Professor Adam Smyth

I am interested in the ways texts are composed, circulated and consumed: this means thinking about the connections between literature and the history of the book. Lots of my work focuses on literature from 16th and 17th century England, but I'm excited by writing from all periods. I have a long-term interest in life-writing (diaries, autobiographies, and other, messier 1st-person forms).

I have written four monographs:

• The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives (Bodley Head, 2024), chosen by The Economist as one of its Books of the Year for 2024, and published also in America, and in translation in South Korea, Japan, Italy, and Mexico
• Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2018), runner-up in the SHARP DeLong Book History Prize
• Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
• Profit and Delight: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640-1682 (Wayne State University Press, 2004)

I have edited or co-edited six collections:

• The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England (OUP 2023), winner of the Bainton Prize for Best Reference Work (2024)
• Book Parts, with Dennis Duncan, a collection of essays on the history of parts of a book (title-page, errata list, chapter heading, blurb, index, wrapper, running-head, etc.) (Oxford University Press 2019), and in translation in China
• A History of English Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
• ‘Renaissance Collage: Towards a New History of Reading’, a special edition of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2015), edited with Juliet Fleming and William Sherman, on knives, scissors and glue as tools of reading
• Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary (Palgrave 2014, with Gill Partington)
• A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England (Boydell and Brewer, 2004).

I am the co-editor of Routledge's book series Material Readings in Early Modern Culture: the series currently has 29 titles. With Gill Partington and Simon Morris, I am co-founder and co-editor of the creative-critical journal Inscription: the Journal of Material Text -- Theory, Practice, History (2020-). I am currently editing Pericles for Arden Shakespeare (4th series).

How can we think about books and literature in new ways? I enjoy thinking of creative ways of presenting my work, and of working. This usually involves collaboration - often with other members of the 39 Steps Press printing collective. Recent and current creative projects include 13 March 1911 (reviewed here), a collaged account of one day in history; a collaboration with Laurence Sterne's Shandy Hall, as a Knowledge Exchange Fellow, on an exhibition on writing surfaces; a collaboration with artist Nicola Dale on an immersive installation that explores the experience of the archive. You can read my weekly mini-essays on literature, art, music, archives, and material texts here.

I enjoy presenting my work both within the academy (recent international talks include Amherst, Yale, Johns Hopkins) and beyond: I write regularly for the Times Literary Supplement (for example, here) and the London Review of Books (for example, here), and have appeared on TV and radio in the UK and abroad (for example, here).