Doctoral Studentship on European Research Council Project 'Promiscuous Print: Legal Deposit Libraries, Rejected Texts, and New Methods for Negative Bibliography' (PromPrint)

The Faculty of Media, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Sussex seeks to appoint a postgraduate research student to the European Research Council (ERC)-funded project 'Promiscuous Print: Legal Deposit Libraries, Rejected Texts, and New Methods for Negative Bibliography' (PromPrint). This ERC project is hosted by the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab and led by Principal Investigator Dr Hannah Field. The project uses digital tools and quantitative analyses to uncover the rejects of legal deposit: the printed texts excluded from the ostensibly universal archive promised by copyright libraries. Taking a case study approach oriented around UK copyright libraries between 1836 and 1914, the project asks questions including: which textual forms and genres do deposit libraries reject? How and why does this change over time? The PhD project will focus on the relationship between obscenity and deposit in nineteenth-century Britain. Key research questions include how deposit libraries preserved or suppressed obscene texts, the relationship between deposit and individual library protocols for controversial books, how deposit and copyright contributed to defining obscenity, and how data on rejected books can contest or revise existing histories of gender, sexuality, medicine, and publishing.