bibliography and history of the book

Textual Embodiments: Remediating Meaning Across the Disciplines

Rome Link Campus University, September 11-12, 2026

Information, Medium & Society: Twenty-Fifth International Conference on Publishing Studies, University of Split, Croatia, 30 June - 2 July 2027

Information, Medium & Society: The Publishing Studies Research Network was founded in 2003 with the inaugural International Conference on the Future of the Book. Since then, the Research Network has expanded its scope in two phases. The first was in 2009 when it became the Books, Publishing, and Libraries Research. In this iteration, the Research Network began to look beyond the book as the primary site of investigation. In 2019 the network underwent another change, to become Information, Medium & Society - The Publishing Studies Research Network.

One of the fundamental limitations of English literature before 1800 is that in order to study this literature it must have survived to us in some form: it must have been preserved, intentionally or accidentally, in whole or in part, and usually in some form of archive. This call seeks papers that reflect on or account for the impact of this archival presence in premodern studies. How has or does the need for our texts to have been archived impact the field, whether broadly or through its effect on the understanding of a particular text, author, or genre? How does reading “after the archive” in this subfield differ from similar readings in other subfields, or from readings that do not consider the significance of the archive?

International conference co-organized

with the French School of Athens

From imagination to remains, from remains to imagination: literary representations of ancient Greece in its materiality (14th-19th centuries)

February 25-26, 2027 at the French School of Athens

Call for Papers: MLA 2027 - Los Angeles

The William Morris Society in the United States is soliciting proposals for two panels at next year's MLA (January 7-10, 2027 in Los Angeles). You are warmly invited to submit proposals for either session. Please submit your proposals to the email addresses listed with each CFP. Submissions must be received by March 22.

William Morris, Labor & the Nineteenth Century

Perpetrators of genocide destroy people as well as their cultural legacies, including formal archives, libraries, privately held records, and culturally significant texts and other print objects. Colonial occupation both historically and currently consolidates power through destroying records of occupied peoples to deny their past, present, and future. Resistance, in turn, may take the form of preserving such records through smuggling, hiding, converting, memorizing, digitizing, translating, and reconstituting. Inspired by the Phoenix Library in Gaza, the MLA Forum on Book History, Print Cultures, Lexicography seeks papers on preserving books, print materials, and other textual records (broadly understood) in contexts of genocide.

Call for Papers: MLA 2027 - Los Angeles

The William Morris Society in the United States is soliciting proposals for two panels at next year's MLA (January 7-10, 2027 in Los Angeles). You are warmly invited to submit proposals for either session. Please submit your proposals to the email addresses listed with each CFP. Submissions must be received by March 15.

William Morris, Labor & the Nineteenth Century

Call for Papers — ASA 2026 (Chicago)

Black Feminist Book Cultures and Experimental Methodologies

We seek papers for a panel on Black feminist book cultures and experimental methodologies for the American Studies Association's annual convention (theme: improvisation) in Chicago in October 2026. Please send an abstract (max. 1200 characters), title, and bio to kwitaszek@mta.ca.

Deadline for submissions: February 27, 2026

The Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize is awarded annually to the best Ph.D. dissertation, defended in the previous calendar year, that explores the British periodical press of the long nineteenth century (including magazines, newspapers, and serial publications of all kinds) as an object of study in its own right, not as a source of material for other historical topics. Winners of the prize receive a monetary award of $1,000 and a two-year membership to RSVP.

Memory, Myth, and Meaning: Cather in Dialogue with America 250

Willa Cather Spring Conference | Thursday, June 4 - Saturday, June 6, 2026 

This year marks the centennial of My Mortal Enemy, one of Cather’s least affirmative works and one not produced in the Cather Scholarly Edition (translation: much important work remains to be done!)  We invite papers on new approaches to My Mortal Enemy, including but not limited to the following considerations of style, form, provenance, and themes:

Writing about a series of human-object relationships, Robin Bernstein employs the term “scriptive thing” to articulate how objects become things when they orient, choreograph, or compel human action. In one such case study, she analyzes a photograph of a woman posing with a racist caricature at the Hotel Exposition in New York’s Grand Central Palace, circa 1930. Using this photo, she further clarifies the nature of this particular subject-object relationship, stating that it is “neither an isolated woman and her ‘whys’ nor an isolated caricature and its textual ‘hows,’ but instead through a complex interaction between the two figures,” that the photo constructs race.

The Society for the Study of American Poetry invites proposals for a session to be held at the 37th annual American Literature Association conference in Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026. 

Panel: Mediating American Poetry

This panel invites papers that examine American poetry through the lens of media, broadly construed and across historical periods. We seek work that explores how poetic production, circulation, reception, and interpretation have been shaped by media forms—from print technologies and the history of the book to digital platforms, archives, and social media.