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Helen Smith wins the George A. and Jean S. DeLong Book History Book Prize 2013

Posted on 22 July 2013

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) has awarded Helen Smith, Reader in Renaissance Literature, a prestigious prize to celebrate her recent book, "Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England" (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Announcing the prize at the SHARP annual convention in Philadelphia, Daniel Traister spoke on behalf of the judging panel, commending Smith’s detailed and ambitious study of the roles of women in making early modern books. Traister celebrated the ‘fresh and complex view of early modern English literary and print cultures’ offered by Smith’s examination of ‘the role of women in the book world’, and commended ‘the quality of research’ in Smith’s ‘remarkable and original’ book.

With more than 1000 members in over twenty countries, SHARP is a global network for book historians working in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. The DeLong prize is awarded annually to the author of the best book on any aspect of the creation, dissemination, or uses of script or print published in the previous year.

Helen’s current research continues to build on the interests in making and collaboration which underpinned Grossly Material Things, as she works to recover early modern ideas about matter and materiality across a broad range of texts and objects.