Bloomsbury Chapter conference ‘Faithful to our task’ celebrates 175 years of Macmillan publishing
An international programme has been revealed for ‘Faithful to our task’, an all-day academic conference on the global history of Macmillan publishing, part of this year’s celebrations for Macmillan’s 175th anniversary.
The conference takes place at the Senate House, University of London on Monday, 22 October 2018. It has been organised by the Bloomsbury CHAPTER (a cooperative venture between the Institute of English Studies at the University of London and the Centre for Publishing at UCL) in partnership with Palgrave Macmillan and Pan Macmillan.
Topics will range widely across Macmillan’s outputs, history, and impact: from archaeology and international publishing to innovation in education and children’s books. International speakers include Thomas Vranken (University of Melbourne), Fei-Hsien Wang (Indiana University) and Stefanie Lethbridge (Albert-Ludwig-Universität Freiburg).
At the end of the conference, the annual Stevenson Lecture will be given by the poet Don Paterson (OBE). With the title The Golden Treasury, he will reflect on Macmillan’s poetry publishing over the last 175 years, from Alfred Lord Tennyson and Francis Turner Palgrave’s seminal poetry anthology to the current Poet Laureate Dame Carol Ann Duffy and Mercury Prize nominee Kate Tempest.
Macmillan was started in 1843 with the opening of a small bookshop in London by brothers Daniel and Alexander Macmillan. In 1999, the various companies founded by the Macmillan Family – including the US publishing house St Martin’s Press – were brought together under the shared ownership of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, another independent, family-owned publisher based in Stuttgart, Germany. Springer Nature, home to Palgrave Macmillan and Macmillan Education, is now the largest academic publishing company in the world, while Pan Macmillan continues to publish fiction and non-fiction titles under imprints such as Pan Books and Picador.
The last Macmillan conference at the University of London was held in 1997 to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the British Library’s acquisition of the archive of Macmillan Publishers. The Bloomsbury CHAPTER held a symposium, The House of Macmillan, at University of Reading in 2016.
Dr Andrew Nash, Deputy Director of the IES and Reader in Book History and Communications said:
“Macmillan was one of the first truly global publishers, with a wide-ranging list, so there is a wealth of material available which continues to produce a rich vein of scholarship and contribute to our understanding of the book trade since the 19th century. This conference is certainly more international and gives attention to a broader variety of publishing markets and genres than those we have arranged before.”
The Conference Programme includes:
Macmillan and its authors – I
- Christopher Decker (University of Nevada, Las Vegas): Tennyson and Macmillan
- Simon Humphries (Linacre College Oxford): Christina Rossetti and Macmillan
Macmillan and international publishing
- Thomas Vranken (University of Melbourne): A Publishing Empire: ‘Macmillan’s Colonial Library’
- Susan L. Greenberg (University of Roehampton): The Macmillans and the Bretts: a personal angle on impersonal forces
- Caroline Davis (Oxford Brookes University): Wind of Change: Macmillan, Politics and Publishing in Nigeria, 1960-75
Macmillan and the book trade, 1843-1910
- Rachel Calder (UCL): Macmillan & Co in Cambridge 1843-58: A Provincial Publishing Start-Up
- Alexis Weedon (University of Bedfordshire): ‘Titles, print runs, and printers of Macmillan’s list 1896’
- Maria Vassilopoulos (UCL): How did the ‘Book War’ challenge the identity of the British book trade?
Macmillan and its authors – II
- William Parker (Courtauld Institute of Art): Laurence Binyon, Walter Pater, and the ‘Book Beautiful’, 1873-1913
- Alysoun Sanders (Archivist, Macmillan Publishers): Alexander Macmillan and his ‘man of stones’, Sir Archibald Geikie: a faithful author and friend
- John Cameron Hartley (Open University): ‘One of the most prolific of novelists’: Hugh Walpole at Macmillan, 1918-1941
Education and children’s books
- Lucy Pearson (Newcastle University): A quiet revolution: Macmillan Education and Radical Children’s Literature
- Sandy Brewer (Oxford Brookes University): Thinking Outside of the Book: E J S Lay and the Macmillan Classroom Pictures
- Fei-Hsien Wang (Indiana University): Macmillan in the Middle Kingdom: A Preliminary Look at the Company’s Early Business in China
Genres and markets
- Amara Thornton (UCL): Archaeology at Macmillan
- Federico Coluzzi (University of Manchester): Macmillan’s Dante(s): Popular Dantismo as a Publishing Phenomenon
- Stefanie Lethbridge (Albert-Ludwig-Universität Freiburg): Treasury-Effect? Poetry Anthologies before and after Palgrave
Listing details:
‘Faithful to our task’ Macmillan Conference
Time and date: Monday 22nd October, 9.30am-17.30pm
Venue: Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Tickets: Full Price £30.00 / Concession £25.00
Tel: 01937 546546
Email: IESEvents@sas.ac.uk
Website: https://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/faithful-to-our-task
Bloomsbury Chapter Stevenson Lecture: Don Paterson OBE, The Golden Treasury
Time and date: Monday 22 October, 18.00–20.00
Venue: Senate House, University of London, Malet St, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HU
Tickets: £10 Standard | £5 Concession
Tel: 020 7862 8683
Email: IESEvents@sas.ac.uk
Website: www.ies.sas.ac.uk/stevenson2018
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