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Leslie Howsam

@lesliehowsam.bsky.social
684 followers 605 following 204 posts

Book historian. Special interests in history books (as material objects) and Eliza Orme (Victorian lawyer). Past president of SHARP (2009-2013). lesliehowsam.ca

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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Toronto #bookhistory , with a bonus on the city’s laneway culture.
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University of Toronto Press @uoftpress.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
“In this pathbreaking study, Hrynyk brings a rigourous analytic to power, desire, #Gender, race, illness & disability in a Toronto magazine that was for decades a global touchstone for #GayPolitics.” –Laurie Marhoefer, University of Washington @thompsonriversu.bsky.social Read more: bit.ly/48lTg8Q
Liberation and Libido by Nicholas A. Hrynyk

About: Liberation and Libido delves into the changing portrayals of gay male masculinity in The Body Politic (1971-1987), shedding light on how debates surrounding gender, race, class, and ability influenced the politics of gay liberation in Canada. 

Review: "In this pathbreaking study of The Body Politic, Nicholas A. Hrynyk brings a rigorous analytic to power, desire, gender, race, illness, and disability in a Toronto magazine that was for decades a global touchstone for gay politics." - Laurie Marhoefer, University of Washington and author of Racism and the Making of Gay Rights
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Good to see new research on the intersection of #bookhistory and bible history.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
If you work on the 19th-c press and are looking at bills for travel, repro fees, etc., applying for a Curran Fellowship should be a no-brainer. Not a lot of hoops to jump through, and the folks making the decisions are researchers just like you. These are open to anybody, of any age, anywhere. #C19
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Superb 🧵 from @sarahebull.bsky.social I’ve long struggled with the kinds of tensions between literary and historical disciplinary approaches to the 19th century that are raised here and (to some extent ) in the article she offers.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
The Curran Index, named after my old friend Eileen Curran, is the world's only ongoing research project devoted to identifying the authors of anonymous articles, stories, and poems in the 19th-c. press. Please check it out and let us know what you think. Your help will be invaluable. #victorian
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Dictionary of Canadian Biography @dcb-dbc.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Thoughts on biography, AI, and a return to undergraduate teaching as David Wilson steps down as editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography: stmikes.utoronto.ca/news/celtic-...
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Fascinating conversation between two #bookhistory people, tentatively teasing out the relationships among text, book, and cultural context. With a scary new slippage between text and substrate. 📕
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
Good news. @rs4vp.org in Canada next year. Ottawa!
newsrs4vp.org
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Some #bookhistory for Canada Day. Carole Gerson, member of @sharpweb.org and BSC/SCB has a new book about authorship and commemoration.
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
The annual bibliography is one of @sharpweb.org’s most important (and least recognized) contributions to #bookhistory. Broad and diverse in scope.
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
This promises to be spectacular #victorianperiodicals scholarship with implications for many other web-based projects. They are a #Canadian team!
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Stand by for an article soon, about describing history books through the lens of book history. Another part of the answer is that historians do #bookhistory too.
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
Good question! Any perspective from Canadian history? @ruralcolonialns.bsky.social ?
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
Looking forward to hosting this online #bookhistory mentorship event.
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SHARP @sharpweb.org · 27/04/2026
Our online book history festival is all about connecting with bookish compatriots! Join us for three, action-packed social events: a bookish craft session, a book recommendation hour, and an early-career mentorship session (spots limited, pre-registration required!) events.zoom.us/ev/Ap9iEZwmC...
Coffee and Crafts Fika Social Hour hosted by Sydney Shep, Wednesday, July 8 @ 4:30am UTC
Career Connections: Early Career Researcher Social hosted by Leslie Howsam, Wednesday, July 8 @ 1pm UTC
All-languages Book Recommendation Fika Social Hour hosted by Andrea Reyes Elizondo, Thursday, July 9 @ 7:30pm UTC
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SHARP @sharpweb.org · 13/04/2026
Are you looking for an online global book history festival that features work on ancient through contemporary textual cultures? Look no further! Registration is open now! events.zoom.us/ev/Ap9iEZwmC...
A flyer for three events:
An interview of Martin Paul Eve by Matthew Kirschenbaum about “Digital-Textual Histories” on Tuesday, July 7 @ 1pm UTC
A conversation about Early Modern Writing and Publishing chaired by Andie Silva and featuring Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian E. Ahnert, Andreas Patrick Bassett, Stephanie A. Leitch, and Geoffrey Turnovsky on Wednesday, July 8 at 3pm UTC;
And a joint keynote address by Mark Lester and Mark Letteney on “Ancient Book History: What We Can Learn by Studying Material Transmission and Transformation in the Ancient Mediterranean" on Wednesday, July 8 @ 7:30pm UTC
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Good 🧵 about how historical writing is distinct, as narrative, as discipline, as genre.
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Open Book Publishers @openbookpublish.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Eliza Orme co-founded the Nineteenth Century Building Society, "which by 1885 would have the largest share capital of all the building societies in Britain". Leslie Howsam's book on Orme, ref'd in this article in which Leslie is quoted, is #OpenAccess! 📖 www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...
openbookpublishers.com
Eliza Orme’s Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London
Why are some figures hidden from history? Eliza Orme, despite becoming the first woman in Britain to earn a university degree in Law in 1888, leading both a political organization and a labour investi...
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
In today’s Times, an article about 19th century women and building societies, featuring Eliza Orme. @openbookpublish.bsky.social #feministbusinesshistory www.thetimes.com/money/saving...
thetimes.com
100 years before women could get mortgages, one set up a building society
Trailblazer Eliza Orme was the first of her sex to earn a law degree in England — and way ahead of her time in helping others to buy homes
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
In today’s Times, an article about 19th century women and building societies, featuring Eliza Orme. @openbookpublish.bsky.social #feministbusinesshistory www.thetimes.com/money/saving...
thetimes.com
100 years before women could get mortgages, one set up a building society
Trailblazer Eliza Orme was the first of her sex to earn a law degree in England — and way ahead of her time in helping others to buy homes
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
Fabulous #bookhistory 🧵
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
I’ve now received one of those AI-generated emails offering to promote my book. Reads a bit weirdly since *Old Books & New Histories* is 20 years old! But I can see how an academic author might fall for it.
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Research Society for Victorian Periodicals @rs4vp.org · 30/03/2026
Just a quick reminder that proposals for VPR's upcoming special issue on "Keywords" are due TODAY!
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
#bookhistory
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Sarah Werner @wynkenhimself.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
Come think about Feminist Bibliography with me this summer! I’m teaching a one-week online course for @calrbs.bsky.social—I love this class and am excited to do it again. Description below; priority deadline April 15; all details at www.calrbs.org/feminist-bib...
This online course considers what might constitute a feminist approach to studying books, what the benefits of such approaches are, and how to incorporate them into our own work.
We will center the textual object in exploring these issues, letting artifacts drive our questions rather than the actions of book makers, sellers, or collectors. Another way of putting this is that the course won't ask who women printing books were, but rather, who determined the terms on which we engage with books. This doesn't mean ignoring the many agents involved in book work, including the people involved in the long history of book trades, the academic field of print culture and textual editing, and the intersection of these with library practices. But it means that our work this week will be focused on generating
questions about methodology rather than recovering names and histories.We will also wrestle with the theory and practice of feminism, which has a history of different meanings for different communities, and how to develop it as an inclusive practice for our book work. If living a feminist life is, as Sara Ahmed argues, something we must return to over and over, something that we put into practice daily rather than something that stays in the classroom, how do we bring that into our spaces of book work?
Through a combination of short advance readings about bibliography and feminism, course discussions, and your own work with textual artifacts, we will explore what questions are brought to the forefront when we approach our work through a feminist framework.
Participants should anticipate two concurrent and two asynchronous sessions each course day, with those sessions being scheduled to accommodate the range of US time zones; asychronous sessions could involve exercises, readings, and off-camera discussions.Discussions and exercises will also try explore different models of pedagogy in order to give participants a feel for what methodologies might suit them best.
The course is intended to be of use to anyone researching, teaching, or acting as a custodian for rare books; although we will pay careful attention to the first centuries of western printing, since the study of those books have shaped the field of bibliography as a whole, the issues the course will consider cover all periods of book study. Participants should not expect to come out of the course having mastered a feminist history of books, but to leave with a set of tools to ask feminist questions of books.
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
I’m fascinated by this subset of #Victorian #suffragists. How many were like Miss Brabrook, unsung, obscure, but not unremarkable?
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This Is My Glasgow @thisismyglasgow.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
To mark International Women's Day, here's a celebration of four of pioneering women with Glasgow connections. They are: Margaret Easton Anderson, a graudate of Glasgow University and the first woman to practice law in the UK; Cont./ #glasgow #internationalwomensday #glasgowhistory
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
For #InternationalWomensDay, introducing Eliza Margaret Brabrook (1866-1927) whose editorial and management skills brought the *Women’s Gazette* to a close in 1892 after Eliza Orme’s departure. Subeditor for a London publisher; active Liberal and feminist; daughter of a prominent intellectual.
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Joanie Grenier @joaniegrenier.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
Mon premier article de fond sur la #découvrabilité dans l'écosystème du livre vient de paraître dans la revue Mémoires du livre/Studies in Book Culture, sous la direction de Julien Lefort-Favreau (U. Queen’s) et Sarah Brouillette (U. Carleton) : doi-org.ezproxy.usherbrooke.ca/10.7202/1122....
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
Wonderful 🧵 on Scottish medical women. Can’t help but add that Flora Masson was Eliza Orme’s niece.
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
#bookhistory
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
Latest in the @uoftpress.bsky.social series, Studies in Book and Print Culture. #bookhistory
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
Really interesting (and optimistic) 🧵. But I notice nobody refers to this work as #bookhistory. Is this significant?
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
Interesting article in @jbritishstudies.bsky.social about missionary periodicals. When I first joined @rs4vp.org I was going to do something with the Bible Society’s *Monthly Register*. Someone still should. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
Assembling Home in the Mission Field: Evangelical Periodical Culture in Britain and Tahiti, ca. 1790s–1830s | Journal of British Studies | Cambridge Core
Assembling Home in the Mission Field: Evangelical Periodical Culture in Britain and Tahiti, ca. 1790s–1830s - Volume 65
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Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture @memoiresdulivre.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Studies in Book Culture's latest issue is now available. Directed by Sarah Brouillette and Julien Lefort-Favreau, the issue is entitled "The Politics of Visibility and Discoverability in Contemporary Publishing". You can read it here : www.erudit.org/.../2....
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Sarah Brouillette @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
I co-edited this bilingual issue of Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture w/ @julienlf.bsky.social (an excellent collaborator). It's all open access.
erudit.org
Politiques de la visibilité et de la découvrabilité dans l’édition contemporaine. Volume 16, Number 2, Fall 2025 – Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture
Read this issue of the journal Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture on Érudit. Discipline: Literary Studies, History.
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womensartbluesky.bsky.social @womensartbluesky.bsky.social · 18/01/2026
“I’m a remarkable woman..always was, though none of you seemed to think so.”May Morris, English artist embroiderer, designer, feminist and socialist, dismayed by the lack of support for women artists founded the Women’s Guild of Arts, 1907 #womensart
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Caroline Derry @carolinederry.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
It's published! Histories of women legal historians, edited with @loreldridge.bsky.social and @dremilyireland.bsky.social www.bloomsbury.com/uk/celebrati...
Copies of Celebrating Women in Legal History, edited by Lorren Eldridge, Emily Ireland and Caroline Derry. The blue and purple cover shows a door opening onto bookshelves. Table of contents, showing chapters by Jennifer Aston, Christine Anne George, Anne Logan, Lisa Cowan, Nina Krsljanin, and Valentina Cvetkovic-Dordevic.Table of contents, showing chapters by Maria Fletcher, Charlie Peevers, Seonaid Stevenson-McCabe, and Deborah Siddoway.
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
Surprised and delighted today to find a review (by Courtney Smith) in @jbritishstudies.bsky.social of my *Eliza Orme’s Ambitions*. @openbookpublish.bsky.social
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 25/12/2025
Eliza Orme was born #otd in 1848. Famously sensible and formidably competent, she disliked the excesses of Victorian Christmas cards, preferring “a nice hearty letter”.
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 24/12/2025
Just received my series editor’s copy of Queer Print Cultures. #bookhistory utppublishing.com/doi/book/10....
utppublishing.com
Queer Print Cultures - University of Toronto Press
Queer Print Cultures brings together interdisciplinary scholarship to consider what printed materials can tell us about the history of gendered and sexual embodiment.
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 24/12/2025
Victorian periodicals research, old-school.
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
Nervous History MA student starting a #Victorian Studies program that required one course in English. The one with familiar canonical names was full, so I had to take the one that introduced me to a bunch of writers I’d never heard of, but also #bookhistory.
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
#bookhistory 🧵
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Rohan Maitzen @rohanmaitzen.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
An optimistic dystopia, a romance of the past, a cautionary tale? thoughts on Ian McEwan's What We Can Know
rohanmaitzen.com
A Vigorous Life: Ian McEwan, What We Can Know
It is a wonder that a poem, let alone an unread poem, could have such a vigorous life in the culture–and its story still had decades to run before the present day. In the late twenty-first ce…
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
This reminds me of when I taught undergrads about the practice of history by genre — how to read an article, an encyclopedia entry, a chapter, etc. A #bookhistory approach.
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 28/11/2025
Boosting this reference to Trish Loughran’s important chapter.
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SHARP News @sharpnews.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
📚 New Book Review! Ellen Barth reviews: The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020, edited by Nicola Wilson et al. (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Read it here: sharpweb.org/sharpnews/20... #BookHistory #Publishing #WomeninPublishing #WomeninPrint #FeministBookHistory
Cover of The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020.
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Leslie Howsam @lesliehowsam.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
A #bookhistory academic’s review of @biblioasis.bsky.social bestseller, The Notebook. 📒. 🇨🇦 sharpweb.org/sharpnews/20...
sharpweb.org
Roland Allen. The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. – SHARP News
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