Dr Alice Wickenden

I am a book historian and literary scholar, specialising in the early modern period (1500-1750). My current work is interested in the concept of provenance and how it affects collections of early modern books. I ask how libraries understand their own legacies, how they work to produce new forms of knowledge, and how this might allow us to interrogate our own digital, pedagogical, and institutional engagements with rare books. Within this project, I am also interested in how writers imagine and fictionalise their own reproduction in print in order to think about the afterlives of their books, particularly the way that books are frequently pictured as children.