The grants will be for up to US$3,000 and may be used for travel, accommodation and direct research costs, such as photography. While it is anticipated that the recipients will most likely be individual scholars, proposals that share the grant among two or more scholars are also acceptable. Recipients will be granted a 12-month timeframe for completing activities and spending attached to their award. It is expected that expenditure will be tied to the draft budget or outline submitted in the application.

Awardees will be expected to provide a report of approximately 1,000 words within a month of completing their fellowship. The report will be published in SHARP News.

Applications

In 2026 there are two awards of up to $3000 each. Applications for the 2026 award are now closed. Applications for the 2027 award will open in autumn 2026.

Criteria

Criteria for selection include:

• relevance of the proposed research to the aims of SHARP
• overall quality of the proposal
• the contribution that the fellowship support will make to the project
• current membership in SHARP

Priority will be given to applications for research at locations that do not offer other research grants, and, all other things being equal, for research outside the OECD, as part of SHARP’s aim of enhancing internationalization.

Application process

All applications should go through our online application form. In addition to supplying contact details and a research proposal, applicants will be asked to upload a CV and to procure a letter of reference; applicants are responsible for ensuring that referees email their reference to the Director of Awards before the closing date for applications. Applicants must be a current member of SHARP at the time of application.

The selection panel is chaired by the Director of Awards and two representatives from the Board of Directors (to be nominated annually by the Board). Applicants will be notified of the panel’s decision by the end of the calendar year.

The 2026 awardees

Ellen Forget (University of Alberta)

Forget’s postdoctoral project is titled “A History of Tactile Writing and Reading.” Forget is researching the history of tactile codes and scripts such as braille, raised type, and moon to learn more about how and why braille won the code wars. They are interested in the codes themselves, the materiality of the books and bookish objects that use the codes, the technology used to create and produce text in these codes, the people involved in creating and disseminating the codes, and how braille was adapted to be used in over 100 languages today—including languages that have significantly different visual writing systems than French. The history of how people with print disabilities, including visual impairments, read and access books is an important part of book history, but it is currently significantly understudied. Forget aims for this project to produce publications that will be useful for the study of book history, the science and history of reading, and disability studies with a particular focus on making the work accessible to students. This research will also result in an interactive exhibit to be held at University of Alberta. This award will fund a portion of the research travel required to complete this project, including visits to The American Printing House for the Blind and Perkins School for the Blind.

Harrison Mmerenu (Texas Tech University)

Harrison Mmerenu’s project, “The Farafina Era: Literary Public, Value and Agency in Postcolonial Nigeria Publishing,” examines the mechanisms through which Farafina in Nigeria established and negotiated literary value. Using archival research, postcolonial theory, and digital humanities methods, Harrison traces how editorial decisions, marketing strategies, and transnational collaborative networks shaped Farafina’s positioning as a platform for self-definition, communication, and the exchange of ideas about Africa four decades after the establishment of Black Orpheus and Transition. Harrison’s project makes a significant contribution to postcolonial studies and book history by shifting attention from literary texts alone to the material and institutional conditions of their production and circulation. By examining Farafina Magazine, Black Orpheus, and Transition, his work seeks to clarify how Farafina’s publishing practices mediated the development of local literature, the establishment of value standards, and the creation of a literary public. This approach not only recovers the networks of editors, contributors, readers, and sponsors that are often invisible in traditional literary scholarship but also re-appraises the idea of postcolonial agency in a global literary marketplace. By situating these archival materials within larger debates in postcolonial book history about literary public, value, and agency, his work casts a refreshing light on the entangled histories of empire, publishing, and postcolonial agency. The SHARP 25th-Anniversary Fellowship will support Harrison’s archival research at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which will enable him to conduct a thorough comparative analysis of the physical properties and rhetorical strategies used by these three magazines to create a literary public.

Previous awardees

2025

Jodie Lea Martire (The University of Queensland)

Martire’s doctoral project is “Language rights and minority-language publishing in Australia”; it sits at the intersection of minority-language publishing, community publishing and language rights. Using Derrick R. Spires’ (2021) concept of liberation bibliography, Martire is conducting research/volunteering with Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative, investigating the day-to-day practice of creating minority-language publications through community publishing. Muurrbay is an Aboriginal-led organisation which works with seven different Language communities in the state of New South Wales, Australia. It has published print, audio and digital materials (dictionaries, grammars, children’s books and Language-teaching materials) since 1994. Martire’s collaboration with Muurrbay has been authorised by the organisation’s board. It will see her volunteering her publishing skills to help build the organisation’s publishing capacity, while also conducting ethnographic and interview-based research into how Muurrbay successfully coordinates publishing in Aboriginal Languages with its partner communities. Martire’s aim is to develop good principles for minority-language communities wishing to use publishing to strengthen and protect their languages. The SHARP 25th-Anniversary Fellowship will support Martire’s accommodation and transport costs so she can conduct on-site research in Muurrbay’s offices in Nambucca Heads and Raymond Terrace.

2024

Gloria J. Morales Osorio (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Osorio’s project, titled “Filling the Silence Before Rescue: Editorial Trajectories of Afrodescendant Writers in the 20th Century in Colombia,” traces the editorial experiences and printed manifestations that generated some works of fiction by four Afro-Colombian authors published between 1947 and 1978: Arnoldo Palacios Mosquera, Rogelio Velásquez Murillo, Carlos Arturo Truque, and Gregorio Sánchez Gómez. The research stems from the rescue effort of the state-funded book collection The Afro-Colombian Literature Library, led by the Ministry of Culture in 2010, and seeks to explore what stories of the printed word can be told by studying that space between the first edition of a work in the 20th century and its state “rescue” in the 21st century. Focusing on Black printed culture in this period allows us to attend to a terrain of epistemological struggles of Black intellectuals to define blackness, black identity, and to insist on the legitimacy of their expression on the continent and beyond. Thanks to this fellowship, Osorio will be able to start the first phase of the project, which involves archival research (at Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Archivo General de la Nación), close reading of literary works, reviewing existing studies on involved publishers and printing houses, and bibliographic description of printed materials found in Bogotá. 

Dr Hyei Jin Kim (Independent Researcher)

Kim’s research project examines the Traditional Market Agreement (TMA), a British publishing monopoly that divided the postwar English-speaking world into two markets. Though largely forgotten today, the TMA granted British publishers the exclusive right to sell editions to British colonies (later the Commonwealth) and American publishers to American colonies. This division of publishing territories shaped, if not dictated, the global circulation of postcolonial literature and postwar Anglophone literature more broadly, entrenching structural and economic imbalances in the international book trade. Drawing on archives of publishers, book trade organisations, and governments, this project will investigate how British and American publishers not only arbitrated literary values but also monopolised the right to trade these books. This fellowship will enable Kim to continue her research on the TMA’s origins in wartime Britain (National Archives) and its impact on publishing and circulating African literature (University of Reading Special Collections).

2023

Sarah Pyke (Anglia Ruskin University)

Pyke’s current research project focuses on “Operation Tiger,” the early 1980s raids by HM Customs and Excise on Gay’s the Word bookshop. Thousands of pounds’ worth of books were seized, staff homes searched and nine employees charged with importing indecent or obscene titles. Despite the scale and severity of the case, “Operation Tiger” is missing from most accounts of 20th-century literary censorship. Through primary archival research, Pyke is working to reconstruct the raids, subsequent trial, and Defend Gay’s the Word Campaign, drawing on recently deposited judicial documents, campaign materials, and related media coverage. 

The fellowship will facilitate the second stage of this project: the creation of a new collection of oral histories relating to “Operation Tiger.” Sarah will speak to those in the bookselling and publishing industries who were directly affected by or involved in the customs raids, the campaign, and other associated acts of censorship in the 1980s and 1990s. This new archive will be fully transcribed and summarized and deposited at Bishopsgate Institute where it will be accessible for future research and to the public. Together with archival research and a digital map showing how and when books and other printed materials were prevented from entering the country, these oral histories will help build up a rich picture of this overlooked episode in queer book culture.

2022

Chiara Betti (Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and the Bodleian Libraries)

This fellowship will support research on the manufacture and use of 17th- and 18th-century printing plates and the production of books during that time. The fellowship will allow Betti to conduct material analyses and high-resolution imaging at the Engineering Department at Oxford. Using the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), Betti will map the crystallography of the plates (i.e., the structure of the metal), showing for the first time in print studies how the composition of copper plates changed throughout the centuries. By X-raying the plates, this project will also identify potential conservation issues such as crack and corrosion causes that might go otherwise unnoticed.

2021

Dipanjan Maitra (The State University of New York at Buffalo)

This award will support researching into the role of press-cutting agencies in building a transnational information network that contributed to the composition, production and distribution of literary modernism. Press-cutting agencies were private media-monitoring agencies that emerged in Paris in the late 1870s and rapidly spread to Britain, Europe, and the United States. They employed readers (mostly female clerks) to manually speed-read hundreds of newspapers for keywords (such as clients’ names) in order to identify valuable news and reviews for subscribers. This project argues that these agencies also acted as surveillance tools in the hands of colonial institutions, such as the India Office in London, or organizations like the British Sexological Society. Maitra will be examining various holdings at primarily three institutions: (1) the British Library, (2) University College London Special Collections, and (3) the National Library of Ireland.

2020

Jane Raisch (University of York)

Raisch’s research project examines the pre-history of the facsimile during the letterpress period. Focusing on techniques for visual reproduction that predate the advent of lithography (facsimile types, woodblocks, engraving, and mezzotint), she will consider how and why early scholars and printers harnessed the technology of print to imitate the physical features of textual artifacts. Dr Raisch’s research will be undertaken primarily at the Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, where she will attempt to discern how methodologies of facsimile production were tied to particular printing techniques, how the limitations of pre-lithographic reproduction informed the principles which govern practice, and what purpose these expensive and time-consuming editions served in the wider print market.

2019

Trude Dijkstra (University of Amsterdam)

Dijkstra’s research project examines the early modern medical contacts between China and Europe by way of print culture, in two complementary ways. The first is by analyzing the manner in which Dutch producers of printed materials facilitated and influenced the transmission of medical knowledge from China to Europe. The second is then by studying how early modern European readers received and applied this medical knowledge. The research will be undertaken at the Wellcome Collection and Library in London (UK).