Notes on contributors

Karen Attar is Curator of Rare Books and University Art at Senate House Library, University of London, and a former Fellow of the university’s Institute of English Studies. She has published widely on aspects of library history, book collecting and librarianship. Her main publication is the third edition of the Directory of Rare Book and Special Collections in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland (2016). Girls’ school stories are a hobby.

Hannah Callahan studied literature and printmaking at Bennington College, and received her Masters degree in Library and Information Science at Simmons University. She has a background in rare books and bibliography and is a librarian and independent researcher based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Jane Suzanne Carroll is an Ussher Associate Professor in Children’s Literature in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. Her teaching and research interests centre on landscape, spatiality and material culture in children’s fiction. She is the author of Landscape in Children’s Literature (2012) and British Children’s Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption, 1850–1914 (2021).

Monika Class is an associate professor of English literature at Lund University. Her research investigates the transformative potential of reading experiences in Britain from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries from the perspective of embodiment. As the Principal Investigator of the research group ‘The Visceral Novel Reader’ (DFG 422574378), she is working on a book manuscript under the same title and also on water poetry from the British Isles published between 2000 and 2024.

K. A. Manley is a retired librarian and co-convenor of the Seminar on the History of Libraries at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. His recent books include Books, Borrowers, and Shareholders: Scottish Circulating and Subscription Libraries before 1825 (2012) and Irish Reading Societies and Circulating Libraries Founded before 1825 (2018).

Andrew Nash is Reader in Book History and Director of the London Rare Books School in the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He has written, edited or co-edited books on Scottish literature, Victorian literature and the history of the book, including the final volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (2019) covering the twentieth century and beyond. He is a past editor of the Review of English Studies.

Rahel Orgis works as a scientific collaborator at the University Library, Bern. She is the author of Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (2017) and co-editor of Fashioning England and the English: Literature, Nation, Gender (2018). Her articles on early modern prose fiction and drama have appeared in Renaissance Studies, ELR, Sidney Journal and SPELL. She is currently researching the development of narrators in early modern fiction.

Daniel Sawyer is a departmental lecturer in English literature and manuscript studies at Oxford. He studies poetry, manuscripts and editing, focusing on the period 1100 to 1500. His latest book is How to Read Middle English Poetry (2024), and he is currently writing a new account of poetic innovation in early English.

Lucy Sixsmith completed her PhD thesis, ‘Handling Bibles in the Nineteenth Century’, at the University of Cambridge in 2023. She has published work in Book History, Cambridge Quarterly and Textual Practice.

Shafquat Towheed is Senior Lecturer in English and Director of Research for the School of Arts and Humanities at The Open University. He has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, particularly on the history and practice of reading. His most recent publication (with Corinna Norrick-Rühl) is Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic (2022). He is Vice President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP).

Susan Watson read English at Cambridge and completed a PhD in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her thesis consisted of a collection of poems and lyric essays that respond to and pursue a dialogue with the work of other writers, particularly D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. The critical component of her research was a study of the work of the poet Anne Carson, who also writes about other writers.

Abigail Williams is Professor of English Literature and Lord White Tutorial Fellow, St Peters College, University of Oxford. Her publications include The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (2017) and Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (2023).