Penguin Research Network

The Penguin Researchers Network is a research group, formed in 2019 by a growing scholarly community of Penguin archive users and Penguin book historians. With a strong interest in the Penguin Archive, which is held at the University of Bristol's Special Collections, the Penguin Researchers Network supports shared research initiatives and explores ways for academia to collaborate with the Penguin Collectors Society in publicising Penguin’s historical significance to the wider community. We promote Penguin-related publications, share new Penguin-archival discoveries and material, and support and encourage postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers to navigate and use the archive, which is a rich cultural and literary resource.

Founding Members

    Laura Little
    Laura Little is a Lecturer at Munster Technical University, Crawford College of Art & Design. Her research interests include avant-garde picturebooks, children’s publishing and artists' books, with a focus on design and illustration. She originally trained as an illustrator and practices as a visual artist. She is currently looking at the Picture Puffins from the 1940s in the context of modernist children’s book design in the UK.
    Hannah Lowery (in memorium)
    Hannah Lowery worked with the Penguin Archive at the University of Bristol Special Collections from November 1997–2023 as Archivist, Manager and Interim Head. She worked to make the Archives accessible for academic and student researchers, and to encourage Penguin research. She was a Trustee of the Penguin Collectors Society and a much-appreciated source of all things Penguin Books.
    Muireann Maguire
    Muireann Maguire is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. Her research interests include Gothic novels, the translation and reception of Russian literature in Western Europe, and the representation of maternal subjectivity in fiction. Besides a newly minted passion for collecting vintage Penguins, she is interested in studying the lives and professional networks of the female translators active in the first Penguin Classics series.
    Cathy McAteer
    Cathy McAteer is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter for the ERC-funded project: 'The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland and the USA'. Her main research interests are in the field of classic Russian literature in English translation, specifically Penguin's Russian Classics. Her first monograph 'Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics' (BASEES Routledge series, 2021) is available in Gold Open Access.
    Vike Martina Plock
    Vike Martina Plock is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture and Head of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on early 20th-century literature and has a particular interest in international modernism and publishing and book history. She is currently working on a new research project, investigating how the work of modernist writers and intellectuals such as Mulk Raj Anand, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf was re-published by Penguin.
    Samantha J. Rayner
    Samantha J. Rayner is Professor of Publishing and Book Cultures in the Department of Information Studies, and Vice Dean Wellbeing in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College, London. She is also the General Editor for the Cambridge University Press Elements series on Publishing and Book Culture, and a co-Director of the Bookselling Research Network. She enjoys working on the histories of Penguin Classics (especially the relationships between Penguin editors and academic editors) and on the ways Penguin fostered new writing talent, and the dissemination of ideas, to a general readership.
    Katharine Reeve
    Katharine Reeve is Senior Lecturer in Publishing, Anglia Ruskin University. She has a background in academic book commissioning and is Editor-in-Residence at UCL. Her research interests are 20th-century book and design history, and nature writing. Katharine is writing 'Puffin Picturebooks in Wartime Britain' (CUP Elements in Publishing and Book Culture). This has involved many enjoyable days in the Bristol Penguin Archive, discovering how editors, artists and writers worked together to make Puffin a pioneer of children’s publishing.
    Leah Tether
    Leah Tether is Professor of Medieval Literature and Publishing and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Bristol. With a background in trade publishing, her core interests are in medieval literature, book and library history and publishing studies. She is the author of multiple publications on these topics, including the following monographs: 'Publishing the Grail in Medieval and Renaissance France' (D.S. Brewer, 2017), 'The General Reader and the Academy: Medieval French Literature and Penguin Classics' (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and 'The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Hidden Secrets of a Medieval Fragment' (ARC Humanities Press, 2021).

Members

    Jie Deng
    Jie has a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Leicester. Her doctoral research focuses on the agents participating in the production of Chinese classics published by Penguin Classics. She teaches translation at Hubei University of Arts and Science. Her research interests include sociology of translation studies, Chinese literature in English and the translation process.
    Ben Fried
    Ben is a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. A scholar of editors and their influence over twentieth-century Anglophone literatures, he has a particular interest in the global expansion of Penguin Books to the Penguin Group, instigating and absorbing publishing enterprises across the English-writing world. He is currently embarked on a new project on ‘Migrant Editors: Postwar Migration and the Making of Anglophone Literatures, 1967–1989’.
    Paul Lickiss
    Paul is Professor of Organometallic Chemistry and a Senior Research Investigator at Imperial College London, where he specialises in silicon chemistry. A collector of Pelican and Penguin books, he writes regularly for The Penguin Collector. His Pelicans at Eighty book was published in 2017 to celebrate the 80th anniversary. Paul curated and gave an introductory lecture for the Pelican Books by Design exhibition (University of Reading, 2019). He has since written a more comprehensive and in-depth volume covering all aspects of Pelican books. More recently, Paul has turned his attention to the role of Penguin in education, in particular the Penguin Education series.
    David Trigg
    David is an independent art historian with an interest in the relationship between publishing and the visual arts. His research focuses on how the study of art book publishing might expand our understanding of twentieth-century art. He is currently researching the history of Penguin’s engagement with artists with particular reference to the Penguin Modern Painters series (1944–1959). His writing on art has been published in numerous journals and books.

Previous Events

Penguin Research Network Conference: ‘Researching Penguin: A Far From Random House’ 

(17–18 May 2023, University of Bristol)

This inaugural two-day conference brought together researchers and scholarly enthusiasts of Penguin Books to present papers across a wide range of topics focusing on the Penguin enterprise.

Papers:

Leah Tether (University of Bristol): Penguin Classics: Repackaging Medieval French Texts for the British Paperback Market, c. 1960–2000

Geraint Evans (Swansea University): Agatha Christie and the Mystery of the Vanishing Penguin

Katharine Reeve (Anglia Ruskin University): Interference?: Editorial Decision-Making and Puffin Picturebooks 1939–1960

David Trigg (Independent Researcher): Full Bleed: Ben Nicholson and The Penguin Modern Painters

Elizabeth Bobo (University of Louisiana at Lafayette): Tonson House Pocket Books: Historical Analogue for Penguin Classics

Ben Fried (IES, London): The Rise of Penguin India and the Publication of A Suitable Boy

Vike Plock (University of Exeter): ‘Penguins Must Use the Strachey Version’: Curating the Pelican Freud Library

Gillian Neale (IES, London): Pursuing the Penguin: Charting the Earliest of the British Publishing Industry’s Challenges to Penguin’s Supremacy in the Paperback Market

Muireann Maguire (University of Exeter): ‘Importing Something Alien’: The Very Visible Penguin Translators

Samantha Rayner (UCL): Penguin Books and Penguin Bookselling: A ‘Quiet Radicalism’

Penguin Collectors Society Talk

Cathy McAteer (University of Exeter): One-Hit, None-Hit Wonders: The Rise and Fall of a Penguin Russian Classics Translator

Jie Deng (Hubei University of Arts and Science): Reimagining Chinese Literature: Exploring the Book Covers of Chinese Classics