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Dr Hannah Field

Dr Hannah Field, Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature, has received a 1.47 million euro award from the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for an innovative five-year research project exploring rejections by copyright libraries. The highly competitive awards, which are part of the EU Horizon Europe programme, support researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch cutting-edge research projects in a variety of fields.  

Hannah’s research 'Promiscuous Print: Legal Deposit Libraries, Rejected Texts, and New Methods for Negative Bibliography' will explore the printed texts rejected by the libraries which are supposed to preserve the entire printed heritage of a given nation (copyright or deposit libraries) and how those rejections reflect the priorities and prejudices of particular eras. 

She said: “I’m so excited to begin this project – legal deposit is one of the main safeguards we have for our literary heritage, so thinking about how it works and doesn’t work is really important. It’s the type of project that can’t take place without a lot of support, so I’m very grateful to the ERC and to Sussex.” 

Hannah got the idea for the project during her doctoral research into rare Victorian children’s books at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, a copyright library. She was surprised to find that the very books she was studying were often not part of the library’s copyright holdings. This led her to investigate other works rejected by copyright libraries, such as the rejection of Jane Austen’s Emma at the time of its publication by Cambridge University Library. 

The research will use digital tools and quantitative analyses to uncover texts rejected from copyright libraries in the UK during the nineteenth century and link these untold stories to the devaluation of different knowledges and communities. The project sits within the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab, one of the University’s Centres of Excellence, and aims to pave the way for researchers to examine deposit and its rejects in other national and historical contexts.

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