Publishing and Book Culture

12:30pm EST / 5:30pm GMT

This session offers an opportunity to hear about the Cambridge University Press Elements Series on Publishing and Book Culture.

This series aims to fill the demand for easily accessible, quality texts available for teaching and research in the diverse and dynamic fields of Publishing and Book Culture. Rigorously researched and peer-reviewed, this Elements series is published in thematic areas, or 'Gatherings', that can then be augmented by additional online materials.

The series is cross-disciplinary in nature, making it useful in a number of areas where there are currently few helpful resources for teaching and research purposes: Young Adult Publishing, for instance, or Bookselling.

A Gathering typically consists of at least 3 Elements (20k – 30k words each) which complement each other (either by discipline or by publisher or topic). Crucially, content draws on the collected expertise of the different communities connected to each Gathering – academics, librarians, booksellers, publishers, policy makers, learned societies, festival organisers, – so that the perspectives are represented in the round. Ideally, the perspectives would encompass a variety of geographical and ideological explorations.

Each Gathering has an Editor with experience in the field who commissions and oversees the development of their Elements in close collaboration with the Series Editor and Associate Editor.

In this session editors of some of the Publishing and Book History Gatherings will give a short description of their series, and we’ll be delighted to answer any questions you might have about publishing with us.

Speakers:

• Samantha Rayner: General Editor Cambridge University Press Elements Series on Publishing and Book Culture
  SAMANTHA RAYNER is Professor of Publishing and Book Cultures in the Department of Information Studies, and Vice Dean Wellbeing in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College, London.  She is also the General Editor for the Cambridge University Press Elements series on Publishing and Book Culture, and a co-Director of the Bookselling Research Network. 
  
  
• Leah Tether: Associate Editor Cambridge University Press Elements Series on Publishing and Book Culture
  LEAH TETHER is Professor of Medieval Literature and Publishing at the University of Bristol. With an academic background in medieval French and English literature and a professional background in trade publishing, Leah has combined her expertise and developed an international research profile in book and publishing history from manuscript to digital. As a past President of the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society and Editor of the Journal of the International Arthurian Society, she has a particular interest in Arthurian literature, as well as in historical reading cultures and book production practices, and has published widely in these areas, including her own Publishing and Book Culture Element: The General Reader and the Academy: Medieval French Literature and Penguin Classics
  
  
• Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, Editor: ‘Young Adult Publishing’
  ‘Young Adult Publishing’ explores the flourishing publishing sector of young adult fiction and the mechanisms that contribute to its development and success. The term young adult fiction remains nebulous, and under-theorised, in literary study and this gathering of Elements in Publishing and Book Culture seeks to bring in interdisciplinary perspectives to develop it further. Presenting a series of studies by leading international scholars, it considers key questions such as the influential role of readers, online communities, and fandoms, especially in relation to corporate publishing; how the sector has, both historically and today, been critical in developing more inclusive and intersectional cultural output; how different genres and subgenres have raised YA's visibility; and what the expansion into different forms and formats means for authorship, audience, and publishers. We invite proposals by scholars thinking about such issues as it relates to specific historical or current YA publishing, writing, and reading practices.
  
  GATHERING EDITOR MELANIE RAMDARSHAN BOLD is a Senior Lecturer in Children's and YA Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her work centres Inclusive Youth Literature - her first book Inclusive YA Literature: Authors of Colour in the UK was published by Palgrave in 2019 - and she is currently completing a book on Young Adult Literature Anthologies (CUP, 2024). She also researches contemporary book culture, children's and YA publishers, authors, and readers, as well as participatory approaches with young people. Melanie is on the Advisory Boards for the CLPE Reflecting Realities project, the Pop-up Pathways into Children’s Publishing project, Literature Alliance Scotland, and works with a number of cultural organisations across the UK.
  
  
• Laura Deitz, Editor: ‘Digital Literary Culture’
  ‘Digital Literary Culture’ investigates transformations in reading, publishing, and the sharing of books and literature in the digital era.  As ‘born-digital’ takes on new meaning in the modern publishing industry, where all books are created via digital production methods and an increasing number are written or refined using AI, all books are now in a sense read digitally as well, as reading practices and reading communities have evolved to embrace affordances of electronic communication.  Through studies by international scholars, established and emerging, this gathering of Elements in Publishing and Book Culture explores digital formats like e-books and audiobooks, but also print books as written, promoted, retailed, reviewed, sampled, discussed, shared, fact-checked, and recommended online.  It explores how reading identities and relationships with books are shaped by platforms, formats, and networks, and the evolving roles of publisher and author in a time of changing (but not disappearing) hierarchies. 
  
  GATHERING EDIOR LAURA DEITZ is a Lecturer in Publishing at UCL's Department of Information Studies. In 2023/24, she teaches on the MA in Publishing modules INST0046: Researching Publishing, INST0095: Publishing Studies and INST0096: Working in Publishing. Her current research focusses on screen reading, digital publishing, and contemporary authorship, with a particular focus on how reputation and legitimacy (including the book-status of digital books) affect reading experiences. She did my BA at Stanford and PhD here at UCL DIS. I serve on the Board of Directors of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) and the Editorial Board of the Journal of Electronic Publishing.  Her next monograph, E-books and ‘Real Books’: Digital Reading and the Experience of Bookness, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.
  
  
• Cynthia Johnston, Editor:  Collecting the Book
  ‘Collecting the Book’ is a relatively new Elements strand which aims to focus on new histories of book collecting. We invite proposals which look at the practice of book collecting across cultures and time periods. Our first two publications reflect the purpose of the series in highlighting new research both on established cultural phenomena, and other more hidden histories. The Trade in Rare Books and Manuscripts between Britain and America c. 1890-1929 by Danielle Magnussen and Laura Cleaver brought fresh evidence and perspective to scholarship on the ‘golden age’ of manuscript collecting. Kate Ozment’s study, The Hroswitha Club and the Impact of Women Book Collectors examined the practice of this group of twentieth-century female collectors and their lasting influence.
  
  GATHERING EDITOR CYNTHIA JOHNSTON is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of English Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She convenes the MA/MRes in the History of the Book at the Institute. Her research focuses on the history of book production and dissemination stretching from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. She has curated many exhibitions on book collectors and their collections, and is a long-term collaborator with museums in the North West of England. She is the academic lead for an NPO grant awarded to Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery with a major exhibition in collaboration with the British Library to be delivered in November 2025. Her most recent publication is A British Book Collector: Rare Books and Manuscripts in the R.E. Hart Collection, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, UoL Press, 2021.
  
  
• Andrew Nash, Editor: ‘Book History’
  The Book History gathering presents innovative research offering new theoretical or thematic approaches to the field of book and publishing history and seeks to reformulate our understanding of the terms in relation to different fields and historical periods. For example, the series features titles that explore how the medieval book trade was not a pre-publishing phenomenon but acted as a catalyst and early instigator of the industry that grew with the founding of print. It also presents research which seeks to reassess elements of publishing practices in different periods, or remodel the practice of book history from new perspectives, e.g. translation. The gathering aims to be of interest not just to students and teachers of book history, but to those working in a range of disciplines whose research is concerned with historical formations related to book and publishing culture, such as, for example, medieval, early modern, or Victorian.
  
  GATHERING CO-EDITOR ANDREW NASH is a Reader in Book History, Deputy Director of the Institute of English Studies and the Director of the London Rare Books School. His research interests include the history of the book since 1750; history of publishing; history of authorship; literary and publishing archives; modern manuscripts; the publishing history of the novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Victorian literature, especially Victorian popular fiction; the 1890s; the sea story, twentieth-century literature, especially inter-war fiction and  Scottish literature since 1750, especially J.M. Barrie; Robert Louis Stevenson; Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish literary renaissance; Muriel Spark; the history of Scottish publishing. SEE ABOVE FOR CO-EDITOR LEAH TETHER’S BIO.
  
  
• Nicola Wilson, Editor: ‘Women, Publishing and Book Culture’
  'Women, Publishing and Book Culture' explores the history and futures of women and gender minorities in the book trade and the intersections between feminism, sex and gender, publishing, and the book. We invite proposals from different critical perspectives exploring women's various bookwork and how book cultures interact with women, gender minorities, feminism, sex and gender.    
  
  GATHERING EDITOR DR NICOLA WILSON is Associate Professor in Book and Publishing Studies at the University of Reading and co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. She specialises in C20 print culture and literary history, publishers; archives, working-class writing, and histories of reading. She is currently working on a monograph about the Book Society (1929-69) and is lead editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020.