SHARP 2023 is delighted to feature the following keynote speakers.
Dr Laura Dietz, Anglia Ruskin University
‘They are books to me’ (until they aren’t): Reader experiences of the realness of electronic books.
Laura Dietz is Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Publishing Studies at Anglia Ruskin University. She studies production and circulation of fiction in the digital era, with particular focus on how pre-digital practices and traditions are preserved or transformed. Topics of recent chapters and papers include how Amazon incentives shape novels in the 21st century, the pandemic bookshelf as a mirror for self-image and personal identity, and the history of the digital short story. She’s currently completing a monograph on the bookness of digital books and starting one on novelists’ changing definitions of authorship.
Dr Kanupriya Dhingra, O.P. Jindal Global University
The Death of a Book Bazaar: Past, Present, and an Undefined Future
Dr Kanupriya Dhingra researches the History of the Book and Print Cultures, focusing on Delhi (India), from an ethnographic perspective. She is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean at O.P. Jindal Global University. She earned her doctorate under the Felix Scholarship Fund from SOAS, University of London in 2021, on her dissertation titled “Daryaganj’s Parallel Book History”, which she is currently revising into a monograph. Her doctoral research is based on oral interviews and rhythmanalysis conducted in Old Delhi. Supported by the SOAS Fieldwork Grant, Kanupriya interviewed more than 200 booksellers and several shauqeen book buyers of Daryaganj.
Dr Nancy Linthicum, University of South Carolina
Authors and Readers Online: Reading Egyptian Novels on Goodreads
Nancy Linthicum is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her research spans book history, sociology of literature, and literary criticism and focuses on modern Arabic literature and literary culture. She is working on a monograph tentatively titled Literary Networks: Egypt’s Nineties Generation on the Page and in the Market, an expansion of her dissertation that won the 2019 Middle East Studies Association’s Kerr Dissertation Award (Humanities). In it, she incorporates archival research, interviews, and textual analysis to investigate how key publishers, journals, and prizes influenced the production, circulation, and reception of this literary group.
Ann Steiner, Uppsala University, Sweden
The Publisher as Entrepreneur, Innovator, and Cultural Icon – Colliding Ideals in Contemporary Publishing
Steiner is Associate Professor in Sociology of Literature, Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research focuses on 20th– and 21st-century book markets, reading cultures, and digital publishing. At the moment, her research centres on digital developments, audiobooks, and children’s digital publishing. English-language publications include Hype. Bestsellers and Literary Culture (2014) and more recent articles such as “Talking about Audio” (2023), ”World Literature and the Book Market” (2022), “Hybrid Books. Merged Audiovisual Literature for Children” (2022),and ”Is Backlist the New Frontlist? Large-scale Data Analysis of Bestseller Book Consumption in Streaming Services” (2021).
Whitney Trettien, University of Pennsylvania
The First Digital Book, Published 1886
Whitney Trettien is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania working in the fields of book history, media studies, and digital humanities. Her first book, Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), explores the history of publishing with scissors and paste across the seventeenth century. She is currently researching and writing about nineteenth-century histories of code and computing. She is also working on a collaborative digital project, Printing in Prisons, on magazines published by incarcerated printers, writers, and editors from the 1890s through the present.
