Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia Roman have been awarded the 2020 Publication Grant from the Association of Print Scholars (APS) to support their forthcoming publication, Female Printmakers, Printsellers and Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women 1735 – 1830.

Trade card for Dorothy Mercier, Printseller and Stationer, c. 1750, etching. © The Trustees of the British Museum

This edited collection brings together essays by sixteen print scholars in the first major study of women’s roles in the development of the international print trade of the eighteenth century. As the authors state, it “encompasses interdisciplinary and multi-national perspectives, providing forgotten biographical details and informative analyses of American, English, French, German, Italian and Russian printmakers,” who include Laura Piranesi, Elizabeth Blackwell, Maria Cosway, Maria Ivanova and Eliza Cox Akin. The volume will also address the lives and accomplishments of printsellers and publishers, such as Jane Hogarth, Hannah Humphrey, Mary Darly, and Sarah Hart, and “the pivotal economic and legal accomplishments of these pioneers of the print business.” Finally, the collection’s authors will consider the “contributions of elite women who, although not professional printmakers or publishers, still played an important role in the industry.” The funding supplied by the grant will provide resources for illustrations and indexing costs and travel to facilitate meetings between the editors at the Lewis Walpole Library. The $2,000 award is funded by the Association of Print Scholars and through the generosity of C.G. Boerner and Harris Schrank, whom APS thanks for their support of the organization and its mission.

This year APS received an unprecedented thirty applications for the Publication Grant, and the selection process was extremely competitive among many deserving projects. The five jurors agreed that the proposal from Martinez and Roman was extremely well presented and that, in focusing on this unexplored topic through an interdisciplinary lens, this edited collection would “fill a major scholarly gap” and “insert women into the history of eighteenth-century printmaking and print publishing.” With its appeal to a broad readership, the volume promises to be “a fundamental resource for students and established academics across a range of disciplines.” APS would like to thank Georgia Barnhill, Curator Emerita of Graphic Arts, American Antiquarian Society; Catherine Bindman, Academic Editor and Independent Print Scholar, New York; Katherine Manthorne, Professor of Art History, CUNY Graduate Center; Ann Shafer, Independent Curator, Baltimore; and Christopher Sokolowski, Paper Conservator for Special Collections in the Weissman Preservation Center, Harvard Library, for their diligence and generosity in reading the submissions.

Cristina S. Martinez holds a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London, and teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century British art, graphic satire, the history of copyright law and encounters between art and law. This fall, she co-curated with Ian Haywood the exhibition “Queen Caroline and King George: sex, celebrity and royal scandal, 1820-21” presently on display at the Wilhelm Busch Deutsches Museum in Hannover, and she is currently completing her manuscript Art, Law and Order: The Legal Life of Artists in Eighteenth-century Britain which is under contract with Manchester University Press.

Cynthia Roman, PhD is Curator of Prints, Drawings and Paintings at The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Her research interests focus on the production, circulation and collecting of prints in eighteenth-century Britain and the work of amateur artists. She has published many articles on graphic satire including essays on William Hogarth and James Gillray. She co-curated Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (Yale Center for British Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum, 2009-2010). She is editor of Hogarth’s Legacy, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (2016) and a co-editor with Caroline Patey and George Letissier for Enduring Presence. William Hogarth’s British and European Afterlives forthcoming from Peter Lang.

Please contact grants@printscholars.org with any questions regarding this announcement. To learn more about the APS Publication Grant online, click here.