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 physical 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, from Margery Kempe to Karl Ove Knausgård), Shakespeare (I'm editing Pericles for Arden Shakespeare), and the circulation of poetry. I am also very interested in thinking about creative, or non-traditional ways of undertaking and presenting research (some examples below).

I have written four monographs:

• The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives (Bodley Head, 2024; paperback 2025), chosen by The Economist as a Book of the Year for 2024, and by the Financial Times as a Book of Summer 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 cutting as a form 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).

Other, current projects:

• I am editing Pericles for Arden Shakespeare (4th series).
• I am co-editing Extra Extra!: the Material History of the Visually Altered Book, a collection of essays on extra-illustration (broadly, the practice of addings things to books after they are published), with Julie Park, to be published by Penn State Press
• 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-). 5 annuals editions published, featuring work by academics, artists, poets and fiction writers working around a central theme (volume 1: beginnings; 2: holes; 3: folds; 4: touch; 5: containers; 6, forthcoming: cuts / tears).
• I am the co-editor, with James Daybell, of Routledge's book series Material Readings in Early Modern Culture: the series currently has published 30 titles.

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 a film about Rousseau and self-speaking (here); a collaged account of one day in history, 13 March 1911 (reviewed here); 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 fortnightly 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, Austin, 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 and here and here and here).