Publication Beyond Print: a Leverhulme Doctoral Centre

Leverhulme Doctoral Scholars on a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Photo by Mai-Britt Weichmann.

Publication beyond Print: a Leverhulme Doctoral Centre

The Leverhulme Doctoral Centre Publication beyond Print (2018-23) seeks to challenge the dominance of the printed word in the study of human culture and society, by examining other media used before, alongside and after print.

Jill Lauriston

The Centre questions the assumptions that self-expression, political community and intellectual progress are best served by printing. To do so, it ranges across both historical media (some still in use), such as inscriptions and handwriting, and new digital media.

It asks how past methods of publication without print help us to understand future ones, and how emerging technology helps us to think about cultural history. It brings students into dialogue across differences of time, language, discipline and technology, from the humanities to social sciences.

Unprinted: Publication Beyond the Press (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

As well as their own doctoral research, several of the students collaborated on a ‘multigraph’, comparing their findings, edited by Dr Daria Kohler, one of the former students (now at the University of Leuven), and Professor Daniel Wakelin (University of Oxford), who managed the doctoral group day-to-day. The book was published by on 15 January 2025 and is available online for Open Access until 12 February 2025 and for sale in print from Cambridge University Press. As the students write in the Foreword, ‘Its shared authorship and its circulation largely online are experiments in the ‘publication beyond the press’ that the book considers. We encourage everybody to buy a copy!

Find out more about the Publication Beyond Print Doctoral Training Centre in this podcast produced by some of our scholars: 

Watch a short video of a workshop undertaken by the scholars: