This is the sixth annual F. T. Prince Memorial Lecture. These lectures are given every year in honour of the poet and scholar F. T. Prince, who was one of Southampton’s first English professors. Invited speakers explore new directions in literary studies, drawing on the English department’s wide range of intellectual interests.

Previous speakers have included Daljit Nagra, Christopher Ricks, Simon Gikandi and Isobel Armstrong.

Dr Sydney Shep – ‘Poetry on/off the page: letterpress and its discontents’

The expressive potential and readerly impact of typography is nowhere more evident than in the design, setting, and printing of poetry. This illustrated talk traverses the worlds of historic and contemporary letterpress printing from seventeenth-century shape poems to twenty-first-century kinetic experiments. In the process, it exposes the grid-bound challenges and capacious opportunities of this newly rediscovered artform.

Dr Sydney J. Shep is Reader in Book History and The Printer, Wai-te-ata Press, Victoria University of Wellington. New Zealand. Her practice-based research involves the interdisciplinary study of transnational and cross-cultural book history and print culture, in the contexts of the history of empire, history of technology, and the history of reading. Topics of perennial interest include graffiti, ghostsigns, generative art, and the digital handmade. Sydney is currently a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton, exploring the traces of the town’s bustling nineteenth-century book trades, now ripe for digital storytelling.

This lecture will be chaired by Professor Mary Hammond, Chair of English and Book History at the University of Southampton.

RSVP

Please note this is a free event however we request you book a place if you wish to attend. Bookings will close at 13:00 on 12 October 2018.