Amelia Bonea is a historian working at the intersections of science, technology, medicine and media. She holds a BA and an MA from the University of Tokyo, a PhD from Heidelberg, and has spent several years working as a researcher at the Universities of Oxford and Heidelberg. She is currently Lecturer in Global History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester. Her first book, The news of empire: telegraphy, journalism, and the politics of reporting in colonial India, c. 1830–1900, was published with Oxford University Press and received the 2017 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize from the American
Historical Association. She is working on a new monograph tentatively titled ‘Archives of the earth’, a study of the global entanglements of palaeontology in twentieth-century South Asia, and leading a project on media and epidemics funded by the Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe.
James A. Flath is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He graduated with a PhD in History (Modern China) from the University of British Columbia in 2000. His first monograph, The cult of happiness: nianhua, art, and history in rural North China (UBC Press, 2004) examined the world of the North China village through the medium of folk print (nianhua), and he has expanded on that theme through subsequent articles on related topics examining the theme of ‘alternate modernity’. His second area of research is in museums, monuments, and heritage conservation sites. His monograph, Traces of the sage: monument, materiality, and the first temple of Confucius (University of Hawaii Press, 2016) studies China’s principal monument to Confucius – Kong Temple in the sage’s hometown of Qufu. His current research focuses on effects of natural and manmade disaster on Chinese architectural heritage.
Graham Shaw is a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was formerly Head of the Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections at the British Library. Among his many achievements are leading the ‘Collect Britain’ project, the British Library’s largest digitisation initiative at that time, and devising and directing the Endangered Archives Programme for its first five years.
In 2010 Graham Shaw retired from the British Library, having been Head of the Library’s Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections (APAC) for over twenty years. Trained as an Indologist, he graduated in Hindi and Sanskrit in 1969 from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (SOAS).
For the past thirty years he has researched the history of printing and publishing in South Asia, from the 16th to the 20th centuries. His published works include Printing in Calcutta to 1800 and The South Asia and Burma Retrospective Bibliography (SABREB): Stage-1, 1556–1800.
Vaibhav Singh is an independent typographer, type designer, and researcher. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Architecture (University of Pune) and a master’s in Visual Communication (Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay). He was awarded the Felix scholarship in 2010 for an MA in Typeface Design, and again in 2013 for his PhD, both at the University of Reading, UK. He has worked as a typographer and exhibition designer in Mumbai, Delhi, and Panjim, and specialises in designing typefaces for Indian scripts.
As a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, his research focused on design, technology, aspects of printing history and multilingual typography. For his research projects, he has been awarded fellowships and research grants from the Printing Historical Society, the Design History Society, the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust, the Smithsonian Institution, and the British Library, among others.
Ulrike Stark is Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD from the University of Bamberg and received her Habilitation in Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures from the University of Heidelberg in 2004. Stark taught at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University for more than a decade before she joined the University of Chicago in 2005. Her research focuses on modern Hindi literature, South Asian book history, and the cultural and intellectual history of North India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is the author of An empire of books: the Naval Kishore Press and the diffusion of the printed word in colonial India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008) and has published widely on Hindi and Urdu print culture. She is the co-creator and principal investigator of a digital humanities project titled ‘Chapakhana: mapping the spread of print in South Asia’.
Ad Stijnman (PhD University of Amsterdam, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London) is a professional printmaker and scholar of historical printmaking processes specialising in manual intaglio printmaking techniques. He has lectured and published widely on the subject, including his seminal Engraving and etching 1400–2000: a history of the development of manual intaglio printmaking processes (2012), for which he was awarded the Karel van Manderprijs 2015 for outstanding Dutch art historical publications. Together with Elizabeth Savage he co-edited Printing colour 1400–1700: history, techniques, functions and receptions (2015), which was awarded an honourable mention for best books on print by the IFPDA in 2016. His curatorial activities include exhibitions on medieval prints, early modern colour prints, and Rembrandt etchings on Japanese paper.