Members of the cross-faculty Scholarly Editing and Print Culture Research Group share interests in book history, print culture, bibliography and textual scholarship. They work on manuscripts, images, paper, and printed documents from the Elizabethan period to the present, using a combination of traditional and digital methodologies.
The group draws together arts, design, and conservation practice with expertise on visual culture; the book trade; aesthetics; literary form; typography; serialisation; periodical culture; multimedia fiction. Its members have edited many works, especially letters, propaganda, drama and early novels. Some also have experience outside academia, acting as advisors on digitisation projects and working in libraries and museums, bringing together expertise in working with and digitising collections, cataloguing acquisitions, facilitating printing courses, and curating manuscripts and printed works for public audiences.
Current projects
- Visual Culture Methodologies in Periodical Studies, a one-day symposium on 19 March 2021 sponsored by the Association for Art History and Northumbria University, led by Victoria Horne and featuring Victoria Bazin, Helena Goodwyn, Melanie Waters, and James West
- A scholarly edition of Pierce Egan’s 1821 Life in London, for Oxford World Classics, by David Stewart with John Gardner, Simon Kövesi, and Matthew Sangster
- The annual deluxe portfolio of Parenthesis for the Fine Press Book Association, curated by Chris Wakeling
- An edition of Joseph Conrad’s Plays for Cambridge University Press’s series, The Works of Joseph Conrad, edited by Katherine Baxter and Richard Hand
- Limited edition fine press book Le Cimetière Marin / The Graveyard by the Sea (2021), printed and bound by Chris Wakeling at Corvus Works with artwork from Alfons Bytautas
- An anthology of writing by female medics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, edited by Ashleigh Blackwood and funded by the Leverhulme Trust major project Writing Doctors: Representation and Medical Personality ca. 1660-1832
- An edition of Gorbuduc by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville edited by Paul Frazer and Harriet Archer for The Revels Plays Series at Manchester University Press
- An online database of the works of Laurence Sterne and Sterneana hosted by Cambridge Digital Library and edited by Helen Williams and M-C. Newbould, funded by a major AHRC project grant
- Sex Education Zine Café, a Being Human 2020 festival event by Ashleigh Blackwood and Kit Heyam in partnership with the Wellcome Collection
- An edition of the correspondence of notorious eighteenth-century novelist John Cleland for Cambridge University Press, edited by Helen Williams, Peter Sabor and the late Richard Terry, partly funded by a British Academy Small Grant
- A Corvus Works project exploring Jan Tschichold’s Sabon typeface (1964)
- A series of free printing workshops facilitated by a network of printers, curators and early career academics, Novel Impressions: Literature and the Hand Press in the Eighteenth Century, funded by a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award
This group works across periods and disciplines among like-minded colleagues from across the university and further afield. It offers training in specialist and pioneering methodologies, shares expertise on working with archives and external partners, and works closely with similar interest groups across the region and outside academia.
Please check back for further details of our events.
Meet our members
Jean Brown, Arts
Alfons Bytautas, Senior Technician, Arts
Chun-Chao Chiu, Senior Technician, Arts
Sandra Elliott, Arts
Dr Helena Goodwyn, English Literature
Dr Kit Heyam, English Literature
Dr Victoria Horne, Arts
Prof. Lesley Twomey, Arts
Chris Wakeling, Design
Dr Melanie Waters
Dr James West, History
Andrew Wright, Senior Technician, Design
PhD candidates
Tor Alexander Bruce, Design
Joanne Edwards, English Literature
Shaun Pitt, History
English Research
- American Studies
- Creative Writing
- Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies
- English Language and Linguistics
- Environmental Humanities
- Gendered Subjects
- Medicine, Health and Wellbeing
- Medieval and Early Modern Cultures
- Christopher Marlowe
- Modern and Contemporary Writings
- Scholarly Editing and Print Culture
- Postgraduate Study
