Sprecher
Beschreibung
This paper shares early findings and current questions from a new research project, Women of Letters, Women of Books, devoted to women who mediated the transatlantic and transamerican circulation of texts in the second half of the twentieth century. Stemming from a previous project on literary agents specifically, the project branches out to women who acted as scouts, translators, readers for publishing houses, or assistants and secretaries. Finding these women mediators in the archive is challenging, as is the task of situating them in Darnton’s communications circuit. Yet alongside literary agents -whose tasks they sometimes overlapped or whose careers they later embraced- these professional women form the “circuits” through which books circulated. Drawing on archival research conducted in spring 2026 at the Harry Ransom Center (Austin) and at Columbia University's Butler Library (New York), the paper presented at the Probing the Archive Conference uses case studies to discuss the epistemology of Agent Studies. In particular, it tests “constellation” and “nebula” as alternative ways of visualizing these networks / circuits, in an attempt to account for a more informal insertion into the complex and changing chain of mediators of the international book market.
Speaker Bio
Laurence Cossu-Beaumont is Professor of American Studies at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. She was a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 2015 and a Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center (2018, 2026). Her research lies at the intersection of African American studies, book history, and transatlantic cultural exchanges. She has previously written on the publishing history and international reception of Richard Wright. Her book Deux agents littéraires dans le siècle américain: William et Jenny Bradley, passeurs culturels transatlantiques (ENS Éditions, 2023; in French) documents the role of the Bradley literary agency in mediating the circulation of U.S. and French literature across the Atlantic in the interwar period. She is currently working on a project highlighting the role of women mediators (scouts, agents, translators) in twentieth-century transnational publishing networks.