This panel features members of the newly established University of Sussex “Print Group,” a collective of researchers, print practitioners, and artists working on histories, processes, and artefacts of print. Covering a range of historical periods, we will share our favourite stories of queer printmaking and bookmaking and think collectively about how LGBTQ+ people have relied on printed books, pamphlets, maps and more, to build community and fight for liberation. Print has been a technology for making queer pleasures public, and we will discuss the joys and risks that have come with that.
Featuring five members of University of Sussex faculty – Sam Solomon, Bethan Stevens, Helen Tyson, Francesco Ventrella and Hope Wolf.
Dr Samuel Solomon is Senior Lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Sussex and co-director of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence. Sam is a poet and translator, and is author of Special Subcommittee (Commune Editions, 2017) and co-translator from the Yiddish of The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin (Tebot Bach, 2014) alongside other academic and creative publications. He is currently at work on a literary labour history of queer typesetting and a second collection of poems.
Bethan Stevens is a Reader in English and Art Writing, working on word-image culture in the long 19th century. Her current creative-critical project, Uncaring, investigates illustrated fiction in Victorian magazines. Bethan led the AHRC-funded Dalziel Project, culminating in a monograph (The Wood Engravers’ Self-Portrait) and exhibition at the British Museum (‘The Woodpecking Factory’). She publishes widely on prints and book illustration, including their environmental impacts, and is writing a collaged graphic novel queering print archives.
Dr Helen Tyson is a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century British Literature at the University of Sussex, where she is also Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies. Helen teaches and writes about Virginia Woolf, modernism and psychoanalysis. Helen’s first book, Reading Modernism’s Readers: Virginia Woolf, Psychoanalysis and the Bestseller has just been published by Edinburgh University Press. She is co-editor of the Gradiva award-winning collection of essays Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (Routledge, 2021) and is a co-organiser of the International Virginia Woolf Conference which will take place at the University of Sussex in 2025.
Dr Francesco Ventrella is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex. Francesco’s research looks at the relationship between art writing, embodiment and the politics of affect. He has edited a special issue of parallax on ‘Enthusiasm’ (2011), and with Giovanna Zapperi he has edited the volume Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi (Bloomsbury, 2020). In 2018 he also co-curated the exhibition ‘What Section 28 Did to Me’ at the University of Sussex.
Dr Hope Wolf is a Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sussex where she is also Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies. She works on the relationship between art, place and politics. Her book Sussex Modernism will be published by Yale University Press in Spring 2025. She has also curated exhibitions, most recently A Tale of Mother’s Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff, and the Birth of Psychorealism which toured between the De La Warr Pavilion, Camden Arts Centre and Nelwyn Art Gallery and the Exchange.
