Thursday 12 February, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

DROR WEIL (Cambridge), ‘Polyglossia, Trans-local Materialities and Modalities of Performance: Jewish Textualities in Early Modern China’

Wednesday 25 February, 5pm, Historical Printing Room, CUL

MADISON BENNETT and DAVID MACFARLANE, ‘From Press to Protest: A Workshop in Historical Printing’

Explore the art and activism of historical printing by creating your own wood-type protest posters in this hands-on workshop. Led by Madison Bennett, book artist and current PhD Candidate in Archaeology, and David MacFarlane, Curator of the Historical Printing Room at Cambridge University Library. To sign up for a place, click here.

Thursday 12 March, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English 

ALICE WICKENDEN (Cambridge), ‘Halliwell-Phillipps, theft, and the problem of identifying manuscripts’

Thursday 16 October, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English
Drew Milne (Cambridge), ‘Underdeterminations: towards a history of the theatre programme’

All welcome

Thursday 8 May, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English
Joseph Hone (Newcastle), ‘T.J. Wise’s Book Hospital: A Further Study in Theft and Sophistication’

Thursday 22 May, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English
Sheryl Wombell (Cambridge), ‘Mobility, Materiality, and Temporality in the Early Modern Medical Recipe Collections at the New York Academy of Medicine Library’

All welcome

Thursday 30 January 5.30 pm [note time], Board Room, Faculty of English


Satoko Tokunaga (Keio), ‘Hagiographies in Transit: Caxton’s Golden Legend and its Materialities’

Thursday 27 February, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English


Alessandro Bianchi (University Library), ‘Bookbinding, Bibliophilia, and a Passion for Japan: The Collection of Eugène Gillet (1859–1938)’


Thursday 6 March, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English


Katharina Boehm (Passau), ‘“Pageants of Pasteboard and Buckram”: Antiquarian Practices and the Historical Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century’

[This seminar will be run jointly with the Eighteenth Century and Romantic Studies seminar]

Thursday 31 October, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Abigail Williams (Oxford), ‘Reading it Wrong: Misinterpretation and Befuddlement in Eighteenth Century Print Culture’

Thursday 7 November, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Sarah Haggarty (Cambridge), ‘The folded familiar letter as material and chronotope’

[This seminar will be run jointly with the Eighteenth Century and Romantic Studies seminar]

Thursday 28 November, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Ruth Abbott (Cambridge) and Chloe Steel (artist), ‘Blank Forms for Future Applications’

All welcome.

Thursday 15 February, 5.30 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Dahlia Porter (Glasgow)

‘The 18^th-century Illustrated Catalogue: List Logics, Identical Objects, Epistemic Images?’

This seminar will be held in association with the Eighteenth Century and Romantic Studies Graduate Seminar. For a Teams link, please email the convenors: 18cRcambridge@gmail.com (links will be provided shortly before the seminar begins).

Thursday 7 March, 5 pm [display available for viewing from 4.30 pm], Milstein Seminar Room, University Library

Irene Fabry-Tehranchi (Cambridge University Library)

‘French and English caricatures of the Franco-Prussian war (1870) at Cambridge University Library’

All welcome

Thursday 12 October, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Justine Provino (University of Cambridge)

‘30 years of a self-destructive book: Agrippa (a book of the dead), 1992-’

Thursday 9 November, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Lucy Sixsmith (University of Cambridge)

‘Handling Bibles in the Nineteenth Century’

Thursday 23 November, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Janine Barchas (University of Texas at Austin, Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall)

‘”Lent to Copy”: Art Rentals in the Age of Jane Austen’

This seminar will be held in association with the Eighteenth Century and Romantic Studies Graduate Seminar

Thursday 25 May, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Devani Singh (Geneva), ‘Chaucer’s Imperfect Books’

All welcome.

Thursday 9 February, 5 pm, Milstein Room, University Library

Irene Fabry-Tehranchi (Cambridge University Library)

‘French and English caricatures of the Franco-Prussian war (1870) at Cambridge University Library’

Update: This seminar has been cancelled due to UCU strike action.

Thursday 23 February, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Brian Cummings (York) will discuss his new book, Bibliophobia: The End and Beginning of the Book (2022)

Thursday 9 March, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Erica McAlpine (Oxford), ‘The Poem on the Page’

Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania) 

‘The Erasable Ten Commandments: The Decalogue as Wax Tablets’

Friday 11 November, 12.30-2, Portrait Room, Christ’s College

(in association with the Seminar in Early Modern Scholarship and Religion)

Justine Provino (University of Cambridge)

‘30 years of a self-destructive book: Agrippa (a book of the dead), 1992-’

Thursday 24 November, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English.

All welcome