Working Group
“Publishing”

The working group addresses the genealogies and politics of publishing, from historical accounts and publishers’ narratives to contemporary perspectives on the impact of AI on the making, writing, and reading of books. We explore the entwinements between fields of knowledge and reading publics throughout the twentieth century and into the present: how publishers, together with their authors and editors, have shaped the scholarly agendas of the humanities by creating readerships for particular topics and methods of research.

Publishing is often described metaphorically as a “closed book”—inscrutable, unchangeable, and fixed. Instead, we argue that understanding how publishing has been transformed by the ongoing consolidation of the industry—conglomeration—can help us to imagine new futures for scholarly writing, reading, learning, and knowledge production. Those futures depend on partnerships committed not merely to disseminating knowledge, but to supporting its creation.

The working group regularly invites guests to share their research in internal sessions discussing pre-circulated papers. Past guests include Dilek Arslanlar, Fernanda Beigel, Meta Cramer, Annette Gilbert, Michael Hagner, Ina Heumann, Katharina Knorr, Laetitia Lenel, Cori Antonia Mackrodt, Christian Mathieu, Morten Paul, Rabea Rittgerodt-Burke, and Magdalena Schrefel.