The WPHP Monthly Mercury

Episodet

• Finding, Building, Sustaining, Supporting, feat. Isobel Grundy, Leslie Howsam, and Maureen Bell 13.08.2025 1h 1min

  During ten years of working on the Women’s Print History Project, we have thought seriously and often about “women’s book history.” What is it, and how do we define it in relation to the WPHP? As women working on the history of women’s book history, what does it feel like, and what do we have to offer? What ground has women’s book history trodden — and where is it going? And how can we contribute to a sustainable future for the field? As relatively new contributors to it, Kate and Kandice wer...
• A Newcastle Novelist, feat. Tricia Monsour 19.02.2025 47min

  On the WPHP, our encounters with books and the women who worked on them are bibliographically-focused, as they must be for a project of this scale—focused attention on the contents of every work and the stories of their producers simply isn’t possible. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to engage with the works that closely—the opposite is true, in fact!—and for Episode 4 of Season 5 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “A Newcastle Novelist”, we were delighted to interview Dr. Tricia Monsour from t...
• Bibliographic Intimacies, feat. Megan Peiser and Emily D. Spunaugle 11.12.2024 1h 28min

  For Episode 3 of the fifth season of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “Bibliographic Intimacies,” Kate and Kandice interviewed Megan Peiser and Emily Spunaugle about their work on the Marguerite Hicks Collection in the Kresge Library at Oakland University, a collection of women’s books collected by a queer, disabled woman. Their deep, immersive work on this collection highlights the physical, intellectual, and emotional intimacies that arise from bibliographic research. From the practicalities...
• Deal with the Devil (feat. Kate Ozment) 30.10.2024 1h 5min

  Every year, come hell or high water, The WPHP Monthly Mercury has released a gothic-inflected Halloween episode—and this year, we’re literally taking a trip to hell with Charlotte Dacre’s 1806 novel Zofloya; or, The Moor. To talk about this demonic, orientalist bloodbath, Kandice sat down with WPHP collaborator Kate Ozment, and they found themselves hurled into the abyss of trying to untangle the plot of this most bonkers of bonkers novels. Happy Halloween!
• Authority Issues 16.10.2024 53min

  Authority records, authority figures, authoritative scholarship... What does it really mean to have authority? Nothing good, according to Kandice. However, in working on a new project that relies on bibliographic data from the WPHP, she has had to confront her authority issues. (Meanwhile, Kate is still reeling from the discovery that 'WorldCat' is short for 'World Catalogue' and has nothing to do with felines. On this podcast, we have spent a lot—a lot—of time talking about our s...
• Address-ing Firms; or, The Consequences of Our Own Actions 21.02.2024 40min

  One of the fields we include in our records for publishing, printing, and bookselling businesses in the WPHP—our firm records—is for the addresses where they operated. Sometimes this is straightforward: one individual working at one location for the duration of their career. Other times, however, it is decidedly less so. There are booksellers running multiple shops at the same time, printers moving locations every year or two for fifteen years, publishers working with various combinations of ...
• Ghosts of Print Culture Past 31.10.2023 1h 19min

  Do you believe in ghosts? In this spirited (ha ha) Halloween episode, Kandice and Kate encounter a ghost of their very own in circulating library owner and author Mary Tuck’s Durston Castle; or, The Ghost of Eleonora (1804). Every year, in anticipation of October, we scour the WPHP for suitably spooky titles—previous Halloween episodes have featured badly behaved monks, rogue banditti, haunted castles, lost (and found!) parents, and pages upon pages of moralizing in the mountains (we’re looki...
• New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 5: Kirsteen McCue 20.10.2023 29min

  In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? On...
• New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 4: Manu Samriti Chander 13.10.2023 26min

  In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? On...
• New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 3: Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes 06.10.2023 45min

  In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? On...
• New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 2: Noah Heringman 29.09.2023 25min

  In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? On...
• New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 1: Jennie Batchelor 22.09.2023 22min

  In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like? On...
• It's (A)Live!' The WPHP Monthly Mercury at New Romanticisms 16.08.2023 1h 54min

  In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Organized by Dr. Andrew McInnes and his incredible team of research assistants, “New Romanticisms” was a four-day Romanticist extravaganza with five plenaries, more than one hundred panels, the stunning environs of Edge Hill University, an ingenious coffee c...
• The Canterbury Fails x The WPHP Monthly Mercury: MONKS!!! 28.10.2022 1h 7min

  What do the medieval period and the Romantic period have in common? Well, at the very least, badly behaved monks. In Episode 4 of Season 3 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren team up with David Coley and Matt Hussey and their podcast, The Canterbury Fails, for our first-ever crossover episode. This is, in the words of our friends at The Canterbury Fails, "A late medieval music theory complaint and literally the best most bonkers depraved monk freak show m...
• Working for the (Wo)man ft. Sara Penn, Julianna Wagar, Amanda Law, & Belle Eist 31.08.2022 37min

  This August, the WPHP has been sharing the Spotlights that make up our newest Spotlight Series, “Down the Rabbit Hole: Researching Women in the Book Trades.” Over the course of the month, posts from Research Assistants Sara Penn, Julianna Wagar, Amanda Law, and, as of this coming Friday with the last post of the Series, Belle Eist, have focused on women who worked in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century book trades. In this month’s episode, “Working for the (Wo)man”, you’ll hear from ...
• Wollstonecraft, Revisited (feat. E.J. Clery) 03.08.2022 1h 17min

  If you’ve ever taken an undergraduate English class on the Romantic period, you have probably encountered Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman. A widely read and controversial writer of political treatises, fiction, travel writing, and other works during her lifetime, she has been variously vilified and mythologized since her death in 1797, and has long been a staple in the literary canon. But can we ever really know Wollstonecraft? In the newest episode of The WP...
• By the Author of... 29.06.2022 1h 7min

  Our inaugural episodes of each season have thus far begun with beloved canonical authors: Jane Austen in Season One, Frances Burney in Season Two. This season, we’ve turned to an anonymous author—one whose identity is still a mystery. In 1808, The Woman of Colour was published, with its byline simply reading “By the author of "Light and Shade," "The Aunt and the Niece," "Ebersfield Abby", &c.” Those titles link to more titles, which link to more titles, which link to—! In this first episo...
• Season 2 in Review 27.06.2022 36min

  As we prepare to launch Season 3 of the The WPHP Monthly Mercury later this week, project director Michelle Levy takes a look back at Season 2. Putting it into conversation with Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein's Data Feminism (2020) and Katherine Bode's A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018), Michelle thinks about the work our podcast has engaged in over the last year.
• The Queen of the Disciplines (feat. Lisa Shapiro) 30.03.2022 59min

  Throughout the month of March, the WPHP has been posting Spotlights about women philosophers in print in the WPHP as part of our Women & Philosophy Spotlight Series to celebrate Women’s History Month. Contributors to the series include research assistants Angela Wachowich, Belle Eist, Isabelle Burrows, Tammy T., and project director Michelle Levy, who wrote about the anonymous ‘Sophia, a Person of Quality,’ Margaret Cavendish, Harriet Martineau, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Ann Willia...
• Transatlantic Trajectories (feat. Melissa J. Homestead) 16.02.2022 1h 6min

  In July 2020, project lead Michelle Levy and lead editor Kandice Sharren attended a virtual workshop hosted by Amy Tims at the American Antiquarian Society titled “Searching the AAS Catalog: Keyword & Browse.” This workshop introduced them to the many specific and useful headings of the American Antiquarian Society catalog, including some that we were particularly excited for given that we see them in resources so rarely: “women as authors” and “women as publishers and printers.” In Novem...