Dr Georgina Wilson

My work explores how texts are made and are imagined to have been made, both as written texts and crafted objects. My first monograph, Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), shows how paper both physically makes texts and how paper imaginatively shapes four paradigms – authorship, composition, form, and reuse – that determine how we ‘do’ English Literature. My articles on surface reading as feminist bibliography, on book modification, on folds, and on the paper maker John Spilman have appeared in Criticism 63.3-4 (2022), Inscription: The Journal of Material Texts (2022), The People of Print eds. Rachel Stenner and Kaley Kramer (2022) and The Oxford Handbook to the History of the Book in Early Modern England ed. Adam Smyth (2023). This research was funded by an Early Career Research Fellowship at Fitzwilliam College Cambridge, an AHRC Huntington Library Fellowship, and the Judith E. Wilson Practice-led Research Fund, and I am a 2025 Fellow at the Plantin-Moretus Museum.

I am interested in the histories and future of English Studies and Bibliography, and I have co-edited with Zachary Lesser a special issue of Journal of Early Modern Studies entitled ‘The Politics of Book History: Then and Now’ (March 2025). My work brings together practitioners, creative writers, and curators with literary scholars, and I am co-editing a critical-creative collection entitled Paper and Poetry: Interventions in Theory and Practice for Critical Quarterly forthcoming in autumn 2025.