9 June 2022. Please note that all times are BST. To register please click here.

10.00 – 10.30 Welcome & Introductory Presentation

• George Cooper (University College London) — Locating the Boundaries of Censorship and Suppression: An Introduction to ‘CHAPTER Conference 2022: Books in the Closet’

10.30 – 11.30 Panel 1 | The Queer Closet: Publishers, Readers & the Marketplace [Chair: Dr Andrew Nash]

• Christopher Adams (Institute of English Studies, SAS) – ‘Conditioned somewhat by what we can sell’: Marketing the Homosexual Novel in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain

• Upasana Banerjee (Independent Scholar) – Publishers as Activists: Tracing the Metamorphic Evolution of Queer Literature Market in India

11.30 – 13.00 Lunch Break

13.00 – 14.00 Panel 2 | Closets & Censorship from the 18th Century to the Victorian Era [Chair: Dr Daniel Boswell]  

• JP Ascher (University of Virginia) – The Other Licenses for Printing after the Restoration

• Rachel Calder (University College London) – Joseph Whitaker: ‘Mechanic’ to the Victorian Book Trade

14.00 – 14.15 Break

14.15 – 15.15 Panel 3 | 20th Century Considerations [Chair: Christopher Adams]

• Thomas Cryer (University College London) – ‘This Textbook Fad’: Black Power, the Paperback Revolution, and the 1960s Reinvention of John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom

• Simone Sannio (Freie Universität Berlin) – The Novel as a Coherent Hole: Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and the Art of Self-Censorship

15.15 – 15.30 Break

15.30 – 17.00 Panel 4 | The Closet in Contemporary & YA Publishing [Chair: George Cooper]

• Sonali Misra (University of Stirling) – Cartelisation of English-language Trade Book Publishing

• Amirah Mohiddin (University of Leicester) – ‘In demand by fools and lowly ignoramuses’: Arabic Epics and Young Adult Fiction

• Katharine Smales (University College London) – The Cats and Pyjamas: Using Digital Ethnographic Methods and Semi-structured Interviews to Surface the Voices of Young Children on their Shared Digital Reading Practices at Home

There will be a keynote lecture from Professor Samantha J. Rayner, Director of the Centre for Publishing, University College London, which will be held online and in-person on June 9th 2022, 18.30 BST, Roberts Building, G06, University College London.

Hidden in the bookshelves: Una Dillon and the ‘formidable’ women booksellers of London, 1930s-1960s.

This lecture will look at the contribution Una Dillon and her contemporary women booksellers made to the British book trade in the 1930s-1960s.  It will explore how bookselling developed during this period, and highlight some of the histories which, as in Una Dillon’s case, are now literally hidden behind the bookshelves of the bookshop she created.

If you would like to attend the keynote, please register here. (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/una-dillon-and-the-formidable-women-booksellers-of-london-1930s-1960s-tickets-289409861687)

Please note that this is separate from the main conference registration.