Book History

Cécile Boulaire is an Associate Professor in Children's Literature at the University of Tours, and in 2015 she obtained her professorial thesis [Habilitation à diriger des recherches]. She is the editor-in-chief of the journal Strenæ, dedicated to children's literature and the material culture of childhood. Her research focuses primarily on the history of publishing for the young and the aesthetics of children's picture books. In 2008 she was awarded a collaborative grant from the French National Research Agency to investigate the history of the Mame publishing house, the largest publisher for children in France in the 19th century. Her current research focuses on the effects of picturebook-reading programs for premature babies hospitalized in the NICU.

Sarah Brouillette is a Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

Sarah Bull is an Assistant Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her work on nineteenth-century medical and erotic print networks has appeared in a variety of journals, including Book History, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and History of the Human Sciences.

Michael Durrant is a Lecturer in Book History at IES, University of London. He is currently completing his first monograph on the seventeenth-century printer Henry Hills, which will be published by Manchester University Press. He has written elsewhere on printed waste, printed ornaments, and the materiality of early modern devotion.

Jody Mason is a Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). She has published two books, Writing Unemployment: Worklessness, Mobility, Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literatures (Toronto, 2013) and Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement (McGill-Queen's, 2019) and is currently working on a critical history of the role of books in development initiatives in late twentieth-century Canada.

Madeline McMahon is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her PhD in history in 2021 from Princeton University and her MPhil in early modern history in 2015 from the University of Cambridge, where the earliest version of this article won the University Library's Gordon Duff Prize. McMahon's writings reflect her longstanding interests in how religion and reading interact and of the social context of knowledge creation. She is currently working on her first book.

Leah Orr is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, where she is the current holder of the Joseph P. Montiel Professorship in English. She is the author of Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730 (Virginia, 2017) and Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670-1750 (Oxford, 2023). Her research interests include the history of the book trade, women writers, and fiction in the long eighteenth century.

Sarah Pelletier is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). She received a MA in English with the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture from the University of Toronto, and a BA in English from Toronto Metropolitan University. Her doctoral research focuses on nineteenth-century print history and culture in North America, with specific attention to typographical trade journals, skill, gender, and race.

A. Elisabeth Reichel is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Osnabrück University, Germany. Her research focuses on the economic humanities, science and speculative fictions, the history of anthropology, and sound studies. She is the author of Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict (Nebraska, 2021) and has edited special issues on Boasian Aesthetics: American Poetry, Visual Culture, and Cultural Anthropology (Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2018) and on Posthuman Economies (Interconnections/Interconnexions, 2023). Together with Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor and Stephanie Peebles Tavera, she is co-editing the journal Utopian Studies.

Laura Vrana is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Alabama. She earned her BA from Yale and her PhD from Penn State and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Rutgers and Emory. She researches 20th-century and contemporary Black poetics; her publications on the subject have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous outlets, including the journals MELUS, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, College Literature, The...