Wednesday 3 March 2027 | 1-3.30pm (GMT) - Online
Transition is a word that captures the complex technological and industrial processes that have conditioned publishing industries over the past one hundred years. Since the mid-twentieth century, publishing and book production have been materially and industrially reconstituted across several concentrated, and increasingly rapid waves of technological transition. From hot-metal to phototypesetting, relief to planographic printing, the eventual ubiquity of desktop publishing and current reckonings with artificial intelligence’s threat to knowledge and expertise, capitalist-driven technological innovation has fundamentally shaped publishing and literary practice. Literary and publishing cultures are, in some respects, in a constant state of transition, as new technologies emerge, necessitating processes of adoption and adaptation. Yet some transitions are deeper, more destructive and radical than others: they displace labour and render salient technical knowledge redundant while altering the very material of literary and publishing practice.
Transitions are, however, never absolute. In moments of adaptation and adoption, ‘in-between technologies’ (Singh 2021) are brokered and tested. Workers, industries and even technologies resist implementation, resulting in malfunction, repurposing and novel experimentation. Hybrid formations and artefacts emerge. Systems, infrastructures and practices graft onto each other. New forms of technical and practical knowledge arise, sometimes very briefly, and vanish, just as quickly. Industrial transitions can also disrupt the social organisation of labour by creating new opportunities for previously marginalised workers to gain access to professions from which they had been previously excluded (Cockburn 1981).
We invite submissions from those who work on the intersection of literary production, print history, and publishing for a research workshop on the topic of Transitions in Printing, Publishing, and Literary Practice c.1950-present across diverse, global literary cultures.
In this initial meeting, we want to explore with others the following questions:
What forms of knowledge can be gained by returning to transition pinch points within publishing, printing and literary history?
Can transitional moments in printing, publishing and literary practice be historicised?
What can be learnt through documenting and revisiting moments of technological transition as they resonate across different scales: craft and technique, embodied knowledge, economic impact, cultural perception, or as traces in literary production?
How were production transitions managed and implemented in the printing and publishing industries of the mid-late twentieth century?
Approaching these questions ‘from below’, how did technological changes affect the political power of workers in print and publishing? What demographic shifts took place in these industries alongside technological transitions?
What are the consequences of technological transition in printing for the economics of literary publishing and labour?
How can histories of printing, publishing and literary practice be enriched by paying attention to transitional processes?
Please send 300-word proposals for 10–15-minute talks with name, affiliation and short bio via this form by Friday 22 January 2027. Contact Sam Solomon for details
We welcome proposals from scholars and practitioners. We want to provide an opportunity for participants to share work and establish a network for researchers in the field.
Further topics for consideration include but are not limited to…
Typography, memory and practice
Printing transitions
Production, materiality and book making
Histories of industrial and technological transition
De/Colonialism and Transition
Licensing, proprietary technologies, privatisation, monopolisation and enclosure
Artificial Intelligence and editorial labour
Authors and their writing machines
Scales and speeds of transition in different national and industrial contexts
Technics, publishing and literary practice
Industrial disputes, trade union histories and resistance
Media archaeological and bibliographic approaches
Craft and revival
Profiles of inventors, companies and entrepreneurs
Transnational networks and collaboration
Transition and Environmental Sustainability
Writing futures – hands, type, surfaces, capture
Remediations and palimpsests
Infrastructural histories of change and resistance
Manuscript and editorial studies of literary production
Business histories of transition in printing and publishing
Transitions in Printing, Publishing, and Literary Practice c.1950-present is organised by Sam Solomon (The Centre for Print Culture, University of Sussex), D-M Withers (English and Creative Writing, University of Exeter) and David Wylot (School of English and the Centre for the Comparative History of Print, University of Leeds).