Codex and the Making of Time
16/4/18, Prof. Porscha Fermanis, The SouthHem Project: Literary Outputs and Mediating Institutions Produced in the Southern Hemisphere and Straits Settlements 1780-1870
26/2/18, Dr Nil Palabiyik, The Humanist Interest in the Ottoman Language: Marginalia and Annotations in Turkish Books from Early Modern Libraries
15/1/18, Dr Joseph McDermott, Transmitting Paper and Printing Technologies Across Eurasia: What the Successes and Failures Have to Teach One Another
28/11/17, Dr Dennis Duncan, Filthy Talk p.2′: Handwritten Indexes in Printed Books
25/7/16, Professor Monica Bolufer, Books, Travels and Letters: British Connections of an Eighteenth-Century Spanish Aristocrat
3/5/16, Dr Isabelle Baudino, Samuel Wale and Eighteenth-Century Historical Engraving