Notes on Contributors
Rebecca Baumann
is the Head of Curatorial Services and Curator of Modern Books at the Lilly Library, the rare book and manuscript library of Indiana University. They are also Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Library Science at IU, teaching courses in Rare Book Librarianship, Rare Book Curatorship, and the History of the Book, 1450 to the Present. They are the curator of the 2018 exhibition Frankenstein 200: The Birth, Life and Resurrection of Mary Shelley’s Monster and author of the accompanying catalog, published by Indiana University Press. Their interest in pulp and paperback publishing has led to articles in Fine Books & Collections and Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction (PM Press, 2021).
Montserrat Cachero
has a degree in Economics from the University of Seville and a doctorate in History from the European University Institute. She was distinguished academic visitor at Queens’ College (University of Cambridge) in 2005 and visiting fellow at the Center for History and Economics (Harvard University) in 2016. She has been teaching Economic History at Pablo de Olavide University since 2004 as part of the Economics department where she received her tenure track in 2012. She is an expert in 16th century Atlantic Trade focusing on conflicts and institutions for contract enforcement. Since 2015 has been involved in the Social Network Analysis and its use as a methodological tool for historians. She has published several articles on both the theoretical side and its application in specialised journals. She has headed a research project about early modern credit markets and their role in trade financing, funded by the European Commission (EDRF). In 2023 she edited, jointly with Natalia Maillard Álvarez, the volumes Book markets in Mediterranean Europe and Latin America (Palgrave) and Instituciones, imprenta y mercados de libros en Europa y América (University of Seville Press).
Verônica Calsoni Lima
teaches Early Modern History at the Federal University of Triangulo Mineiro (UFTM) in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Her PhD in Social History from the University of São Paulo (2023) focuses on an underground network of authors, booksellers, and bookbinders known as the ‘Confederate Stationers’ and their clandestine production and dissemination of non-conformist and anti-monarchist books, tracts, pamphlets, and broadsides during the English Revolution and the Restoration of Charles II in the seventeenth century. She holds a master’s (2016) and a bachelor’s degree (2012) in History from the Federal University of Sao Paulo. She was awarded grants and scholarships to study and research projects in Brazil, Portugal, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Verônica was also a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2014–2015 and 2018–2019), at Chetham’s Library, Manchester (2018–2019), and Houghton Library, Harvard (2024). Additionally, she integrates h_moderna (the Brazilian Network of Studies in Early Modern History) and participates in three research groups: ‘Metamorphose: Materiality and Interpretation of Early Modern Manuscripts and Printed Texts’ (University of Brasilia), ‘Early Modern Iberian History Study Group’ (University of Sao Paulo), and ‘Power and Religion in the Early Modern Period’ (Federal University of Sao Paulo).
Matthew Chambers
is visiting research fellow at the University of Reading and honorary lecturer at University College London. He has written on literary networks and publishing history in Modernism, Periodicals, and Cultural Poetics (Palgrave 2015) and in London and the Modernist Bookshop (Cambridge 2020), and has articles which have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Transatlantica, and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. His most recent research, part of a two-year grant funded by the Excellence Initiative (University of Warsaw), looks to build out from his last monograph to explore the social, political, and literary roles bookshops played in the early decades of the twentieth century. He is a member of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (University of Reading) and the Bookselling Research Network. He is also editor of the peer-reviewed journal The New Americanist (Edinburgh University Press), which is planning a special issue on Print Cultures and Bookishness in Contemporary Life (2024).
Kanupriya Dhingra
is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean at the Jindal School of Languages and Literature, O.P. Jindal Global University (India). She researches the History of the Book and Print Cultures, with a focus on Delhi (India), from an ethnographic perspective. Kanupriya’s recent monograph, Old Delhi’s Parallel Book Bazaar (Cambridge University Press, 2024), is based on her doctoral research at SOAS (University of London), supported by the Felix Scholarship Fund. She has written extensively about her research for journals, magazines, and digital news publications such as Comparative Critical Studies (Edinburgh University Press), The Caravan, Scroll, and Himāl SouthAsian. She is also contributing a chapter to the fourth volume of the Book History in India series, edited by Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty. Kanupriya has been invited to deliver talks the parallel book markets and the nayi-jaisi books of Old Delhi at the University of Oxford, The British Library, The Books and Prints Initiative and The Institute of Historical Research, Jadavpur University, Ambedkar University, Jamia Millia Islamia, University of Delhi, among others. Apart from her interest in ‘the book’, Kanupriya’s research engages with oral history, urban studies, interdisciplinary spatial studies, and the theories of the everyday. Kanupriya is deeply interested in Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu poetry, especially that of Amrita Pritam, and continues to research and translate it. Her creative writing and translations have appeared in Indian Literature (A Sahitya Akademi imprint), Scroll, Indian Writers Forum, Guftgu, Aainanagar, and Antiserious. Her translations of two short stories, by Premchand (Hindi) and Nasira Sharma (Urdu), into English, have appeared in edited volumes published by Niyogi Books (2022) and Oxford University Press (2022), respectively. In July 2023, she was awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Grant for Bristol Translates, an international Summer School for translation, in recognition of her contributions to the field.
Nora Epstein
is the Instruction and Outreach Librarian at the Newberry Library and a Postdoctoral Fellow with Yale University’s Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She received her PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2021. Her thesis centred on the copying and reuse of Tudor devotional illustrations and introduced the framework of ‘Visual Commonplacing’ as a way to appreciate repeating images in early modern print as a function of memory culture. She holds a master’s of library and information science from the University of Illinois and a master’s in book history from the University of St Andrews. In 2022 she was awarded fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Bibliographical Society of America.
Natalia Fantetti
has recently completed her PhD on women’s contributions to the medieval manuscript trade ca. 1900–1945 as part of the CULTIVATE MSS team at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study. Her thesis situated better-known women involved with manuscripts and rare books within wider trade networks and brought to light the work of relatively forgotten names such as Anne Nill and Alice Millard. As a medieval-modernist, her work seeks to draw links between the two periods and how they may inform each other. She holds a BA in English and an MA in Modern Literature and Culture, both from King’s College London. Her findings during a Turing Scheme Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania resulted in an Annotation published in Manuscript Studies in 2023. She has also contributed to the newly published volume, The Pre-Modern Manuscript Trade and its Consequences, ca. 1890–1945.
Jessica Farrell-Jobst
is an early modern scholar who recently completed her doctoral research at the University of St Andrews. Her thesis examined the multifaceted ways women participated in the book trades in Nuremberg during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her previous work has explored ideas about gender and familial dynamics that shaped women’s work in print shops and book businesses in the early modern period. Her upcoming research will explore governmental support of local print trades, civic authorities as publishers, and the variety in printing practices and processes in early modern Germany.
Agnes Gehbald
is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Bern. Her research interests include the study of printing and book history, the Viceroyalty of Peru, and transatlantic history. In 2020, she completed her PhD in Latin American History at the University of Cologne. Before, she was a short-term fellow at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University (2018) and a visiting PhD student at the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge (2019–2020). Her first monograph, A Colonial Book Market: Peruvian Print Culture in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2023), reveals how books permeated late colonial society on a broad scale and how they figured as objects in the inventories of diverse individuals, both women and men, who, in previous centuries, had been far less likely to possess them.
Rabia Gregory
is Associate Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Missouri and the author of Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe: Popular culture and Religious Reform (Ashgate/Routledge 2016). She has published articles on Christian material culture, gender, and the relationship between religion, new media, and medieval culture in contemporary video games. In addition to preparing a critical introduction, biography, and facing-page edition and translation of the poetry of Anna Bijns (1493–1575), she is currently undertaking research to explain how the introduction of affordable paper to western Europe changed how Christians understood their religion.
Laura Guinot Ferri
is a postdoctoral researcher (APOSTD 2022) from the University of Valencia and the University of Bologna since September 2023. She has been a member of the Project CIRGEN: Circulating Gender in the Global Enlightenment. Ideas, Networks, Agencies (ERC2017-AdG 787015) (University of Valencia) between 2019 and 2023. She obtained her PhD in 2019 with a research focus on the intersection between women’s studies, history of medicine and the history of religious practices. She is the author of Mujeres y santidad: sanadoras por mediación divina. Un estudio desde la microhistoria (siglos XVII y XVIII) (Comares, 2021) (Women and sainthood: healers by divine mediation. A microhistorical case study (17th and 18th centuries)). She has also focused on the circulation of books “for women” in the Hispanic world and in the contrast between imagined female readerships and actual readers, as well as in the role of women as cultural mediators. On this topic she has co-edited with Carolina Blutrach the special issue Agencia y mediación cultural en femenino: bibliotecas, correspondencia y redes transnacionales en los siglos XVII y XVIII (Arenal. Revista de Historia de las Mujeres 2022) (Female Agency and Cultural Mediation: Libraries, Correspondence and Transnational Networks in the 17th and 18th centuries), and co-edited with Mónica Bolufer and Carolina Blutrach the book Gender and Cultural Mediation in the Long Eighteenth Century. Women across Borders (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
Elizabeth Le Roux
is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of Pretoria, where she coordinates the Publishing Studies programme. She is co-editor of the journal Book History, and her research focuses on the history of publishing and book cultures in South Africa and Africa more broadly. She is author of Publishing Against Apartheid: A case study of Ravan Press (Cambridge University Press Elements, 2020), A Survey of South African Crime Fiction (with Sam Naidu, UKZN Press, 2017), and A Social History of the University Presses in Apartheid South Africa (Brill, 2016). She is also closely associated with industry-driven research, for the Publishers’ Association of South Africa, the South African Cultural Observatory, and the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture. Before becoming a full-time academic, she worked in the scholarly publishing industry in South Africa.
Sarah Lubelski
is an independent scholar whose work focuses on equity, diversity, and inclusion within the creative industries. Her postdoctoral work, which was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, explored gender bias and the gendering of publishing work and publishing organisations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her doctoral thesis, titled ‘A Gentlewoman’s Profession: The Emergence of Feminized Publishing at Richard Bentley and Son, 1858–1898,’ was the recipient of the 2020 iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award. She has published in the journals Archivaria, Book History, and Publishing History.
Natalia Maillard Álvarez
has a degree in Geography and History and holds a PhD in History (2007) from the University of Seville. She was Visiting Fellow (2009) and Marie Curie Fellow (2010–2012) at the European University Institute in Florence, and EURIAS fellow at the Collegium de Lyon (2015–2016). Since 2012 she has been associated with the Department Geography, History and Philosophy at the University Pablo de Olavide, first as lecturer and postdoc fellow and, since 2022 as associate professor of early modern history. Her research field is book history, especially the history of the book trade and the history of readers in the Hispanic Monarchy during the 16th and 17th centuries. She has edited the volume Books in the Catholic World during the Early Modern Period (Brill, 2014) and was principal investigator (PI) of the research project “International Book Trade Networks in the Hispanic Monarchy, 1501–1648”, funded by the Spanish Government. Currently she is leading a new research project with Montserrat Cachero on the networks, agents, and financial architecture of the early modern book markets (PID2022-137793NB-100).
Charley Matthews
is completing their AHRC-funded PhD in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Their thesis is in the field of Book History, exploring queer and trans reading practices in nineteenth-century Britain. They examine the diaries, letters, and book reviews of Anne Lister, David Lyndsay, Geraldine Jewsbury, Frances Power Cobbe, and others, to recover how these queer readers interacted with restrictive nineteenth-century discourses about women’s reading. Charley has published on Anne Lister’s reading habits in the Journal of Lesbian Studies (2022) and in Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History (2023). They have presented to international audiences at conferences, including at the Institute of English Studies’ Queer Bibliography (2023) and at SHARP: Moving Texts (2021). Charley teaches undergraduate English Literature courses at the University of Edinburgh, and is training as a professional indexer. Their research interests also include the development of the anthology, narratology in the nineteenth-century novel, and digital humanities methods.
Susan McElrath
is the current Head of Public Services at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, where she manages circulation, duplication, exhibits, interlibrary loan, reference, research, and stacks maintenance. During her tenure as University Archivist at American University, she developed expertise in digitization, web harvesting, and preservation. She has worked in archives, libraries, and museums for over thirty years in a variety of capacities, including instruction, acquisitions, archival description and processing, and reference. She has served in leadership positions in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference and the Society of American Archivists. She holds an M.A. in American History and an M.L.S from the University of Maryland. An extension of her interest in women, work, and society, her current research project is a prosopographical study of the San Francisco Bindery Women’s Union. She has also written/spoken on African American women’s history, archives management, and digitization.
Kirk Melnikoff
is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where he teaches courses in Book History, Shakespeare and his contemporaries in performance, and Early Modern British Literature. He is the author of Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (U Toronto P, 2018) and has edited four collections of essays, most recently, with Roslyn L. Knutson, Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade (Cambridge UP, 2018). He has also recently published editions of James IV and Selimus. He is currently jointly putting together a volume of transcribed early modern book-trade wills for Manchester UP, working on an edition of Edward II for The Oxford Marlowe: The Collected Works, jointly editing the Oxford Handbook of Christopher Marlowe, and finishing a monograph on early modern London bookselling and bookshops.
Malcolm Noble
is an historian who received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in Economic and Social History. He has worked on print in a range of settings including eighteenth-century street literature and chapbooks, debates on nineteen-century political reform, twentieth century corporate catalogues and magazines, and zines in the twenty-first century. In February 2024 he co-organized a symposium ‘Queer Bibliography: Tools, Methods, Practices, Approaches’, at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London with Sarah Pyke, and together they are guest editing a special number of Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America as well as an edited collection of papers from the symposium. Malcolm’s interests in queer bibliography are framed around affect, emotional labour, and touch, as well as broader approaches to bibliography.
Kate Ozment
is Team Leader of the Digital Scholarship group in Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University. She is co-editor of the Women in Book History Bibliography, which was awarded honourable mention for an archive or digital project from the Modern Language Association in 2019. She has published on feminist bibliography and women’s engagement with books in Textual Cultures, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Eighteenth-Century Studies and has held research fellowships from the Newberry, Folger, Smith College Special Collections, Princeton Rare Books, and Houghton Library. Her Cambridge University Press Element, titled The Hroswitha Club and the Impact of Women Book Collectors, was published in 2023 and is a historical recovery project focused on the most influential group of women book collectors in the United States. Currently, she is working with the Women’s Print History Project team to input data on women’s contributions to print production in England from 1700 to 1750, focusing specifically on the firm run by Anne Dodd and its connections to other women-run bookselling businesses.
Joanna Rozendaal
is an antiquarian bookseller. She is also working on her PhD Female book ownership in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. Buying books, building libraries, at Radboud University (Nijmegen, The Netherlands). By drawing on the data from the MEDIATE-database and bookseller’s archives, Joanna aims to gain more insight in eighteenth-century Dutch female book ownership, women’s access to knowledge and their participation in the cultural field.
Kandice Sharren
is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan, as well as the lead editor of the Women’s Print History Project. Most recently, her writing has appeared in Women’s Writing, Huntington Library Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Review of English Studies, and English Studies in Canada.
Valentina Sonzini
researcher in History of Printing at the University of Florence, SAGAS Department (Italy); member of the board of JLIS.IT (open access review in Library Science); member of the Scientific Committee of Bibliothecae.it (open access review in Bibliography, Library Science, History of Printing, History of Books); member of the Scientific Committee of the Summer School La Digital Library: evoluzione, strutture, progetti-The digital Library: evolution, structures, projects (University of Bologna). Her research activity concerns the fields of Library Science, History of Books, History of Printing, Gender studies, Decolonization and Post colonization studies. She has focused her studies on the project Repertorio delle tipografe in Italia dal Cinquecento al Settecento-A Repository of Italian Women Printers from the XVI to the XVIII Century, which is now available for consultation on Wikidata. Thanks to an institutional protocol between the University of Florence e the Marucelliana Library (Florence, Italy), in the latest months she has been involved in a new project concerning the Mare Magnum, one of the biggest manuscript bibliographic repositories in the world.
Elise Watson
is a postdoctoral researcher with the Universal Short Title Catalogue Project at the University of St Andrews, where she works on early modern France and the Low Countries. Her PhD, completed in 2022, documented the clandestine Catholic book trade in the Dutch Republic, examining how the availability of print shaped minority religious experience. She has been published in Studies in Church History (2021), Brill’s Library of the Written Word series (2021 and 2022), and the Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis (2022). She is also the Managing Editor of Brill’s Book History Online database.
Joëlle Weis
is a research associate at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities, where she heads the research area Digital Literary and Cultural Studies. Until 2021 she was a post-doctoral researcher for the Marbach-Weimar-Wolfenbüttel research association, working on the project ‘Weltwissen. Das kosmopolitische Sammlungsinteresse des frühneuzeitlichen Adels’. Together with her colleagues, she investigated the private collections of members of the princely family of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel from the seventeenth and eighteenth century. She obtained her Ph.D. in History in 2019 at the Universities of Vienna and Luxembourg with a dissertation on the scholarly practices of the historian Johann Friedrich Schannat (1683–1739) and his correspondence network. From 2010 to 2014, she was a researcher with the Viennese project ‘Monastic Enlightenment and the Benedictine Republic of Letters’ involved in the edition of the correspondence of the brothers Pez. Her research focuses on (digital) methods of collection research, book and library history, and the history of scholarship in the early modern period.
Helen Williams
is Associate Professor of English Literature at Northumbria University. She has published widely on eighteenth-century literature and book history, being the author of Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge University Press, 2021), the co-editor of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Broadview, 2018), and the co-director of the Cambridge Digital Library dataset, Laurence Sterne and Sterneana (2019). Her most recent work is on women and the book trade in the long eighteenth century. She is currently undertaking a British Academy Innovation Fellowship in collaboration with the Archive of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers entitled Communicating Women’s Work in the Historical Archive. Through sharing evidence of women’s labour in the book trades with public audiences, the project aims to improve the visibility of diverse heritage in one of the UK’s major livery companies and to foster more inclusive research and archival practices within academia and the wider archives community.
Alexandra E. Wingate
is a book historian studying early modern Spain and is a PhD candidate in Information Science at Indiana University Bloomington. She holds an MA in the History of the Book from the University of London’s Institute of English Studies, a Master of Library Science from Indiana University Bloomington, and a BA in Hispanic Studies and Linguistics from the College of William and Mary. She has researched both booksellers and private libraries in early modern Navarre, Spain using inventories and other archival sources, and her dissertation research seeks to uncover the practices of Navarrese booksellers and the specific books they sold. More broadly, she is interested in how quantitative methods, mixed methods, and GIS can expand our approach to book history; the use of digital humanities in book history; and the intersection between book history and information science. She is also the Bibliography Editor for the Chymistry of Isaac Newton Project tracing Newton’s citations in his manuscripts, and she produces bibliographies on book historical topics as the Bibliographer for SHARP News.
Georgianna Ziegler
is the Louis B. Thalheimer Associate Librarian and Head of Reference Emerita at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has published widely on early modern women in literature and art, including the manuscripts of Esther Inglis as early “artists books”, and has curated major exhibitions at the Folger including: Elizabeth I: Then and Now (with catalogue); and Shakespeare’s Sisters: Voices of English and European Women Writers 1500–1700. She has written blog posts for the Folger’s Collation, and for Female Book Ownership and Art Herstory. Her most recent publications are essays on early women as book owners, in Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (2020), ed. Valerie Wayne; and Esther Inglis’s self-portraits in Renaissance Quarterly (2023). She has written the entries on Esther Inglis for the New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (2018) and the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World. Currently she is finishing a book-length biography of Inglis, as well as maintaining the website https://estheringlis.com.