During ten years of working on the Women’s Print History Project , we have thought seriously and often about “women’s book history.” What is it, and how do we define it in relation to the WPHP? As women working on the history of women’s book history, what does it feel like, and what do we have to offer? What ground has women’s book history trodden — and where is it going? And how can we contribute to a sustainable future for the field? As relatively new contributors to it, Kate and Kandice were ...
Aug 13, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Season 5Ep. 5
On the WPHP, our encounters with books and the women who worked on them are bibliographically-focused, as they must be for a project of this scale—focused attention on the contents of every work and the stories of their producers simply isn’t possible. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to engage with the works that closely—the opposite is true, in fact!—and for Episode 4 of Season 5 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “A Newcastle Novelist”, we were delighted to interview Dr. Tricia Monsour from the ...
Feb 19, 2025•47 min•Season 5Ep. 4
For Episode 3 of the fifth season of The WPHP Monthly Mercury , “Bibliographic Intimacies,” Kate and Kandice interviewed Megan Peiser and Emily Spunaugle about their work on the Marguerite Hicks Collection in the Kresge Library at Oakland University, a collection of women’s books collected by a queer, disabled woman. Their deep, immersive work on this collection highlights the physical, intellectual, and emotional intimacies that arise from bibliographic research. From the practicalities of rare...
Dec 11, 2024•1 hr 29 min•Season 5Ep. 2
Every year, come hell or high water, The WPHP Monthly Mercury has released a gothic-inflected Halloween episode—and this year, we’re literally taking a trip to hell with Charlotte Dacre’s 1806 novel Zofloya; or, The Moor . To talk about this demonic, orientalist bloodbath, Kandice sat down with WPHP collaborator Kate Ozment, and they found themselves hurled into the abyss of trying to untangle the plot of this most bonkers of bonkers novels. Happy Halloween!...
Oct 30, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 5Ep. 2
Authority records, authority figures, authoritative scholarship... What does it really mean to have authority? Nothing good, according to Kandice. However, in working on a new project that relies on bibliographic data from the WPHP, she has had to confront her authority issues. (Meanwhile, Kate is still reeling from the discovery that 'WorldCat' is short for 'World Catalogue' and has nothing to do with felines. On this podcast, we have spent a lot—a lot— of time talking about our sources, and es...
Oct 16, 2024•53 min•Season 5Ep. 1
One of the fields we include in our records for publishing, printing, and bookselling businesses in the WPHP—our firm records—is for the addresses where they operated. Sometimes this is straightforward: one individual working at one location for the duration of their career. Other times, however, it is decidedly less so. There are booksellers running multiple shops at the same time, printers moving locations every year or two for fifteen years, publishers working with various combinations of par...
Feb 21, 2024•41 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Do you believe in ghosts? In this spirited (ha ha) Halloween episode, Kandice and Kate encounter a ghost of their very own in circulating library owner and author Mary Tuck ’s Durston Castle; or, The Ghost of Eleonora (1804). Every year, in anticipation of October, we scour the WPHP for suitably spooky titles—previous Halloween episodes have featured badly behaved monks, rogue banditti, haunted castles, lost (and found!) parents, and pages upon pages of moralizing in the mountains (we’re looking...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Season 4Ep. 2
In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? One a...
Oct 20, 2023•30 min•Season 4Ep. 1
In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? One a...
Oct 13, 2023•26 min
In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? One a...
Oct 06, 2023•46 min•Season 4Ep. 1
In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? One a...
Sep 29, 2023•26 min•Season 4Ep. 1
In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? One a...
Sep 22, 2023•23 min•Season 4Ep. 1
In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Organized by Dr. Andrew McInnes and his incredible team of research assistants, “New Romanticisms” was a four-day Romanticist extravaganza with five plenaries, more than one hundred panels, the stunning environs of Edge Hill University, an ingenious coffee cart...
Aug 16, 2023•1 hr 54 min•Season 4Ep. 1
What do the medieval period and the Romantic period have in common? Well, at the very least, badly behaved monks. In Episode 4 of Season 3 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury , hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren team up with David Coley and Matt Hussey and their podcast, The Canterbury Fails , for our first-ever crossover episode. This is, in the words of our friends at The Canterbury Fails , "A late medieval music theory complaint and literally the best most bonkers depraved monk freak show mock-go...
Oct 28, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 3Ep. 4
This August, the WPHP has been sharing the Spotlights that make up our newest Spotlight Series, “Down the Rabbit Hole: Researching Women in the Book Trades.” Over the course of the month, posts from Research Assistants Sara Penn, Julianna Wagar, Amanda Law, and, as of this coming Friday with the last post of the Series, Belle Eist, have focused on women who worked in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century book trades. In this month’s episode, “Working for the (Wo)man”, you’ll hear from our Resea...
Aug 31, 2022•38 min•Season 3Ep. 3
If you’ve ever taken an undergraduate English class on the Romantic period, you have probably encountered Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman . A widely read and controversial writer of political treatises, fiction, travel writing, and other works during her lifetime, she has been variously vilified and mythologized since her death in 1797, and has long been a staple in the literary canon. But can we ever really know Wollstonecraft? In the newest episode of The WPHP...
Aug 03, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Season 3Ep. 2
Our inaugural episodes of each season have thus far begun with beloved canonical authors: Jane Austen in Season One, Frances Burney in Season Two. This season, we’ve turned to an anonymous author—one whose identity is still a mystery. In 1808, The Woman of Colour was published, with its byline simply reading “By the author of "Light and Shade," "The Aunt and the Niece," "Ebersfield Abby", &c.” Those titles link to more titles, which link to more titles, which link to—! In this first episode ...
Jun 29, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 3Ep. 1
As we prepare to launch Season 3 of the The WPHP Monthly Mercury later this week, project director Michelle Levy takes a look back at Season 2. Putting it into conversation with Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein's Data Feminism (2020) and Katherine Bode's A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018), Michelle thinks about the work our podcast has engaged in over the last year .
Jun 27, 2022•37 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Throughout the month of March, the WPHP has been posting Spotlights about women philosophers in print in the WPHP as part of our Women & Philosophy Spotlight Series to celebrate Women’s History Month. Contributors to the series include research assistants Angela Wachowich, Belle Eist, Isabelle Burrows, Tammy T., and project director Michelle Levy, who wrote about the anonymous ‘Sophia, a Person of Quality,’ Margaret Cavendish, Harriet Martineau, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Ann Williams. Findi...
Mar 30, 2022•59 min•Season 2Ep. 10
In July 2020, project lead Michelle Levy and lead editor Kandice Sharren attended a virtual workshop hosted by Amy Tims at the American Antiquarian Society titled “Searching the AAS Catalog: Keyword & Browse.” This workshop introduced them to the many specific and useful headings of the American Antiquarian Society catalog, including some that we were particularly excited for given that we see them in resources so rarely: “women as authors” and “women as publishers and printers.” In November...
Feb 16, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Season 2Ep. 9
In 1803, Mary Hays published the six-volume work Female Biography, a substantial work of scholarship that relied on more than one hundred sources to write biographies about more than 300 hundred women. But how did Hays, a Dissenting writer of moderate means, access all of those books? To find out, we invited Dr. Timothy Whelan to talk all things Mary Hays, but especially her literary environs, which included relationships with Dissenting booksellers, connections with the Godwin circle, a number ...
Jan 19, 2022•1 hr 25 min•Season 2Ep. 8
In Episode 7 of Season 2 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury , “The Business of Gossip,” hosts Kate and Kandice follow the highly successful Henry Colburn, leading publisher of fiction in the early nineteenth century, across his three main business addresses in London—and in so doing, explore how the publisher prompted, encouraged, and engaged with gossip. The subject of much gossip himself, Colburn’s origins are unknown (although rumoured to be noble), his less-savoury business practices are disparaged...
Dec 15, 2021•32 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Why hasn’t the third edition of Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife been digitized? Why doesn’t GoogleBooks group the different volumes of multi-volume works together in a single catalogue record? And, what do authors and pandas have in common? We bemoan the limitations of our various sources on a monthly basis, but this month we’re digging into why they exist in the first place—especially why digitization can be so uneven. In Episode 6 of Season 2 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury , “The Ecolog...
Nov 17, 2021•1 hr 24 min
In last October's episode, “ Of Monks and Mountains!!! ” Kate and Kandice each read a gothic novel found in the WPHP, and it was so much fun that we simply had to do it again. For Season 2, Episode 5, “The Witching Hour”, we read books about witches — almost every book that mentions witches in the title in the WPHP, in fact! (There are only five.) But within that small sample, we found a full spectrum of representations of witches and witchcraft, from the fantastical (and silly) woodland witches...
Oct 20, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 2Ep. 5
In 1794, Ann Lemoine ’s husband, Henry , who was an author and publisher, went to debtor’s prison—this led to their separation, and the following year, Ann Lemoine began her own publishing business in White Rose Court in London. Between 1795 and the early 1820s, it is estimated that Ann Lemoine published, printed, and sold more than 400 titles, and explored new and inventive ways of packaging and reselling the cheap print she was known for publishing: chapbooks. In this episode, hosts Kate and K...
Sep 15, 2021•51 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Throughout the month of August, we’ve been sharing Spotlights on the WPHP site as part of the “Around the World with Six Women” Spotlight Series on travel writing. In this month’s episode, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren are joined by the authors of the Spotlight Series, who share what they have learned during their vicarious journeys through France, Italy, Germany, India, Chile, Rome, China, the Red Sea, and the Scottish Highlands. Along the route we touch on the stakes of travel writing...
Aug 18, 2021•47 min•Season 2Ep. 3
In 2016, Dr. Kirstyn Leuner shared data from her project, The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing , with the WPHP — in particular, the Virtual International Authority Files she and her team had attached to their person records. This month, she joins us to chat all things Stainforth, databases, and cataloguing, including the kinds of data her team has been working with and collecting, the project decisions that have had to be made along the way, the hidden and not-so-hidden gems the Stainforth ...
Jul 21, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Welcome back! In the first episode of Season 2 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury , hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren delve into the publication history of Frances Burney’s first two (and most popular) novels, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782). Although both were regularly reprinted well into the nineteenth century, we recently realised that the WPHP was missing the post-1800 editions of these works (although it did already hold all of the editions of her two far less popular novels, Camilla (1796...
Jun 16, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 2Ep. 1
As we get ready to launch the second season later this week, WPHP Primary Investigator Michelle Levy reviews some of the highlights from our first season.
Jun 14, 2021•26 min•Season 1Ep. 10
In the final episode of Season One of The WPHP Monthly Mercury , hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren celebrate Women’s History Month by interviewing Dr. Kate Ozment about the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writer, Delarivier Manley. Famous for her scandalous semi-autobiographical ‘secret histories,’ which satirized important Whigs in Queen Anne’s courts, Manley inspires us to consider the relationship between eighteenth-century women and history, and how they—and we!—capture, ...
Mar 17, 2021•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 10
