Material Text

Theme leaders

Overview of theme

‘The Material Text’ brings research excellence together from several areas: publishing and the book trade, distribution, ownership and readership; the history of the book, printing, and typography; design for reading; and the study of the social and communication functions of texts, whether written, printed, illustrated, performed, or mediated.

The theme also includes research on a text’s material attributes including its design, illustration, binding, format; the interpretation of a text or series of texts through performance, curating, exhibition; and research using an archive or collection of texts and what that can tell us about audiences, making, selling and distribution.

The Material Text research theme involves:

The following archives and collections are currently involved in Material Text research: the Publishing History Archives in Reading University Library; the Lettering, Printing and Graphic Design Collections in Typography; the Rickards Collection of Ephemera in Typography and the Beckett archive.

For more information: contact our Administrator, Polly Harte

Summaries of research interests of people involved

Rob Banham, Typography & Graphic Communication

Rob Banam's research interests are, broadly speaking, history of printing & design and ephemera studies. More specifically, nineteenth century letterpress printing, type design, book design and the changing role of the designer.typographer.

Jonathan Bignell, Film, Theatre & Television

Jonathan Bignell works on television and film, with special expertise in the historiography of British television drama. This involves work on the written and audio-visual archives documenting and preserving television programmes of the past, and how these material texts can illuminate the production processes, aesthetics and cultural meanings of television. The tension between the ephemerality of television as a broadcast medium and the materiality of records of its production is one focus of his research. Jonathan is Director of the Centre for Television Drama Studies.

Roy Brigden, Keeper of the Museum of English Rural Life ( r.d.brigden@reading.ac.uk)

Rural writing flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly between the two world wars, and enjoyed a resurgence, very different in style and tone, from the 1960s. The genre includes classics in the earlier period from names such as George Sturt, A.G.Street, H.J.Massingham and Henry Williamson whilst later on come George Ewart Evans, and Ronald Blythe amongst many others. Part lyrical, part nostalgic, part polemical, this body of writing encapsulates the complex and changing relationship between a predominantly urban society and its rural roots. The Museum of English Rural Life, itself a response to great changes in the twentieth century countryside, includes a comprehensive collection of this material in its library and provides the opportunity to analyse these links in depth.

Cedric Brown, School of English and American Literature

Cedric Brown's research field is mainly that of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, spanning the cultures of manuscript and print and considering the texts in their social and political contexts and functions. In recent years he has been especially though not exclusively concerned with poetry and epistolary forms, often addresses to friends and patrons. He has also done unusual work with the social transmission of texts to provincial groups. The focussing on the transmission of texts through manuscript and print sources means that he has also worked a lot with issues of textual change and presentation. At the moment he is writing on a complex set of letters, verse letters, and other presentational material of John Donne, in a patronage situation.

Katherine Gillieson, Typography & Graphic Communication

Katherine Gillieson’s research has to do with meaning in graphic language, mainly book design and in diagrammatic representation. This includes work towards a PhD on complex layout in book design. The project is concerned with the way that illustrations, diagrams and various forms of text interact to convey ideas: the graphic language of ‘complex texts’. A case –study of commercial non-fiction books on science for older children, published in the UK, is serving as a reference point in the investigation, to examine how books design acts as a language and an artefact of culture.

Grace Ioppolo, School of English and American Literature

Grace Ioppolo’s areas of specialization are Shakespearean and early modern drama, manuscript and textual study, bibliography and the History of the Book, archival research and records. She is Director and Founder, Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project, which is digitising the single most important manuscript archive (held at Dulwich College, London) on theatre production and performance in Shakespeare's time.

Eric Kindel, Typography & Graphic Communication

Eric Kindel's research coincides with themes of the material text through work to recover a history of stencilling, particularly as associated with texts and other graphic matter. Research encompasses the technical aspects of designing and making stencil characters and disposing them into words and texts, and the various techniques and materials used for such work. The period of study spans the past five centuries. Reconstructions play an important role in addressing questions about the technical and ergonomic dimensions of stencilling, and about why stenciling was useful in some circumstances but not in others. Special emphasis is placed on the 17th- and 18th-century use of stencils for making large liturgical books, one effect of which was to allow Catholic dioceses and monastic orders in western Europe to preserve the character and content of local worship and veneration in the face of post-Tridentine liturgical standardization.

Anne Lawrence-Mathers, History

Anne Lawrence-Mathers is concerned with the medieval book – the making, copying, illuminating, binding and collecting of texts, particularly in England and Normandy c. 1000 to c. 1300. Annotations, additions and other evidence of use and reading are also of importance. Previous work has focused on the scriptoria and libraries of the networks of monastic houses which developed in Northumbria after the Norman Conquest, and on the physical properties of manuscripts as well as their textual contents, as evidence of cultural change in both the region and in monasticism over 250 years. She is Director of the Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies.

Paul Luna, Typography & Graphic Communication

Paul Luna's main area of research is the design of complex text, especially dictionaries, in both paper and electronic formats. Dictionary design involves the close mapping of typographic elements to underlying structure, and has particular requirements for effective typeface choice. Paul's interests cover both the historical development of dictionary design and the 'state of the art', especially the relationship of typographic design to production technologies.

Ronan McDonald, School of English and American Literature

Ronan McDonald Director of the Beckett International Foundation, whose archive holds the world's largest collection of manuscripts, notebooks letters and theatre ephemera by and relating to Samuel Beckett. In addition to the works of Beckett, he has research interests in Irish studies, modernism, Darwin's influence on modern culture, critical theory and the history of reading.

Alastair Philips, Film, Theatre & Television

Alastair Philips is a film historian with current research interests in French and Japanese film history as well as patterns of cross-cultural exile and emigration within Europe and between Europe and Hollywood. His understanding of the Material Text is grounded in detailed appreciation of the audio-visual and spatio-temporal qualities of films themselves, but also encompasses archival material such as production records, publicity documentation and trade and popular film journals relating to the production, promotion and reception of the film material in question.

Denise Santos, School of Languages and European Studies

Denise Santos's research deals with the investigation of educational texts in general (and textbooks in particular) and how they contribute to the development of the semiotic landscape in learning environments. Central to this exploration is the study of the interplay between verbal and non-verbal elements found in these educational texts and the discursive practices emerging in people's interaction mediated by these texts.

David Sutton, Reading University Library

David Sutton's principal research interests are literary manuscripts and literary copyright. He directs two projects which have been accorded the status of British Academy Research Projects: the Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters and Writers Artists and Their Copyright Holders (WATCH). Both projects are collaborative ventures, involving librarians and archivists around the UK. WATCH is administered as a joint project of the Universities of Reading and Texas.

Michael Twyman, Typography & Graphic Communication

Michael Twyman’s research interests lie in two main areas: the history of printing and the graphic organization of language (text and pictures). More particularly he works on:

  • lithography in all its aspects, particularly in England and France
  • chromolithography and other colour printing in Europe and the US
  • ephemera with a special emphasis on forms and information design
  • 19th century printing processes generally

Chris Wagstaff, Department of Italian Studies

Chris Wagstaff research involves Italian cinema, neorealist cinema and the aesthetics of cinema Italian Futurism, visual poetry

Sue Walker, Typography & Graphic Communication

Sue Walker's interest in the Material Text falls first in the area of design for children’s reading and information books from around 1830 to the latter part of the twentieth century. Her focus on the materiality of such texts arises from a series of studies describing and accounting for change in visual appearance and in designing typography for beginner readers. A second interest is the materiality of correspondence: substrates, writing implements and articulation of meaning through space and graphic marks.

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