Here is a list of all our research events. 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
Bibliographical Survey of English Novels, 1770-1830
Two awards from the Leverhulme Trust supported research for a major two-volume publication by Oxford University Press, set to revolutionise our understanding of the production of English fiction in the Romantic period. The two volumes, The English Novel, 1770-1799 and The English Novel, 1820-1829 were published by Oxford University Press in March 2000.
The general editors are Prof James Raven (Director CPBT), Prof Peter Garside (University of Wales) and Prof Rainer Schowerling (University of Paderborn, Germany). The CPBT Leverhulme Research Associate is Prof Antonia Forster (University of Akron, Ohio) who is also an editor of volume one.
Details of the authorship, bookselling, and reviewing of all prose fiction of the period, surviving and lost, is reconstructed, together with location references to all remaining copies. Sources include contemporary newspapers, periodical reviews and booksellers’ records. Exhaustive use is made of library catalogues throughout the world, and a copy of each surviving novel has been consulted.
Translation into English of neglected European studies of book history
The first translation will be Otto Walde’s Storhetstidens Litterära Krigsbyten (Uppsala and Stockholm, 1916). This classic Swedish history of literary war booty and the dispersal of library collections during the Thirty Years War, has been available only in Swedish. Walde’s account remains a key guide to our understanding of the movements of book collections from the early seventeenth century. Walde identifies books removed from private and institutional libraries, monasteries and castles in Poland, northern Germany, Denmark, Moravia and Bohemia, and retraces their history to explain their present locations. A translated and fully revised edition in English is being prepared by Elsa Meyland-Smith.
Mapping the Print Culture of Eighteenth-Century London
This project provides for the first time the exact location of printers, booksellers, stationers and binders in London, 1690-1820. The history of the transformation of Paternoster Row and St Paul’s Churchyard as one of the great sites for the book trades in eighteenth-century Europe, can now be recovered by use of land tax records in conjunction with a variety of new sources. These provide not only details of shop size, rentals, and turnover of personnel, but chart the whole character of the commercial neighbourhood. The project, supported by Oxford University (Faculty of Modern History), was awarded an Institutional Research Fellowship by the Humanities Research Board and the British Academy. Using the latest computer techniques, a book trades database was constructed by Dr Nigel Hall. See Bookscape and the history of the book trades in London for more information.
The database provided the basis for James Raven’s 2010 Panizzi Lectures at the British Library, lectures to be published by the British Library as London Book Sites: Places of Printing and Publishing before 1800.
