Print Group

The Print Group at Sussex is a collective of researchers, print practitioners, and makers working on the histories, processes and artefacts of print.

About the Print Group

Through our scholarship, creativity, and practice, we investigate a range of areas:

  • print media
  • printing history
  • publishing cultures
  • the social, cultural, and labour histories of the book, periodical and print trades
  • material texts
  • technologies of replication and reproduction
  • creative industries.

We undertake collaborative research, organising workshops, masterclasses and talks in relation to these topics, ranging from theoretical and historical investigations, to experiments with the manual skills of printing. The University of Sussex houses and runs a tabletop Albion Press from the 1840s and a small collection of type, cutting tools and printing blocks. We are committed to working with students, visitors and researchers to share and preserve knowledge of printing techniques through historical research and contemporary practice. Our press is used by students and staff to produce original small-press publications.

The Print Group works closely with printers and printmakers, booksellers, museums and archives, both internationally and in the local Sussex area. Group members have collaborated with many external institutions, including:

  • the Stationers’ Company
  • the British Library
  • the Centre for Printing History and Culture
  • the Virtual Museum of Printing
  • the National Printing Heritage Committee
  • the Printing Historical Society
  • the British Museum
  • the Victoria and Albert Museum
  • the Society of Wood Engravers.

We also work with the University of Sussex's own archival and rare book collections at The Keep.

  • Members

    Kat Addis is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow interested in the mechanics of Elizabethan printing and the Elizabethan view of mechanics, the woodcuts in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender (1579), cool printing vocabulary ('chase' and 'form' and 'quoin' etc), and printing as part of a writing process, rather than as its consequence.

    George Clutterbuck is a PhD student whose research looks at aesthetics of disaffection in the work of Laura (Riding) Jackson, Eva Frankfurther and Anna Mendelssohn, and examines the role of biographical research in scholarship about women's artistry. Her research is particularly concerned with Laura (Riding) Jackson's interest in the relationship between the visual and poetic arts, and her contribution to modernist print culture during the inter-war years.

    John Doyle is a Senior Lecturer in Digital and Multimedia Journalism in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities. His research explores creative non-fiction, journalism and archival documentary practices. A strand of his current research and scholarship is focused on analogue media practices and associated forms of printed media.

    Hannah Field is a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature and works on Victorian popular print, especially children's picturebooks and illustrated ephemera. My monograph Playing with the Book was partly about how changing technologies of the book affect the narratives offered to young readers in the nineteenth century. Current research is about copyright libraries and what they reject: a reverse image of the literary canon that includes everything from canonical novels to sheet music, children's evangelical tracts, political pamphlets, and labels.

    Charlie Jeffries is Lecturer in American and Media Studies. Her research focuses on the history of sexuality and of social movements in the United States, and includes work on youth and college-based feminist and queer zine cultures. She is currently working towards a book on the history of the American lesbian magazine Girlfriends (1993-2006).

    Margaretta Jolly is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities and directs the University's Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research.  She is Principal Investigator for The Business of Women’s Words: Purpose and Profit in Feminist Publishing, partnered with The British Library and funded by The Leverhulme Trust. She is interested in how small businesses with social justice values and purposes have evolved and been sustained over time and the role of book and magazine creation, trading and sharing in women’s movements. She has written on Virago and The Body Shop, publisher memoirs, philanthropy, and the long history of Women: A Cultural Review.

    Sam Ladkin is a Senior Lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing and works on post-45 North American and British poetry and the arts. His interests include the circulation of  small press poetry (including the so-called mimeo revolution) as well as artists' books and prints. He has experience co-editing and publishing small press poetry and poetics, mostly recently both are worse: poetry & poetics with colleagues at Sussex.

    Sam Solomon is a Senior Lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing. His academic interests are broadly in twentieth century and contemporary literature (poetry and cross-genre writing especially) as it relates to radical social movements. Recently, he has published and spoken on the queer and feminist histories of printing and typesetting labour during periods of technological change, including articles on writer-typesetter-activists Karen Brodine, Leslie Feinberg, and his own family history in American radical printing.

    Rachel Stenner is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature 1350-1660 and works on the history of the book and print trades. She is particularly interested in the life-writing of print trade personnel, regional printing, and the role of women in the historic trades. She is the Chair of the National Printing Heritage Committe, and the editor of Publishing History journal.

    Bethan Stevens is a Reader in English and Art Writing, interested in word-image culture and print history in the long 19th century and in contemporary practice. Her current creative-critical project, Uncaring, investigates illustrated fiction in Victorian magazines. Recent work includes the AHRC-funded Dalziel Project, which culminated in a monograph (The Wood Engravers’ Self-Portrait) and an exhibition at the British Museum. She has also worked on the environmental impacts of book illustration. Interests include William Blake; Jemima Blackburn; museum collaborations.

    Hope Wolf is a Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sussex and co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies. She has interests in modernist printing, in both the visual and literary arts. Her wider research tends to focus on the relationship between art, place and politics, and her work on regional dissidence has uncovered some fascinating examples of amateur as well as more professional print-making.

If you would like to know more about our current activities or discuss a potential project you can email: