Wolff Lecture
“Moving Types: Irishness, Migration, and Machine Learning in Digital Periodical Studies”
Katherine Bode
Australian National University
Katherine Bode is a professor of literary and textual studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. Her research uses computational methods to explore literary phenomena and literary methods to explore computational phenomena in books, including Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (2012) and A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018). She is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Computing Writing: Why Literary Studies Matters and How It Can Continue to Count in the Digital Age, for which early versions of some chapters have been published in Critical Inquiry and New Literary History.
Colby Conversation
“Authority, Politics, and the Nineteenth Century Press: New Directions”
Andrew Lewis & Teja Varma Pusapati
In conversation with Caroline Sumpter
The Colby Book Prize of 2025 was awarded jointly to Andrew Lewis (British West Indian Newspapers and the Abolition of Slavery) and Teja Varma Pusapati (Model Women of the Press: Gender, Politics and Women’s Professional Journalism, 1850-1880). In this keynote conversation, they will discuss key aspects of their books and the ways their interdisciplinary work raises important questions about authority and politics in periodical studies, academia, and beyond.
Andrew Lewis
Independent Scholar
Dr. Andrew Lewis studied for his Ph.D. under the late Professor Glyn Williams at Queen Mary University of London between 1990 and 1994. Since then, he has worked for the Historical Manuscripts Commission, as a probate genealogist, and in the Higher Education Library sector. He currently works as a freelance historical researcher and also part-time as an archivist at Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives in East London. His research interests are mainly focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social and political history, with a particular emphasis on the newspaper industry. He is currently working on a biographical dictionary of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West Indian newspaper proprietors, editors, journalists, and printers. British West Indian Newspapers and the Abolition of Slavery is his first major publication.
Teja Varma Pusapati
Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Dehli
Dr. Teja Varma Pusapati is Associate Professor of English at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi NCR. Her first monograph Model Women of the Press: Gender, Politics and Women’s Professional Journalism, 1850–1880 (Routledge) was published in 2024. Teja has held a TORCH Women in the Humanities writing fellowship at the University of Oxford, an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship at the Huntington Library in California, and a Curran Fellowship, awarded by RSVP. She has also served on the Board of RSVP. Her articles have appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review, Women’s Writing, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. She has contributed book chapters to Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain 1830s-1900 and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism. A chapter on translations in the Victorian feminist press is forthcoming in the Edinburgh History of the Radical Press, 1780-1914.
Teja is currently developing a new project on media and the environment in the long nineteenth-century. One strand of this new work, ‘Encountering Nature in the 19th Century’, a collaborative project with Dr. Tara Puri at Bristol University, has been granted a 2025-2026 Research Development International Collaborative Award by the University of Bristol, UK.
Caroline Sumpter
Queen’s University, Belfast
Dr. Caroline Sumpter is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her specialisms include the nineteenth-century press and the history of reading, the history of science, and fantasy fiction. Her monograph, The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale, won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award and was shortlisted for the Esse First Book Award and the Katherine Briggs Award. She has published in the journals Nineteenth-Century Literature, ELH, Victorian Studies and 19. Her latest book project focuses on relationships between evolution, ethics, and democracy in the late nineteenth-century press and fiction.