This is the third of a series of short reports on SHARP 2024: Global Book Cultures, provided by select SHARPists who were supported by SHARP travel awards. They are presented below in interview format. Please feel free to reach out to these scholars for collaboration and networking! Their contact info is hyperlinked to each of their names, below.

Tell us a little about yourself and your research.

I’m N Manohar Reddy (he/his). My Ph.D. was on the modernization of Telugu, spoken by around 96 million people and is one of the prominent four languages of South India. It is the official language of two Indian states: Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. For my Ph.D., I researched on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial enterprise of Telugu print and publishing, in which the Telugu intelligentsia enthusiastically participated and collaborated. My research shows how print and publishing led to the emergence and consolidation of linguistic national identity which often clashed with the pan Indian nationalist movement that viewed linguistic national movements (Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Bengali, and so on) as illegitimate, chauvinistic, jingoistic, divisive, and so on and were perceived as threats to its own existence. While the Indian nationalists claimed that India was one nation, the leaders of linguistic nationalisms challenged such claims and argued that India was a federation of Nations/nationalities, and only a federal India could be secular and was suitable for democracy and more conducive for achieving popular sovereignty. Ironically, after India got independence, Indian languages and their respective print cultures have been consistently on the decline. Unlike the existing research that sees colonization and English as the culprits for such a state of affairs, my research shows that it is the Indian nationalism that has contributed to such a disaster. Of late, I have also been working on the Telugu journals run by marginalized communities such as Dalits (formerly untouchables) and Adivasis (indigenous communities).

My name is Saskia Roberts (she/her). I am a PhD candidate in History at the Australian National University. My thesis is tentatively titled ‘Reading for pleasure: Australian teenage girls, intimate knowledge and print culture, 1970–2010.’ I am interested in how girls encountered and interacted with publications that discussed topics like sexuality, reproduction, puberty, contraception, sexually transmitted illnesses and romance and relationships. My research has involved conducting approximately forty oral history interviews with people who were teenage girls in Australia in the recent past. I’ve also spent a lot of time reading sex education manuals, teenage fiction and copies of Dolly, a magazine infamous in Australia for its medical advice column which answered letters about puberty and sex. I have been lucky to access a private archive of approximately five thousand of these letters too. My work has been published in Lilith: A Feminist History Journal and The Conversation. Before I began my doctorate, I was a Senior Research Officer at the Northern Territory Treaty Commission, where I researched colonisation and reconciliation in Canada and Australia, and wrote discussion papers calling for a Truth Commission in Australia’s north. After eleven years in Canberra, I now study remotely and live in Madrid. I like hiking, trying new foods and going to the beach, all things I hope to do more often once I submit my PhD!

I’m Lozana Rossenova (she /her). I am a digital humanities researcher and designer based in Berlin. I studied art and design in New York, before moving to the UK to pursue an MA degree at the Department for Typography and Graphic Communication in the University of Reading. I was a Sessional Lecturer in hybrid and digital publication design at Reading between 2016¬-2021. In 2021, I completed a PhD at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University) in collaboration with Rhizome, a leading international born-digital art organisation. My research focused on questions related to presentation and performativity in the online archive of born-digital art, which I examined through the lens of interface design (theory and practice). I am currently a Postdoc Researcher at the Open Science Lab at TIB (German National Library of Science and Technology, Hannover) working on the NFDI4Culture project for a national research infrastructure of cultural heritage data. My work focuses on open-source and community-driven approaches to digital infrastructures, which organise, store and make knowledge, and different ways of knowing, accessible. I continue to collaborate extensively with international research and cultural institutions, including the Department for Typography and Graphic Communication at Reading, Aarhus University, Department of Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University, Critical Media Lab (Basel), Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam), NYU (NY & Berlin), among others.

I’m Nicole Salama (she/her). I am currently a Ph.D. student at Loyola University Chicago, where I study Modern Literature and Culture. My research considers the various modes that literature occupies, especially its transformation from manuscript to print. Specifically, I am interested in the ways that this process is managed on behalf of many women writers. My current research examines the initial publications of late 19th century and 20th century works, many of which, despite initial skepticism, are now canonical—from Emily Dickinson’s poems to Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: A New Mestiza. I examine the inextricable social and financial networks that produced the first editions these works. My primary focus is on bibliographic codes of prices. I find that these small markings hint at the larger economic considerations and ultimately point to the cultural value the publisher both predicts for the book and shapes the book to attract. By tracking these trends from the end of the 19th century and through the 20th century, I hope to contribute to providing a robust social text that could elaborate on the treatment of women writers, many of whom occupied intersectional identities, from the end of the 19th century into the contemporary age.

My name is Ksenia Papazova (she/her). I have recently completed my PhD on print culture in post-Soviet Russia at the University of Manchester, where I continue to teach a range of courses. My PhD thesis examined the neovintage book in Russia, which are new editions of books published at the turn of the nineteenth century in Europe and Russia. These neovintage books attempt to reproduce the aesthetics of the old editions by copying thoroughly not only elements of their design, but also their shabbiness and traces of previous ownership, resulting in visual illusions of torn bindings, scratches on covers, and foxing. Individual chapters explored the reception of the neovintage book through the prism of readers’ attitudes to vintage aesthetics and Soviet book culture, based on findings from online bookshops. I am interested in (post-)Soviet book cultures, materiality, vintage aesthetics, and how a concept of time can be embedded in the material object of the book. I received my MA in Book and Digital Media Studies from Leiden University, the Netherlands. I am also the managing editor at publishing house Glagoslav, which specialises in translations from Eastern European languages into English and Dutch.

Can you share a bit about the work you presented at the conference?

N Manohar: Our panel titled, “Caste, Print and Power” was scheduled on the first day afternoon of the conference, and was chaired by Prof. Graham Shaw. The panel had three speakers: Sayanthan Mondal, Rahul Jondhale Hiraman and N. Manohar Reddy. My paper was titled, “A Journal of Adivasi Resistance in Modern India.” It was about a Telugu little journal run by two prominent personalities belonging to the most marginalized communities in India, namely, Erukalas and Yanadis which were classified as “Criminal Tribes” by the British India government. Post independence, while the Nehruvian national state’s ambitious attempts at building modern India through economic initiatives is well known, “Adivasi” provides us with a critical understanding of how Adivasi communities responded to such state-driven governmental initiatives, which had nothing to offer to the so called Criminal Tribes. In addition, the journal became a platform to mobilize the scattered adivasis—Eurukalas, Yanadis, Lambadas, Pichhigontlas, and so on—as one community to fight against the hardships they were facing, such as lack of food, drinking water, education, employment, oppression by the upper castes, police atrocities and so on. While the audience for our panel was small, Q&A and post-presentation discussions were interesting. There were some insightful questions and a couple of suggestions as well. Overall, it was the worth the effort.

Saskia: I was in the panel ‘Young adult fiction’ with Amanda K. Allen. Amanda gave a brilliant paper about an influential literary network of librarians, authors, editors and publishers that operated in the USA in the mid-twentieth century, just before the rise of contemporary young adult fiction. This network functioned, in part, to make sure writing for adolescents instilled ‘positive values’ – a nebulous but important idea that shaped the content and messaging of several publications. Amanda’s work spoke to my own very well, but also provided a good contrast. My paper was titled ‘The Joy of Sex(ual Reading): Australian teenage girls, illicit literature and sexual learning, 1970–2010.’ It was about how Australian girls stumbled upon and sought out texts like erotic fiction, lovemaking manuals and porn magazines in the recent past. These works certainly did not contain the ‘positive values’ the children’s literary network had in mind a decade or two before! Drawing on my oral history interviews, I revealed that many girls read against the grain of these sexual texts to produce their own meanings. In girls’ hands, these publications could highlight bodily diversity and queer sexualities, allow for productive, shared debate of sexual mores and even lead to an active rejection of violent pornography. I also discussed how girls eroticised much more pedestrian texts, many of which may appear mundane to adult readers; these included dermatology textbooks, Peter Mayle’s sex education classic Where Did I Come From? and even a library book with reproductions of Renaissance nudes (and these were just the examples I had time to include in the paper). In drawing attention to these forms of reading, I demonstrated how girls’ reading habits deviated from those of adults, bucking historical trends towards silent, individual reading. Girls often swapped erotic texts and/or read them together, with some of my participants recalling this collective engagement as not only a fun activity but a social obligation: if one girl found a text with sexual information, she had to share it and enlighten her friends as well. Overall – and without endorsing any of the texts I mentioned – I wanted to challenge ideas that illicit literature is inherently harmful in the hands of teenage girls. Girls in the recent past – and indeed today – are not passive consumers of culture, but are capable of challenging and even shaping sexual norms through their interactions with texts. A highlight of the panel was, undoubtedly, when I mentioned a major debate in Australia about condom vending machines and somebody thought I said ‘hotdog machines’. A more genuine highlight was the productive discussion that took place during question and answer time, as well as the recommendations and personal stories audience members shared with me. It’s always interesting (and useful) to be reminded of how widespread the reading practices I study were – I now know girls in the UK also used their peer networks to share illicit texts, just like my interviewees in Australia!

Lozana: I co-chaired the hybrid panel session: ‘Experimental publishing: networked cultures, archival initiatives and recursive publics’ alongside Dr Ruth Blacksell. The panel included paper contributions by Dr Blacksell and Dr Lucie Kolb, and an interactive video presentation by designer Mindy Seu. The panel was conceived by Blacksell as a continuation of two previous panel events we co-organized together with support from the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. The first of these, ‘Experimental publishing and alternative networked cultures’ took place in 2021 and was instigated by our common preoccupation with historical as well as contemporary references that examine experimental publishing through a range of perspectives, spanning the fields of art, communication design, digital media and software development. Through our introduction and invited guest contributions we sketched out some of the links between conceptual and performance art practices from the 1960s, (Dr Blacksell’s primary research field) which fed into critical debates in art and design discourse – vis-a-vis the role of the active audience/reader/user – emerging in the 1980s and ‘90s with the broader availability of desktop computing and networked communications (the latter of which were the topic of my own doctoral research). With the second event in the series, ‘Experimental publishing and new archival initiatives’, which took place in 2022, we took note of the increasing significance of archival initiatives in experimental, grassroots publishing which have extended relationships between social and media environments over the past decade. We were interested in the breakdown of strict boundaries between activities of publishing and archiving, enabled through the hybridization of digital and analog contexts. With the panel at SHARP, we continued this line of inquiry by adding two additional speakers / practitioners who bring their own specialised perspectives, but are closely connected in a variety of ways to networks of ideas, projects and practices we were bringing to the foreground with the first two events. Dr Lucie Kolb is not only a well-known scholar of experimental publishing across the art and design world, but works fluidly across archives and publications as information spaces with potential to generate new forms of sociality. As part of a collaborative project with the Critical Media Lab in Basel, Kolb is assembling an archive of networked artistic production, whose infrastructure will be based on the collaborative, open source software developed by my team at the Open Science Lab. The link to archives and networked cultures is furthered by Mindy Seu’s video contribution to the panel. Seu has developed a collaborative archive of cyberfeminist publications which features materials and inspiration from the Rhizome net art archive and beyond. The archive takes multiple forms across digital and analog contexts and openly references historical sources from the conceptual and performance art space in the 60s and 70s to the proto-networks of the (Feminist) Whole Earth Catalog communities. The panel brought together a range of significant historical references alongside concrete projects and practice examples of new forms of collaborative and interactive (i.e. embodying the ‘recursive’ concept as defined by activists of the open source software movement) public engagement with acts, platforms and environments of publishing. It proved to be a valuable forum for exchange that furthered previous event discussions and set out routes for possible future collaborations, staying close to the networked spirit of the researched materials.

Nicole: It was a joy to present alongside Mela Dávila Freire and Camila Gonzalez Simon as part of the “Alternative Publishing Cultures: Latinx & Latin America” panel.

My paper, entitled “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Developing a Praxis of Decolonial Publishing,” traces the evolving relationship between Anzaldúa and Joan Pinkvoss, her publisher at Aunt Lute. Pinkvoss sought out Anzaldúa to urge her to consider publishing her work with Aunt Lute upon hearing her read a few poems from an initial draft of Borderlands/La Frontera. Despite this early and fervent interest in the poems, the work changed dramatically as the pair began to work together towards the book’s publication. The nature of these changes—changes to aspects of the book as fundamental as genre—suggests a complicated authorship. Of course, the complications only increased when the widespread reach of Anzaldúa’s masterpiece quickly became evident. Though book sales were high, Anzaldúa reaped few of the financial rewards, often begging Pinkvoss for her royalties as various needs arose in her personal life. By considering this publishing narrative, I search for a distinctly decolonial mode of publishing. Aunt Lute in many ways sets a good example, publishing and promoting the works of marginal writers without conditioning their acceptance and support of these works purely on their potential to garner sales revenue. My paper suggests that it is additionally necessary to ensure that publishing these works does not leave writers in a more precarious position. Unfortunately, many of the small, often feminist, presses that actively publish marginal writers are themselves in unstable positions. In many cases then, funds must be devoted either to enabling the press to continue or to paying authors’ royalties. As a result, I propose that presses ought to plan for their own dissolution, supporting writers as they operate and by preparing them and their works for a future beyond the press when it can no longer support them. In many ways, Freire and Simon’s presentations actively seek to remedy discrepencies in publishing and promotion of marginal artists. Their projects both envision alternative publicity and publishing structures for Latinx artists. Freire’s exhibition “Off-Register” sought to fill a noticeable gap in the representation of Latin women artists in the second half of the 20th century. Her stunning exhibit centers these women and their art without simplifying these diverse works into a singular artistic narrative. Her exhibit thus promotes these artists’ works on their own terms. Meanwhile, Simon’s zine making practices strive towards granting everyone, particularly those without easy access to representation, a voice in print. Her work encourages not only authorial self-reflection, but also dissemination of unique, various, and very necessary perspectives. Both of their presentations have inspired me as I continue to consider the necessary practices for a decolonial press, as have the abundantly helpful questions and advice provided by the panel’s kind audience.

Ksenia: My paper was part of “The Victorians: Book cultures and reception” (Thursday, 4 July), together with Dipanjan Maitra and Alex Bubb. I chose to talk about one translation of Charles Dickens into Russian published in 2010. What is unusual about this translation is that it copies rather faithfully the design and original illustrations of an undated edition, published by Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd. in London c. 1910. I was interested in exploring how paratextual elements of English culture are translated into Russian culture. I used paratextual studies and translation studies as my framework drawing on the works of Lawrence Venuti and Gerard Genette. By analysing the paratextual elements (book covers, title pages, formats, and books as material object itself) of the English and Russian editions in terms of domestication and foreignisation, I could reconstruct the editorial process of this translation step by step. I came up with a term ‘historical paratexts’ to show how the Victorian design features are carefully reconstructed in the book: e.g. textual elements and florid designs on the cover. The publisher’s decisions to retain, omit, or change design elements of one print culture and recreate them in another foregrounds appreciation of a foreign book culture and the book as a material artefact, as well as a changing publishing landscape in the digital age. This Russian edition of Dickens reveals a publisher’s struggle to both preserve the English spirit of the original and follow Russian book design conventions. It also challenges our assumptions about the role paratexts play in a publisher-reader interaction. However, there is an additional layer to the book. The 2010 edition emphasises the traces of previous ownership and associated tear and wear, recreated in what I call ‘vintage paratexts.’ The effects of ageing and traces of previous ownership, which vintage paratexts embody, are created digitally by the publisher based on the translator’s copy of Dickens. The Russian edition of Dickens marks the birth of vintage paratext in Russia, made possible due to the technological advances at the publisher’s disposal. The book’s visual complexity is achieved by an interplay between historical and vintage paratextual elements, which create a separate space for interpretation and interaction with the book as an object. Peritexts, which are usually meant to frame the text inside the book, come to the fore and almost subdue the voice of the text. It is arguably the artificial antiquity itself in the book design makes the book seem more authentic and sincere, stimulating in the reader the feeling of cultural and social involvement in the historical process by means of travelling through time together with the book.

Beside your own panel, what was your favorite session at the 2024 SHARP Conference? 

N Manohar: The session on 2nd July, “Transatlantic Slave Trade and Print Culture in Latin America (18th and 19th Centuries).” Agnes Gehbald’s presentation was very thought provoking and was well researched. We registered only for the first two days of the conference as the registration fee was quite high. Thus, sadly, we missed some more interesting sessions scheduled on the last three days of the conference!

Saskia: It’s very hard to pick a favourite. In the session following mine, ‘Access denied: how censorship and book banning shapes reading and archives’, Lindsay DiCuirci, Tamara Bhalla and Lisa Z. Sigel conducted a timely conversation about the past, present and future of literary censorship. I opened my own paper with a discussion of a similar topic; last year, a sex education book for which I provided basic research assistance was subject to a vitriolic online campaign after a right-wing thinktank claimed it was ‘grooming’ children and contained what it termed a harmful ‘gender ideology’. In light of this experience, I found Tamara’s research on Moms for Liberty and whiteness very enlightening. I am really looking forward to her monograph concerning race and childhood literary cultures, an understudied but deeply important subject. Later in the conference, I was completely taken with Camila Gonzalez Simon’s discussion of zine-making with young people in Chile. She has authored an incredible guide to making fanzines with beautiful illustrations; it was a delight to leaf through during the panel. I also loved seeing her slides on what children and teenagers themselves created during her workshops. Unsurprisingly (to me, at least), Camila’s participants did not always feel bound to conventions concerning the content of their fanzines, and created wonderful texts about their favourite media or their political concerns. I hope Camila (or others) can continue important projects like this in the future.

Lozana: I was only able to attend the conference for the day of my panel, Monday July 1st, so I didn’t have a chance to attend many other sessions, but I enjoyed the collection session by Gerry Leonidas and Borna Izadpanah – Stories of adaptation and divergence: two scripts, one model of seeing – at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, as well as the Ladybird books exhibition at the MERL. I also found the exchanges with other researchers during the interim pauses exciting and surprising as to how diverse the SHARP community is!

Nicole: Perhaps my favorite aspect of SHARP’s conference is the sheer variety of fascinating, and incredibly different, panels that all find a home at SHARP. I attended panels that spanned several hundred years in time frame and ranged in topic from AI to the transatlantic slave trade, all of which were phenomenal. The far-ranging impact of the material book was clearly on display throughout the conference. Presentations by Marianne Marten and Gitte Balling, Xiang Ren, and Sara Kärrholm during the second “Digital Platforms and Fan Fiction” emphasized the contemporary evidence of this continuing material importance of the book. I am not an active social media user myself; nevertheless, I was engrossed by the sheer number of ways that the reading public is consuming and remaking the book—whether by literally repackaging books with self-made covers, influencing sale trends through social media, or dictating the terms of a new genre.

Ksenia: I really enjoyed the panel “Old fakes in today’s libraries” (Wednesday, 3 July) as fakes studies was one of the frameworks I wanted to use in my research some time ago. At that time I was not aware of any works about fakes in books, and after this session I have a lot to think about in connection to my research. I found the session by Book History editors (Thursday, 4 July) very helpful – it helped me to make up my mind which journal I am going to send the article I am currently working on. I would also like to mention the collection sessions (I wish I could have attended all of them) and Asha Rogers’ keynote – she is a great presenter. Though her research is outside my expertise and current activities, I am going to familiarise myself with her book.

Give us a reading recommendation!

Saskia: Gay Men at the Movies by Scott McKinnon

Lozana: Lucie Kolb, “Study, Not Critique,” in Transversal Texts, 2018

Nicole: Sherry Shenoda’s poetry collection Mummy Eaters

Ksenia: The New Russian Book: A Graphic Cultural History by Birgitte Beck Pristed (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)