Here you can find out about the latest work and research interests of the members of the network.

Caleb Abraham
I am a second-year PhD student in Early Modern History at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. I have worked on incunabula and their circulation in late 15th and early 16th century Lausanne, as well as 16th century academic libraries such as the Lausanne Academy library, which I reconstructed from its extant volumes. My current research focuses on this library’s readers and late 16th century intellectual history. More generally, my research interests are academic literature, reception studies, textual genealogy, philosophy, theology, as well as philology.

Friederike E. Ach
I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and am currently working on a dissertation titled “Textually transmitted diseases: literature, illness and early modern circulation.” I am researching literary translations and early printed books concerned with syphilis, plague and aegritudo amoris, particularly Latin and Italian texts translated into German and English. As part of this project, paratexts, woodcuts, the marketing of early printed texts and their readership, have been of particular interest. More broadly, I am interested in early modern poetics (especially as discussed in paratextual material), translation, rhetoric, and affective and ethical responses to literary texts.

I am currently a Curriculum Coordinator, Lecturer, and Preceptor at Signum University. My thesis and first monograph (First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1590-1790) surveyed the early reception of Shakespeare’s sonnets in printed editions and seventeenth-century manuscripts. My current research uses satirical portrayals of servants and tradesmen in seventeenth-century manuscript miscellanies to recontextualize theological and cultural concepts of service and servanthood in that era; I am broadly interested in print history and early modern manuscript culture.

Sophie Aldred
I’m currently a 3rd year Dphil student at Worcester College, Oxford and I work on the history of Reading Practices. More specifically, I work on the remainder of the Robartes’ family library – a 17th century collection that has remained shut away in Cornwall for the past 300+ years. I using the families engagement with the texts (through marginalia/signs of ‘book use’) to trace their interests and evaluate the significance of ‘reading events’ to the happenings of their public careers and day-to-day lives.

I am an MHRA Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London, working on the CUP edition of the complete works of Geoffrey Chaucer. In 2022, I begin a new research project on co-creative networks in early English print at the University of Tübingen, funded by a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Taking co-creativity, rather than individual authorship, as a paradigm for textual production, I look to recover some of the multiple agents evidenced by the layout, illustration, and compilation of early English printed books, and to explore ways in which they led sixteenth-century readers to buy, bind, and engage with new kinds of texts.

Nina Assas
I am a PhD student in late medieval literature, Aix-Marseille Université (France). My research is about the Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethoricque, edited by Antoine Vérard in Paris around 1500. More specifically, I’m interested in early printed poetry collections, their poetics and their reception. I’m working under the supervision of Prof. Sébastien Douchet.

Ricarda Brosch
My name is Ricarda, and I would love to join the collaborative network. I am a second year part-time PhD student at The Courtauld looking at illustrated books from the Manchu-led Qing court in China (1644-1912), especially those from the 19th century. I am also an Assistant Curator at the V&A in London, where I look after the Chinese collections of art and design. I am especially interested in the design process and the technological and material infrastructure of printing.

Elisabeth Chaghafi
I am a lecturer at the University of Tübingen in Germany. I am particularly interested in print as a form of reception (for example, I have written an article on the layout changes in the quarto reprints of The Shepheardes Calender arguing they reveal compositors’ attempts to ‘read’ the text). As a keen palaeographer I am also interested in manuscript copies or excerpts from printed texts as evidence of how early readers read. I am currently working on an article about manuscripts containing poems copied from Complaints (1591), as part of an edition I am preparing together with a colleague.
(Image from Folger Library under Creative Commons License)

John Colley
I’m a doctoral student at Jesus College, Oxford. My doctoral project investigates humanism, English literature, and the translation of classical and patristic Greek, c. 1430–1560. I look at texts which are translated both directly and indirectly (often via Latin) from Greek into English, as well as English works which are disingenuously presented as translations from Greek sources. Writers of interest include John Lydgate, John Skelton, Thomas More, Thomas Elyot, Nicholas Udall, Roger Ascham, and Mary Clarke Basset. More broadly, I’m interested in classical reception and book history in England from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

Ray Clemons
I am curator of pre-1600 materials at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Before coming to Yale I was an Associate Professor of History at Illinois State University. My first job was at the Newberry Library’s Center for Renaissance Studies. I am mostly a manuscript person, but very interested in the way that manuscript and print bleed into each other in the fifteenth century. My research is on the transmission of scribal diagrams in medical, philosophical and geographical works. We are active participants in CERL’s MEI project and hope to restart summer fellowships to bring advanced graduate students to the library for CERL MEI programs. If I can help your scholarship, please reach out.

I am a first year DPhil in English student at the University of Oxford. In my current project I am working on the anonymous dream vision The Court of Sapience, a late medieval text which survives in four manuscripts and two early printed editions. This project falls at the intersection of several of my research interests including late medieval poetry, compendious genres, and material manuscript/print culture.

Alex da Costa – co-founder
I am an Associate Professor at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. I’m currently writing a book on Reading Forbidden Books, investigating the experience of reading banned texts in the early Reformation. In 2020 I published Marketing English Books, 1476-1550: How Printers Changed Reading, which explores how developments in the marketing of printed texts began to change what readers read and the place of reading in their lives, shaping their expectations, tastes, and even their practices and beliefs.

Ségolène Gence
I’m an AHRC-funded second-year PhD student in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. My current research focuses on the reception, transmission and translation history of the Mirror of Holy Church by Edmund Rich (Saint Edmund of Abingdon) in the late medieval period. I hope to pursue further the study of the Mirror of Holy Church and of its early printed versions in the near future. My research interests reside in the material contexts of pre-modern religious literature, textual networks, early print culture, manuscript and translation studies. I am also interested in early printed pedagogical works.

I am an AHRC-funded PHD Candidate in the School of History at QMUL. My work focuses on the role played by religious prints and the ways in which they were produced and encountered during the religious quarrels of eighteenth-century France. My project focuses on the artistic print networks (both clandestine and official) that supported or challenged the Church in France, as well as the ways in which women, both as artists and subjects, reinforced or subverted socio-religious conventions. My broader interests include the history of religious art in the period, the interplay between the Church, State and Public, and the social history of belief in the early modern period. I am Conference and Events Manager for All Souls College, Oxford, and Conference Organiser for the British Society of Eighteenth Century Studies.

Federica Fabbri
I am a second-year PhD student in Book Science at the University of Bologna. From 2012 to 2019 I worked at the Incunabula collection of the Municipal Library «Giuseppe Taroni» of Bagnacavallo (catalogue soon to be published). For the library I organized numerous bibliographic exhibitions. My research interests are focused on the history of fifteenth-century printing, the history of book binding and the history of illumination and woodcut illustration in incunabula. I’m currently working on the Bolognese incunabula production in vernacular and on Ugo Ruggeri’s typographical annals. I also work for the Italian National Research Program PRIN 2017BXKWLJ The Dawn of Italian Publishing. Technology, Texts and Books in Central and Northern Italy in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. I’m also MEI Editor of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) for the cataloguing of books printed in the XVth century in the Material Evidence in Incunabula database.

Iain Fenlon
I am an Emeritus Professor of Historical Musicology, University of Cambridge. My interests are principally in the printing and publishing of music in the early modern period, particularly in sixteenth-century Italy and Iberia. I am continuing to work on questions of censorship and the activities of the Inquisition in relation to printing and publishing in general in sixteenth-century Italy and Iberia, with particular reference to printed polyphonic music.

Berta Ferrer
I am Architect of Books. A graphic designer, researcher and writer specialised in book design. With an MA in Architecture and MA in Graphic Design, I combine my creative and academic work with the development of a Ph.D. at the University of Reading (UK) focused on the possibilities offered by the book as a physical object in the digital era. I lecture Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, Barreira Arte+Diseño and LABA School of Art, Design and New Media. I deliver book design workshops and seminars which aim to challenge the conventions of reading and the materiality of the object.

I am lecturer in medieval and early modern literature at the University of Limerick, where I am currently head of English and a member of the Limerick Centre for Early Modern Studies: https://emslimerick.wordpress.com/. I previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London and was a teaching fellow at the University of Bristol. I am interested in late-medieval book production and early print, particularly with respect to scientific and instructional discourses, and in MS-print exchanges around women’s domestic compilations from the 16th onwards.

Antony Henk
I am a master’s student at the University of Göttingen with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of West Florida. I am an aspiring historian, codicologist and bibliographer who favours cross-disciplinary approaches that synthesize a broad range of linguistic, archaeological, architectural, and theological data, and I also wish to learn more about digital tools and software design to take more advantage of data available. While my master’s project tracks the pedigrees of early modern Scottish book privileges via close analysis of book designs and emphasizes the design strategies and innovations occurring in the early seventeenth century, my future plans centre on early medieval Insular hagiography and theology.
(Image of a gauffered fore-edge from an Andro Hart (d. 1621) book, published by the University of St Andrews here.)

I’m currently a fixed-term Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. My research focuses on transgressive gender and sexuality, including their intersections with print culture. My first book, The Reputation of Edward II, showed how Edward II’s queer reputation in late medieval and early modern England was shaped by literary texts, literary techniques and the print marketplace. My current project, ‘Sexual Knowledge and Print Culture in Early Modern England’, investigates how early modern understandings of sex were shaped by print culture, including the material book, generic conventions and publishers’ commercial interests. I also have a global history of gender nonconformity, Before We Were Trans, forthcoming in June 2022.

I am Career Development Fellow in English at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. My research focuses on the literary and material cultures of the early modern period, with particular focus on the history of Shakespeare’s texts. I have published on early Shakespearean libraries, on feminist book history, and on the conceptual status of early modern bookshops, among other things. My first book, Shakespeare’s Syndicate, is published by OUP in 2022 and I am now working on a book entitled Copy/Edition/Work that examines how the bibliographical categories on which we rely have shaped literary studies. I run a book history interview series at: www.benjaminhiggins.co.uk.

I am currently a lecturer in Middle Dutch Literature at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. In my PhD thesis, I investigated the relationships between early sixteenth-century Dutch Bibles and their readers, focusing specifically on the active involvement of readers in customising their books. At the moment, I am developing a new research project on religious Sammelbände in which handwritten and early printed texts are bound together. I am particularly interested in the ways in which these mixed-media books challenge the common dichotomies between manuscript and print, and between book production and book use. Other research interests include female book ownership, paratexts, and marginalia.

Edward Holberton
I have a general interest in the print culture of the civil war and Restoration in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. In previous work I have looked at the circulation of early modern print in early America and the Caribbean, and I am beginning a new project which is interested in the publisher Humphrey Moseley: his practices as a publisher and bookseller, and what reception studies of his books might add to our sense of the way he developed new markets for literary print.

I am an associate professor at Catania University (Italy); my broad research interests are related to incunabula collections and book archaeology. My current research projects: Incunaboli a Catania, Incunaboli ad Agrigento and Incunaboli a Montecassino in the project MeMo, Memory of Montecassino (PRIN 2020 with the University of Cassino and Sapienza in Rome). My page (in italian) : http://www.disum.unict.it/docenti/simona.inserra

I am a Lecturer in Medieval Literature and Palaeography at the University of York. My research focuses on late medieval illumination and its potential for localising manuscript production. Related to this, I became interested in the illumination of early printed books in England, and in the extent of the opportunities for manuscript craftsmen to work on printed material, including printed books imported from the Continent.

Jim Kelly
I’m a recently retired academic librarian and long-time member of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. My book history interests are broad and largely play into my indexing related books in the Modern Language Association International Bibliography.

Veronika Lahodinski
I am a PhD candidate in History at the University of York. In my thesis, I examine the meanings of excrements in England and the German countries in early modern times, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries. In particular, my research focuses on the significance of uroscopy as a diagnostic method and on the use of excrements as therapeutic agents in dirt-based pharmacy by reference to uroscopic publications, handwritten primary sources, and dirt pharmaceutical writings. Furthermore, my research interests include but are not limited to the history of medicine, the history of the body, and social and cultural history in general.

I am a Permanent Research Fellow at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University. My first monograph is entitled: Error in Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Error, and is published with Palgrave Macmillan’s Shakespeare Studies series (2021) (see here). I am Co-Editor on the Notebooks volume of The Complete Works of Thomas Browne (forthcoming with OUP), and my research interests include print errors, errata, crossovers between book history and the history of science, and correction. I am currently researching a second monograph: The Invention of Error and the Scientific Method, 1500-1800, to be submitted to OUP’s History of Science & Technology series.

Rosalind Lintott
I am broadly interested in matters of textual reception and the circulation of antiquarian books, particularly of works of chorography and chronology. Following a Land Niedersachsen fellowship at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel my research has focused on the collecting, classification and editing of medieval manuscripts in the early modern period, and my present research concerns readers’ aids in incunable editions of Universal Histories. I teach Middle English literature at Cambridge.
(Image of Antoine Vérard’s Orose (1491) from Wikipedia Commons)

Céline Magada
I am a first year PhD student at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. My thesis, which focuses on printed drama and the culture of judgment in Early Modern England, is part of the SNFS project “Theater and Judgment in Early Modern England” directed by Professor Kevin Curran. Within this project, I am looking more particularly at commonplace markers and books, paratextual materials such as “To the Readers”, dedications, title pages, annotations, etc. More broadly, I am interested in topics dealing with theatre (printed and performed), book history (editing, publishing, reading etc.), comparative literature and translation studies.

John McQuillen
I am an associate curator of printed books & bindings at the Morgan Library & Museum (New York) and, as a colleague always introduced me, resident incunabulist. My specialization is 15th-century book and library history, but I have worked from early 14th-century books of hours to 16th-century bindings. My current research/exhibition projects focus on 15th-century European blockbooks, including their production and use to provenance and modern collection.

Michelle Michel
I am a current PhD student at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham and am researching the texts printed by printer/publisher John Danter between 1591 and 1599. This project is heavily focused on a descriptive bibliographic analysis of the ninety-six extant titles printed by him and will seek to broaden our knowledge on the business of printers which is historically dominated by play texts. I am interested in the printing of texts, especially in the late 1500s and early 1600s.

Aditi Nafde – co-founder
I am a Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Newcastle University. My current research, Manuscripts After Print, was generously funded by an AHRC Early Career Leadership award and asks how the printing press affected scribal practice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. More broadly, it considers the continued significance of writing, from manuscripts to digital books.

Jack Nunn
I am an MSt student in Medieval French at Worcester College, Oxford. I’m currently working on my dissertation, which examines a sixteenth-century print anthology of texts by the ‘Grands Rhétoriqueurs’ – a group of late-medieval Burgundian and French court writers. Later this year, I will begin a DPhil on the act of anthologisation. My project asks how the physical features and hermeneutic dynamics of multi-author anthologies from the period c. 1470-1537 can inform new approaches to rhétoriqueur literature. My broad research interests include issues of canon formation; literary materiality and early print culture; and eco-critical and nonhuman theory.

Alijan Ozkiral
I am a PhD Student at New York University. My research focuses on Book History and Media Studies. I am trained in the English Incunabula period, centered on William Caxton, as a moment of significant media shift and I levy this knowledge against born-digital media. I use a study of Med-Ren media to guide my understanding of “new” media and media history. My research questions tend to revolve around format theory and the residue of print format in digital media. I also have some training in the digital humanities, using the tools of DH to develop my understanding of media. Currently, I am working on a genealogy of the paragraph with an eye towards its “loss” in born-digital writing.

Alicia Peterson
I’m a PhD Candidate in History & the History of Science and Medicine at Yale. My work focuses on representations of the human body in print in 16th- and 17th-century England and France. I am interested in how print as a technology allowed for new and more widespread interactions with human bodily interiors.

I am a postdoctoral researcher and assistant in Medieval English Studies at the University of Bern, Switzerland. My research focuses primarily on Middle English romance, including early print versions of romances like Sir Degaré, Blanchardyn and Eglantine, and Eger and Grime. I am currently working on two main projects. The first is a monograph tentatively titled Unwillingness to Love in Medieval English Romance: Negotiating Consent, Gender, and Desire. The second focuses on representations of the senses and sensory experience in romance literature. My main research interests include sensory history, textual transmission, consent, emotion, embodiment, gender, and genre.

Alexandra Plane
I am a PhD student supervised jointly at Newcastle University and the National Library of Scotland. My doctoral research aims to reconstruct the library of King James VI and I. Seeking out and identifying his books, my work analyses their material and intellectual significance and situates his libraries in the context of both Scottish and English book cultures. I am also a librarian, with experience in special collections and academic libraries across the Universities of Oxford and Durham. Accordingly, I am also interested in provenance and library history more widely, as well as digital humanities—I am constructing a database of King James’ books as part of my PhD
Image from British Library under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

Corrina Readioff
I am a Post-Doctoral Researcher in English and an Honorary Fellow in the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures at the University of Liverpool and my first monograph (forthcoming with EUP) explores the function of pre-chapter epigraphs in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. I have research interests in paratext, print culture, book history, Swift Studies, and the history of poetry; one of my current projects investigates the medieval and early modern context of whale imagery in relation to Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704).

I graduated in Historical sciences at the University of Bologna and I continued my studies at the University of Udine, where I achieved a PhD in Bibliographic, Text and Document Sciences in 2016. Currently I am Adjunct professor of Archive Administration at the University of Bologna and I also work for the Italian National Research Program PRIN 2017BXKWLJ “The Dawn of Italian Publishing. Technology, Texts and Books in Central and Northern Italy in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries”. My research for this project focuses on the introduction of printing in the cities of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Duchy of Este), and on the engraver of printing types Francesco Griffo from Bologna with Paolo Tinti.

Jacob Romm
I’m a first-year Ph.D. Student at Yale, pursuing a joint Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies. I have a growing interest in book history, particularly the role of print in the Protestant Reformation as well as Jewish printing in the early modern period, printing conventions for translations and bilingual/multilingual editions, and the reuse of woodcut illustrations. I am also a beginning letterpress printer and bookbinder and am interested in exploring the ways that these hands-on practices can inform academic study.

I am an associate professor at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland). My background is that of a historical linguist. I started my research from structural analyses of the morphosyntax and orthography of the fifteenth-century correspondence. With the emergence of Early English Books Online, I became interested in the early printed books, and particularly in the process of regularisation of spelling across consecutive editions of individual books. While examining and comparing the facsimiles of early prints, I have taken an interest in their paratextual and visual aspects, as well as in the interface between orthography, typography and (socio)pragmatics. More about my research can be found here: http://wa.amu.edu.pl/wa/Rutkowska_Hanna. In the network I hope to exchange ideas with researchers who share some of my interests and, perhaps, engage in some joint projects.

Amaranta Saguar García
I am a research scholar of the Talent Attraction Programme of the Comunidad de Madrid at the Universidad Complutense. I am the PI of the research project “La tradición iconográfica de Celestina: materialidad y recepción de las ediciones ilustradas en la Edad Moderna” (2018-T1/HUM-11717), devoted to situating the early modern illustrated editions of the late-fifteenth century Castilian masterpiece Celestina, both in the original language and in translation and adaptation, within the European context. More specifically, I explore what illustrations convey about the perceived literary genre of the work. In addition, I am working on an ontology that can describe book illustrations as both, artistic and literary objects, with the illustrations of Celestina as my case study.

I’m a Senior Lecturer in Book History and Communications, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. I research pre-industrial European printing techniques across text and image, especially for colour and in 15th–16th century Europe. I apply bibliographical research methods to non-textual content, for example trying to recreate techniques for printing woodcuts in unusual ways at historical presses. I edited Printing Colour 1400–1700, and my latest book is Early Colour Printing: German Renaissance Woodcuts at the British Museum. I also curate and contribute to exhibitions. My current projects include editing the volume Printing Colour 1700–1830 and researching the earliest colour-printed wallpapers printed in Europe 1550–1600. I teach at London Rare Books School.

Giacomo Savani
I’m an RSE Saltire Early Career Fellow at the School of Classics, University of St Andrews. I work at the intersection between classical reception, antiquarianism, history of ideas, and history of medicine. I’ve published extensively on the reception of ancient baths and balneology, focusing on the role of printed images in disseminating antiquarian and medical knowledge during the long 18th century. For instance, I reconstructed the changing fortunes of a sixteenth-century woodcut depicting a cutaway view of a set of ancient baths, re-branded as a copy of a Roman wall painting in several 18th-century architectural and antiquarian works. My current RSE project, Women and the Baths in Ancient Medicine, explores the role of baths in ancient gynaecological texts and their influence on Renaissance treatises.

Valerie Schutte
I’m an independent scholar who has published widely on royal Tudor women, book dedications, and queenship. I’m currently currently working on several edited collections on Queen Mary I in literature and writing, the making and remaking of the queenships of Queen Mary I and Lady Jane Grey, Queen Mary I and continental humanism, and popular myths about the Tudors. I am also working on a large-scale project on Anne of Cleves, including a cultural biography and an analysis of all related books and manuscripts.

I am an assistant professor of French seventeenth-century literature at Yale. My research focuses on marketing and literature (what it does to the book, to the texts, etc.), Early modern media and information control, and cultural transfer. I am also active in Digital Humanities, both in practice and theory.

Devani Singh – co-founder
I am an FNS Ambizione Research Fellow at the University of Geneva, where I lead the ‘To the Reader’ project investigating the emergence of printed epistles to readers in English books. My recent and forthcoming publications include work on printed Chaucer editions, early modern printed commonplace books, paratexts in early printed playbooks, the history of printed author portraits, early modern marginalia, and EEBO-TCP. I’m also interested in applying the tools of the digital humanities, particularly databases, to the study of literary history and bibliography. My monograph Chaucer’s Early Modern Readers is forthcoming from CUP.

Kathleen Tonry – co-founder
I’m an Associate Professor of English at UConn. My current research includes a monograph project situated between media studies and the history of the handpress. Press Time: Labor, Temporality and the Long Politics of the Handpress traces the uses of “slow print” as an activist and aesthetic form from the fifteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Working through four historical moments, the study follows the handpress to argue that tracing the reoccupation of historical media forms offers a provocative and salient political history up through our contemporary moment.

I am a Lecturer at the Department of English, University of Turku. My research mainly focuses on late medieval and 16th-century English book production and combines book studies with historical discourse linguistics. I am especially interested in the interaction between manuscript and print, paratext and book producers’ metadiscursive practices, and the interplay between visual, material, and verbal elements on the page. I currently work in the Early Modern Graphic Literacies project (2021–25) that investigates the use of graphic devices such as tables and diagrams in English printed books 1473–1800.

Jorge Fragua Valdivieso
I have a degree in Multimedia and Graphic Design from the Universidad Camilo José Cela with a stay at Korea University. I hold a Master’s Degree in Written Historical Heritage from the Faculty of History at the Complutense University of Madrid. I am currently a PhD student at the Department of Design and Image in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the same university and the Department of History of the University of Antwerp. My doctoral thesis, “La mise-en-page del libro durante los siglos XVI y XVII: la producción de los Giunta y Platin-Moretus”, directed by Benito Rial Costas (UCM), Agustín Martín Francés (UCM) and Pierre Delsaerdt (AU), studies the hierarchical relationships in the page design of Plantinian and Giunta missals in the historical context of the Reformation.

Zanna van Loon
I am Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Museum Plantin-Moretus. I previously worked as the Expert on analytical bibliography and the project leader of STCV. The Bibliography of the Hand Press Book at the Vlaamse Erfgoedbibliotheken vzw. I obtained a PhD in Early Modern Book History at KU Leuven in 2020 on the social and material characteristics of early modern manuscripts and printed books on Indigenous languages of North and South America.

I research the connection between late medieval female religious communities and the authorial personae of early English printers. While finishing my dissertation (2021) Englishing the Virgin: Enclosure, Dissemination, and the Early English Book, I founded a new interdisciplinary research collective of visual artists and scholars: the Enclosure Group. My current project traces Marian iconography in prose works from the Book of Margery Kempe to the Golden Legend of William Caxton and Tottel’s Miscellany. I teach English at University of San Diego and lecture in International Studies (focusing on Book History) at UC San Diego.

I’m an Early Career Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam Cambridge, working on a book entitled Paper and the Making of Literature in Early Modern England. This book explores how paper intervenes – both materially and imaginatively – in the making of literature, and I combine book history with literary theory to think this through. I’ve written about book modification, and feminist modes of ‘surface reading’, and am interested in broader material things like libraries and folds. Alongside producing research for an academic audience, I have taken part in the ‘Festival of Ideas’ in York and in Cambridge, and reviewed for the TLS.

I am Lecturer in Middle English Literature at the University of Glasgow. I am particularly interested in the movement and transmission of texts across borders, and in the place of English literary activity and book production in relation to continental Europe. I am currently working on a project that examines a group of European bestselling romances that fuel new translation and printing activities, ranging from incunabula closely modelled after continental examples to late sixteenth-century multilingual editions, but I also have a secret side project on women readers and book collectors.