Dr D-M Withers

My research is concerned with how feminist knowledge is transmitted across time and space; my thinking is rooted in the practice of publishing, and the concept of the archive.

I have a particular interest in the publishing cultures and activist businesses that emerged from or alongside the feminist social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, and have published research on Virago Press and Honno, the Welsh Women's Press. My short book Virago Reprints and Modern Classics: The Timely Business of Feminist Publishing  was published in 2021 (Cambridge University Press).

My research is animated by cultural logics of untimeliness, memory, approaches I explore through my publishing practice, Lurid Editions Ltd, which reprints LGBTQ books that have fallen out of circulation.

I am currently researching histories of entrepreneurship, precarity, transnational and transmedia production in the post-war creative industries through a biographical study of Deben Bhattacharya (1921-2001), a Bengali field recordist and prolific media producer who for five decades ran a successful transnational folklore collection and publishing business. 

This research brings archival sources into conversation with methodologies from Book History and Publishing Studies, centring analysis on the materiality of literary media Bhattacharya published (books, educational films, long playing records, and radio programmes) and the business relationships and personal networks which produced them. A monograph, Deben Bhattacharya: Producing the Field, a Biographical Portrait, is in preparation (Bloomsbury).

Research on Bhattacharya has been published in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and Studies in Travel Writing. I also feature in the 2023 BBC Radio 3 documentary about Bhattacharya's life, Recording on the Nomads' Trail.

My monograph, Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission: The Theory and Practice of Cultural Heritage, was awarded the Feminist Studies Association Book Prize in 2016.

I joined the University of Exeter as Lecturer in Publishing in 2022. Prior to this I worked at the University of Reading. Between 2018-21 I was Research Fellow on the Leverhulme-funded project the Business of Women’s Words: Purpose and Profit in Feminist Publishing, a partnership between the British Library, University of Sussex and University of Cambridge. In this role I worked closely with the personal and business archives of Virago founder Carmen Callil, which are held at the British Library.

I am Co-Director of the University of Exeter's MA in Publishing programme and welcome enquiries about the course from prospective students.

Research Supervision

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students in the following areas: Twentieth century publishing histories; Feminist and Queer Publishing Histories; Publishing Practice as Research; Heritage and Archive Publishing; the Contemporary Publishing Industry; Histories of the Creative Industries