Probing the Archive – Finding Literary Agents

On 8 May 1931, author James Hanley (1897-1985) wrote a begging letter to publishers Chatto & Windus. ‘I am in the position of being a person who is getting married next Thursday and who has no money’ he explained. ‘I cannot ask Pinker for anything because he has already helped my people who are very poor indeed. […] It is Pinker who is practically keeping my parents out of the bloody workhouse. That’s how poor we are and how poor I am’ (C&W archives).
This reference to J. B. Pinker & Son’s financial support (the UK side of the agency now run by Pinker’s younger son, Ralph, after his father’s death) was in keeping with the firm’s reputation and heritage. Coming from a working-class background himself, J. B. Pinker’s (1863-1922) unexpected wealth and rise in social status as an adult – via marriage – encouraged him to support many unknown, precarious writers to navigate the ‘Gentleman’s Industry’. Unlike the elder, established A. P. Watt, Pinker made a name for himself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by taking up ‘the unknown man, the youngster struggling for reputation and bread and butter,’ investing time, care, and tenacity in the unknown writer to help ‘build his reputation’ (Bookseller, April 1898).
Drawing on Manuscript Entry Books in the Archive of British Printing and Publishing at the University of Reading, this paper considers Pinker’s long-term investment in such clients, exploring his support for now little-known writers from working-class backgrounds such as Welsh miner Joseph Keating (1871-1934), as well as better-known, economically precarious writers including D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce.
This work comes out of a chapter on agents I am writing for my new book, Books for the People: A history of the outsiders who made modern publishing (Reaktion). It is part of a larger, long-term project I would like to develop to uncover the agents and publishers ‘behind-the-scenes’ who helped make working-class literature possible.

Speaker Bio
Nicola Wilson is Professor at the University of Reading and Co-Director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. Her most recent book is a study of the Book Society (1929-68) – Recommended!: The influencers who changed how we read (2025). She was lead editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020 (2024) and is a co-founder of the international digital humanities project the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). She has written on publishers' archives, libraries, literary censorship, and the history of reading, and is a specialist on working-class writing. Since 2010 she has been working to republish the writing of Lancashire mill-woman, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Her current book is a trade history provisionally titled, Books for the people: A history of the outsiders who made modern publishing.

This paper investigates how literary agents operated in the gendered and bureaucratic infrastructures, shaping the production of modernist texts and interwar literary culture. By examining the archives of major publishers such as Chatto & Windus, the Hogarth Press, and Duckworth, it focuses on marginalia such as handwritten annotations and literary agents’ commentary that crowd the margins of correspondence, readers’ reports, and internal notes. This paper argues that these notes form a gendered and bureaucratic paratext: a set of material inscriptions through which modernist literature was not only administered but materially produced.

By re-reading this administrative detritus as an aesthetic field, the chapter redefines and extends the concept of ‘modernist marginalia’ from authors to the wider body of administrative interlocutors they worked with, especially literary agents. These notes reflect the negotiations between routine clerical procedure and creative decision-making – the moment when the publisher’s office becomes a workshop of modernist form. A letter initialled or redirected; an entry overwritten in a new hand; a note cross-referencing a work or an author: such traces reveal the bureaucratic temporality of repetitions that contributed to and harmonised with the modernist aesthetics of revision.

As a case study, I examine Nancy Pearn, manager of the Magazine Department at Curtis Brown, whose correspondence and negotiating practices exemplify the institutional dimension of bureaucratic modernism: her letters to the authors she represents and publishers she works with combine affective negotiation with clerical precision, demonstrating the hidden labour of literary facilitators who underwrote the rational organisation of the modernist publishing landscape. Through close reading of these seemingly mundane marginalia and document systems, this chapter argues that bureaucratic textuality shared interwar literary culture’s preoccupation with process and fragmentation.

Speaker bio

Buxi Duan is an Academic Coach at Buckinghamshire New University and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Reading. Before his current roles, he completed a PhD in English Literature and held a one-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include modernist studies, archival research, book and publishing culture, and textual scholarship. His recent essays have appeared in Feminist Modernist Studies, English Studies, Notes and Queries, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, and English: Journal of the English Association.

In 2022, Corinna Norrick-Rühl and Miaïna Razakamanantsoa acknowledged the issue of investigating literary agents and representatives in archives, indicating that researchers’ work may, in this regard, ‘be influenced by the work of others, such as by former employees of the publisher and their filing preferences, but also by archivists and their knowledge organization strategies’ (C. Norrick-Rühl and M. Razakamanantsoa, ‘“Your Eyes and Ears on this Side of the Ocean”: Complicating S. J. Greenburger’s Role as Literary Scout and US Representative for Rowohlt Verlag in the 1960s’, Authorship, Vol 11:1 (2023)). In the previous workshop of this group, a recurrent problem was the definition of a literary agent and the difficulty of locating and accessing their archives. Drawing from these scholarly inputs, this paper investigates the impact that the fragmented nature of literary archives has on the study of literary representatives in charge of the circulation of English-language literature between the UK, the US and Italy. Locating and gaining access to literary agents’ archives is often challenging. Many of them did not leave archives behind or have fragmented estates. Because of this, scholars must often resort to publishing businesses archives. However, because literary agents and representatives liaised with multiple businesses, evidence of their activities is dispersed across numerous archival collections, each contributing to the reconstruction of their professional trajectories. Through the case studies of Charles G. Bode and Elaine Greene, I argue that each newly uncovered piece of archival evidence –often located in previously unknown archival collections – reshapes our understanding of literary agents’ and representatives’ professional trajectories. Therefore, this paper suggests that only through a responsible speculation approach these professionals’ trajectories may be satisfactorily uncovered and investigated.

Speaker Bio:
Cristina De Luca is an AHRC SWW DTP PhD student at the University of Reading and Bristol, and she is also a PGR Representative for the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing at the University of Reading. Her PhD project aims to analyse the role of literary agents connecting Italian and British publishers in the Second Post War Era. She is particularly interested in independent literary agents and female literary agents who represented Italian publishing firms. Prior to undertaking her PhD, she earned a BA in Modern Languages, with major in translation, and a MA in Modern Philology, with major in publishing, at the University for Foreigners in Siena. She has also worked for the Digital Sales department of Mondadori and is currently the Production Manager of the Postgraduate interdisciplinary journal Question – A Journal for the Humanities.

This paper examines the archival visibility of two women literary agents, Denyse Clairouin in France and Annie Laurie Williams in the United States, in order to ask what it means to “find” an agent in the archive. Their cases present strikingly different archival configurations. Williams’s professional activity is preserved in a substantial named collection at Columbia University, where correspondence, contracts, financial records, and client files make the agency legible as an institution and the agent visible as a professional actor. Clairouin, by contrast, emerges more obliquely. Her work as translator, literary intermediary, and foreign-rights agent must be reconstructed from dispersed traces in the archives of writers, publishers, and other agencies, including the William A. Bradley Literary Agency records.

Rather than treating this disparity simply as a problem of incomplete documentation, I argue that it offers a way of thinking about the archive of literary agency itself. Agents occupy a structurally intermediary position: traces of their work can be found in a wide range of documents including correspondence, contracts, and rights negotiations.
When no autonomous business archive survives, the archival record risks reproducing their professional invisibility.

By placing Clairouin’s distributed archive beside Williams’s institutional one, the paper considers how different archival formations shape the histories we are able to write. What becomes visible when an agent’s papers are catalogued under her own name, and what kinds of labour remain hidden when her presence must be inferred from the files of others? The comparison also raises questions of gender, professional identity, and archival description. It illuminates the transatlantic infrastructure of literary circulation, in which agents worked across languages, national markets, publishing houses, and media while leaving uneven documentary footprints. Ultimately, I suggest that “finding” literary agents requires reading not only within collections but across them, treating absence and dispersal as evidence in their own right.

Speaker Bio
Lise Jaillant is Professor of American Studies at the University of Lorraine, France. She previously spent two decades living and working in the UK and North America. Her research focuses on twentieth-century literature, publishing history, archives, and the circulation of books across national borders. She has published extensively on literary modernism, book history, and archival studies, with particular attention to the relationship between authors, publishers, agents, and other intermediaries in the literary marketplace. Her latest monograph is Women Poets, Male Publishers: Myth vs. Market in Post-1960s Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). With Laurence Cossu-Beaumont and Cécile Cottenet, she co-edited the Book History cluster “Agents of Connection – Rethinking Transatlantic Book History” (in press). Her work also examines questions of access to archives, including born-digital and digitised collections. More information can be found at www.lisejaillant.com.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the profession of literary agent emerged in Scandinavia, largely shaped by three pioneers: David Grünbaum in Copenhagen, Gösta Dahl in Stockholm, and Lena I. Gedin, initially based in Berlin and later in Stockholm.
The sources documenting their activities are scarce, despite their fundamental role in establishing and defining the profession and their importance as key actors in the cultural transfer between countries, particularly during the Second World War.
The available material provides only limited insight, with one important exception: the private archive of Lena I. Gedin. Gedin’s archive offers an intimate view of the interplay between personal and professional relationships that formed the basis of the agents’ work. Notably, she differed from her two colleagues and competitors by not only acting as a sub-agent to British and American agents but also serving as the main agent in Scandinavia for a number of important authors, including Karen Blixen and all members of the Thomas Mann family. In these cases, symbolic capital (prestige) and income were unusually and instructive intertwined.
However, her archive also raises a number of methodological questions: How can a coherent picture be constructed from an archive marked by evident gaps? How should a source created by a single actor in a highly competitive field be assessed and contextualized?

Speaker Bio:
David Gedin, Associate Professor of Literary Studies, Uppsala universitet, with a focus on sociology of literature. Recent book publications include: Boken som fetisch: numrerade upplagor i Sverige 1819-1915, 2022 (The Book as Fetish: Numbered Editions in Sweden 1819–1915). Strindbergs Schering; Emil Scherings brev till August Strindberg (1899-1912): Original, samt översättning och kommentarer av David Gedin och Karin Hoff, 2025. (Strindberg’s Schering; Emil Schering’s Letters to August Strindberg [1899–1912]: [German] Original, Translations, and Commentaries by David Gedin and Karin Hoff.) Currently working on a study of the emergence of literary agents in the Nordic countries from 1900 to 1980, which is expected to be published in 2027.

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.

During and in the aftermath of the Second World War, Allied information and propa-ganda agencies engaged with translation in several ways. While leaflets in local lan-guages were dropped on enemy territories, and speakers’ voices travelled on radio frequences, booklets and guides helped troops and civilians navigating a global war. However, organisations like the British Central Office of Information (COI) and the American Office of War Information (OWI) were also active in international copyright negotiations at a time when few others could. The activities of these agencies would “include work usually done by book publishers, […] literary agents, export booksellers, and library suppliers” (COI Publications Division Report, Oct. 1946, TNA, INF 8/1). While carrying out daily copyright clearance tasks for their own publi-cations, Allied organisations set up copyright facilitations aimed at encouraging the commercial translation of British and US works in newly liberated areas.
Following traces found in Italian agents’ and publishers’ archives, this paper explores the agenting function of British and American information agencies before and after 1945. Delving into records at the UK National Archives (Kew) and US National Ar-chives and Records Administration (College Park, MD), it unpacks goals, features, and results of translation rights programmes between 1943 and 1947, with Italy as a target area. In doing so, it reflects on the interactions between nation states, literary agents, and book trades at home and abroad; on the tension between propaganda and cultural diplomacy in modern times; and on the origins and legacy of state-run translation aids, as the conflict became an opportunity to test the soft power potential of copyright on the international landscape.

Speaker Bio:
Anna Lanfranchi is a Teaching Fellow in Translation and Transcultural Studies and Italian at the University of Warwick. Her research intersects translation and book his-tory; she is the author of Translations and Copyright in the Italian Book Trade: Pub-lishers, Agents, and the State (1900-1947) (Palgrave, 2024). She has published arti-cles and book chapters on Italian publishing and translation history, history of copy-right, intellectuals and the book trade, and translation programmes in the Second World War.

Over the course of his forty-year career, James Baldwin recruited the very best professionals—agents, lawyers, and accountants--to manage his literary business. This is a little-known fact because scholars and critics of Baldwin’s canon have not systematically surveyed and analyzed those relationships.
Drawing from Baldwin’s business records sourced in multiple US archives (the NYPL/Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Beinecke Library at Yale; the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin; and the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University), I will offer a first look at Baldwin’s business team (Helen Strauss, Robert Park Mills, Robert Lantz, and Tria French), to examine how their collaborations with Baldwin allowed him to navigate the changing terrain and terms of the post-WWII U.S. publishing industry. In dialogue with scholarship on Agent Studies and US Book History (e.g., Laura McGrath's Middlemen; Laurence Cossu-Beaumont’s Deux Agents Littéraires dans le Siècle Américain; Daniel Sinykin’s Big Fiction, Richard Jean So’s Redlining Culture, and Howard and Kenton Rambsy’s forthcoming One at a Time), my presentation will identify and examine the structural dynamics that characterized Baldwin’s deals and dealings with his agents, on the one hand; and I will consider how those business decisions and practices shaped key aspects of Baldwin’s literary craft, on the other.

Speaker Bio:
Jacqueline Goldsby is Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of English and Black Studies at Yale University. She specializes in African American literary criticism and Print Culture Studies during the long century of Jim Crow segregation, from 1865 to 1965. She is the author of the prizewinning A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (2006), and the widely-acclaimed Norton Critical Edition of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (2015). She’s currently at work on two book projects, The Business of Becoming “Jimmy”: James Baldwin and the Work of Art, and Writing from the Lower Frequencies: African American Literature and Its Mid-Century Moment. She has also founded two Digital Humanities projects, “Mapping the Stacks: A Guide to Black Chicago’s Hidden Archives” (2005-2010) and presently, since 2017, The Black Bibliography Project (co-directed with Meredith McGill at Rutgers University).

Between 1960 and 1973, Jonathan Cape's manuscript books record 1,744 submissions of foreign-language and translated works, of which fewer than five per cent reached contract. This paper reads that ledger as an archive of refusal as much as of acquisition, and uses it to reassess the place of the literary agent in Anglo-American translation commissioning under Tom Maschler.
Drawing on a funded project at the University of Reading's Special Collections, which catalogued these entries in the Archive of British Publishing and Printing and identified 407 named intermediaries, the paper distinguishes three overlapping channels through which foreign fiction reached Bedford Square: continental publishing houses trading rights directly, translators acting as unpaid scouts, and a small, densely networked cohort of London and Paris agents. The last group is disproportionately female. Rosica Colin alone accounts for more submissions than any other single source, while Carmen Balcells, Hope Leresche, Denyse Clairouin's agency and Tanja Howarth recur across the decade, even though only three of the seventy-eight accepted titles are by women authors.
Set against The Bookseller's contemporaneous reporting and recent sociologies of translation, this evidence complicates the familiar account of the agent as commercial gatekeeper. In Cape's practice the agent operates less as a broker of price than as a curator of linguistic access, shaping which literatures became legible to a house that read, in this period, in forty-six languages. The paper closes by asking what a submissions ledger can and cannot evidence, and what the declined manuscript owes the historian.

Speaker Bio:
Daniela La Penna is Professor of Italian and Translation at the University of Reading (UK) and co-founder of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. She has published extensively on publishing and translation and has held numerous research grants, including awards from the AHRC, Leverhulme Trust, and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). She is co-editor of Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) and is currently writing a book on Tom Maschler and Jonathan Cape.

A typical day at the ALI: how a literary agency shapes texts and editions
The paper examines the operations of ALI (Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale) from the 1950s to the early 1980s, when the agency was headed by Erich Linder. ALI’s archives – now held in Milan by the Arnoldo and Alberto Mondadori Foundation – together with contemporary interviews and accounts provided by some of Linder’s collaborators, make it possible to reconstruct the agency’s workings during a pivotal period in Italian publishing. A close examination of ALI’s day-to-day activities reveals the systematic and organized approach Linder adopted in managing relationships with authors, publishers, and foreign literary agencies. It also highlights the agent’s central role in shaping texts and editions, not only by offering suggestions and advice on content, translations, paratexts, and publishing strategies, but above all by coordinating the various parties involved.

Speakers bio

Virna Brigatti is associate professor at the University of Milan. She deals with contemporary Italian literature, focusing on the investigation of literary production in the XX Century publishing system, in particular from a philological and ecdotic point of view, paying attention to the papers in the author's and publisher's archives; the subjects she teaches are Literary Communication in XX Century Italy and Editorial Philology. She is the author of two monographs on Elio Vittorini (2016 and 2018); she has produced various essays dedicated to XX century authors and literary issues and in particular to the work of Italo Calvino, with the volume entitled Calvino publishes Calvino. Editions, Indexes and Variations (2025). She is head of unit of the PRIN 2022 project Dear Linder... Stories of texts and editions in the ALI-Erich Linder archive, coordinated together with PI, Monica Zanardo (https://carolinder.disll.unipd.it/ ).

Monica Zanardo is associate professor of Italian literature at Padua university. She studies authors’ archives (manuscripts and personal libraries) from the 18th to the 20th century, with an approach combining filologia d’autore, critique génétique and digital humanities. She especially focused on Elsa Morante (and namely on the manuscripts for History. A novel, to which she devoted her monograph Il poeta e la grazia, published in 2017) and on Vittorio Alfieri (a new critical edition of the author’s autobiography is forthcoming, and she is co-responsible, with Christian Del Vento, of the project Digital Alfieri). With Virna Brigatti she co-led the PRIN project (Project of Relevant National Interest) Dear Linder… histories of texts and editions in the ALI-Erich Linder archives, focusing on the archives of the ALI – International Literary Agency.

In 1928, a group of dramatic agents founded the New York Society of Authors’ Representatives (SAR), a professional organization of East coast agents. Its initial purpose was to foster “a better understanding among all agents” and elaborate a code of ethics that would improve the standards of the profession and, consequently, their image within the publishing industry. In 1977, a split resulted in the creation of the Independent Literary Agents Association, which reunited with the SAR in 1992 to form the Association of Authors’ Representatives.
Contrary to many agencies’ records, the SAR records held at the Butler Library at Columbia University (New York) are a rather small (15 boxes, 1939-1991). One of its specificities is that it provides a rare collective perspective on US literary agents. The detailed minutes of the different committees within the society reveal the workings of a professional organization; they also shed light on the development of a profession that gained a firm foothold in New York as the city was becoming, after World War II, one of the most prominent publishing centers in the Western world. These records, especially after 1946 when the SAR formed a specific literary branch, offer us representations of the profession even as its members sometimes struggled to articulate a common definition. I am interested in the historical and discursive construction of the profession. Who were the SAR members? How did they contribute to shaping the profession? What do the society’s rules, by-laws, and code of ethics tell us about this “soft” profession? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this presentation. In my view, the fundamental issue is that of the legitimization of the profession in the United States, before the turn of the 1970s. I will examine how discourse, practices, and regulations documented in the SAR records can be understood as addressing a deficit in legitimacy.

Speaker Bio:
Cécile Cottenet is professor of American Studies at Aix-Marseille Université (France). She is the coordinator of an online project on mediators of US literature in France in the 20th century (https://dicopalitus.huma-num.fr/), which features several literary agents. Her long-term interest in mediators of texts in publishing history has led her to investigate the role of agents in the transatlantic circulation of US fiction (Literary Agents in the Transatlantic Book Trade: American Fiction, French Rights, and the Hoffman Agency, Routledge, 2017; “Bringing Books to France. Literary Agents in Cold War Transatlantic Networks,” 2025). She is currently researching the history of literary agents in the United States, with a specific focus on their professionalization between the 1920s and the 1960s.

This paper primarily investigates the postwar career of the literary agent B.J. Buber (1892-1950). A representative of the Agenzia letteraria internazionale (ALI) in France, the polyglot Buber embedded himself simultaneously in multiple literary, linguistic, and political milieus. He leveraged his Paris contacts as well as relations with such authors as Elio Vittorini and Anne Seghers to cumulatively earn and defend his unique authority as an international mediator even within the broader ambit of the ALI. In time, Buber further extended this transnational position to an international or poly-national one stretching between Italy, France, western Germany, and all of Eastern Europe. This paper accordingly explores three key aspects of Buber’s unique success: a cosmopolitanism not necessarily available to publishers’ in-house personnel; appraisals of both literary and what became political markets in a volatile geopolitical moment; and finally an ability to triangulate and enforce what I call a politics of the first option through engaging multiple foreign publishers at once. Buber’s career hence presaged a new model for western literary agencies while also rising to meet the novel demands posed by new state literary agencies in the Eastern bloc. Precisely as a transitional figure of the early Cold War as well, this paper ultimately argues, Buber’s activities permit simultaneous historical comparisons of the literary agent caught between individual and corporate functions, national and international roles, and western and eastern Europe.

Speaker Bio:
John Raimo is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern Europe with a particular focus on transnational histories of the book, reading, and publishing. Key research interests of his also include cultural transfers, sociological fields, intellectual networks, and the history of scholarship. Literature, photography, and debates on historiography also animate John's research within French, German, Italian, and Czech contexts. Currently a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), he is currently revising his doctoral thesis, an account of postwar European publishers' constructions of a transnational identity over and against early Cold War geopolitical divisions of the continent, into a monograph. A second project of his consists of a conceptual and cultural history of European political asylum stretching from the early nineteenth century to the immediate postwar era.

Literary agencies rarely appear in the archive as actors in their own right. They surface as senders of offers, as clauses in contracts, as recipients of statements. This paper takes that marginal position as its starting point and asks what mediation actually consists of when it is examined as work rather than judged by its outcome. Drawing on correspondence between Ruth Liepman and Fritz J. Raddatz and on the Baldwin contract files in the Rowohlt holdings, it reconstructs how a Zurich agency that represented publishers and other agencies, rather than authors, came to hold and defend a precarious position in a four-cornered network stretching from New York to London. The Baldwin case spans three decades and is unusually turbulent: representation is repeatedly contested, two theatre contracts take four years to sign, translation begins before any contract exists, and an advance is halved when the publisher doubts a play with a Black cast can be staged in German. However, the agency placed Baldwin's entire German-language œuvre with a publisher that backed him for twenty-five years, and it did so through precisely the frictions the files record: through arguing clause by clause, through repairing relationships, through waiting. Reading agency work from its conflicts makes visible a form of labour that success narratives, including the agency's own, tend to smooth away.

Speaker Bio:
Erika Thomalla is Assistant Professor of Book Studies and Digital Book Culture at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where she is based at the Zentrum für Buchwissenschaft. With Carlos Spoerhase she co-directs subproject A09 of the Collaborative Research Centre 1369 "Cultures of Vigilance," which investigates sensitive reading practices and hermeneutic vigilance between 1880 and 1970. Her current book project examines literary journalism in German-language periodicals from 1970 to 2010. Her research combines literary and media history with book studies, grounding questions of literary circulation in publication economics, circulation figures, press law, and the material conditions of production; recurring interests include recommendation networks, blurbs, publishers' catalogues, and informal censorship. She is the author of Gegenwart machen: Eine Oral History des Popjournalismus and the editor of a Text+Kritik volume on literary journalism. She also writes as a literary journalist and essayist.

The international success of Astrid Lindgren’s children’s books, especially Pippi Longstocking (1945), is largely due to her contacts with the German publisher Oetinger. When Friedrich Oetinger, a bookseller and director of the publishing house Verlag für Wirtschaft und Sozialpolitik Friedrich Oetinger & Co, met Astrid Lindgren in 1949, he acquired the rights to her Pippi Långstrump and reo-riented the publishing house towards children’s literature. In the very same year, 1949, Pippi Lang-stumpf was published in German in a controversial translation by Cäcilie Heinig. By this time, Frie-drich Oetinger’s wife, Heidi, was also working at the publishing house; together with her daughter Silke, she developed a close friendship and professional relationship with Astrid Lindgren. As an intern in the 1960s, Silke Oetinger gained an insight into the workings of the Swedish publishing hou-se Raben & Sjögren, where Astrid Lindgren had worked as an editor until her retirement and had played a key role in bringing Scandinavian children’s literature to Europe. This network between Lindgren, Heidi Oetinger and her daughter Silke, who continued to run the publishing house with her husband Uwe Weitendorf, transformed the German market for children’s literature. The letters from Lindgren, which are accessible in the Foundation’s archive, reveal the growing influence Lindgren exerted over the marketing and translation of her books.

The archives of the Silke Weitendorf Foundation in Hamburg contain numerous letters and other do-cuments, most of which are unpublished, which provide insight into the close-knit and productive network of women (Heidi Oetinger, Silke Oetinger and Astrid Lindgren). These are supplemented by Silke Oetinger’s personal accounts. These written and oral sources impressively demonstrate the extent to which Lindgren utilised her personal contacts to act as a literary agent, placing both her own and other Scandinavian children’s books on the German – and thus international – book market.

Speaker Bio:
Karin Hoff studied German, Scandinavian Studies and History in Bonn and Växjö, Sweden. She obtained her PhD from the University of Bonn in 1993 and her habilitation from the University of Kiel in 2000 with a thesis entitled Die Entdeckung der Zwischenräume. Literary Projekte der Spätauf-klärung zwischen Skandinavien und Deutschland (Göttingen, 2003); 2007–2020 Professor of Scandi-navian Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Göttingen; since April 2020 Professor at the Institute for Scandinavian Studies, Frisian Studies and General Linguistics at the University of Kiel.
Main areas of research: 18th-century, modern and contemporary Scandinavian literature; drama and theatre (particularly August Strindberg); cultural transfer and literary translation.
Recent publications David Gedin & Karin Hoff: Strindbergs Schering: Emil Scherings brev till August Strindberg, Original samt översättning och kommentarer, 2025; Karin Hoff: Varianten der Moderne. Studien zu August Strindbergs Dramatik, 2024.

In my lecture, I focus on the first three decades of the literary agency International Editors’ Co. (since 2021 International Editors & Yañez, Co.), founded in Buenos Aires in 1939 by Annie and Hugo Lifczis (Lifezis). On the basis of various archive collections, I show the genesis of the agency’s network during the German exile, especially in the correspondence with the author Leo Perutz. The second part follows the agency’s move to Barcelona and the competition in the 1960s with Carmen Balcells. I would like to ask to what extent Lifczis’ practice of mediating German authors in exile between 1939 and 1945 was a model for Balcells’ worldwide mediation of Latin American authors.

Speakers Bio:
Professor Alexander Nebrig is Chair of Modern German Literature at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. In addition to German literary history, his focus is on Literary Ethics, Writing Theory, Comparative Literature, Translation and Book Studies. Currently, he is leading a DFG-funded database project on translation rights. He is co-editor of the Handbuch Verlag (Metzler 2026) and author of the study Literature and Translation in the Licensing Realm (2 vol., Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).

In the USA the 1960s and 1970s — driven by the civil rights struggles of African Americans and the decolonization movements — were marked by a keen interest on the part of the publishing world in the voices of Black intellectuals. Moreover, the 1960s represented a turning point in terms of the internationalization of cultural circles in Europe, where African American writers succeeded in reaching diverse segments of the public, increasingly attuned to Third World causes. Malcolm X had also been explicit on this point when he described African Americans as a colonized people and identified culture as one of the primary revolutionary tools. In 1965 Ronald Hobbs established the first – as far as we now – literary agency led by an African American, to provide a platform and legitimacy to emerging African American intellectuals and thereby challenge the white cultural establishment. For these reasons, Ronald Hobbs’s agency was founded with a strong political intent. My presentation aims to explore the richness of Ronald Hobbs’s archive and the possible avenues of research it opens up: through the case study of Hobbs and his biography, together with few paradigmatic examples of the reception of Black culture in Italy during the long 1968, my talk also investigates the networks and circuits of African American culture across the Atlantic, exploring the transnational connections between publishing, political action and thirldworldism.

Speaker Bio:
Anna Ferrando is a researcher in Contemporary History at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pavia, Italy. She has been fellow for the Spring Term 2025 at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies (Columbia University) in New York. She has published numerous articles in scientific journals on the relationship between publishing and politics from a transnational perspective, her main focus being cultural mediators and mediation in the 20th century. Focusing on these themes are the monograph Cacciatori di libri. Gli agenti letterari durante il fascismo [Book hunters. Literary agents under Fascism] (FrancoAngeli, 2019), that was awarded the SISSCO Prize for “Best Debut Book” by the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History, and the book she edited on translations under Fascism entitled, Stranieri all’ombra del Duce. Le traduzioni durante il fascismo [Foreigners in the Shadow of the Duce. Translations During Fascism] (Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2019). For the last years she has devoted herself to the history of the Adelphi publishing house, on which she wrote Adelphi. Le origini di una casa editrice (1938-1994) [Adelphi. The origins of a publishing house (1938-1994)] (Rome, Carocci, 2023).

Berta Zuckerkandl’s role as a translator and as a literary and theatre agent has long remained overshadowed by her public persona as an influential salonnière and journalist. Rooted in the liberal, upper middle class Jewish milieu, her salon in Vienna was a significant cultural hub, just as the salon of her sister Sophie in Paris — who was married to Paul Clemenceau, the brother of Georges Clemenceau. This constellation made France Berta Zuckerkandl’s second home. Her commitment to mediating between the two cultures and nations became, after WWI and in light of her financial situation following inflation, an economic necessity subject to stricter conditions. Her correspondence preserved in the Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library reveals new aspects of her identity as a translator and agent in the field of predominantly theatre texts from the 1920s onward. Her letters often testify to the intensity of this labour.
Zuckerkandl translated around 120 French plays, enabling authors such as Paul Géraldy, Henri-René Lenormand, Jean Anouilh, and others to enter the repertoires of major theatres in Vienna, Berlin, and beyond. Her translations were embedded in a broader ecology of mediation: she attended rehearsals, negotiated contracts, advised on titles, and shaped reception contexts. Her brokerage for Arthur Schnitzler and Martin du Gard demonstrates two different practices within transnational literary markets.
Zuckerkandl’s work anticipates contemporary understandings of literary agents and translators as cultural actors who navigate networks, institutions, and power structures. Her role in events such as the Salzburg Festival and the 1937 Paris World Exhibition — where she was praised as “the most important link between Austria and France”—underscores the political dimension of her mediation in a time of escalating crisis.

Speaker bio:
Theresia Klugsberger is an independent researcher in the field of Austrian literature and intercultural communication. She has served as a research associate at the Literaturhaus in Wien and taught in the Department of German Studies at the University of Salzburg as well as at the Department of Cultural Studies at the New Design University St. Pölten. She is the co-editor of the flight diary of Berta Zuckerkand, „Flucht!“ (Czernin, 2013) and published (among others) on Berta Zuckerkandl and on the Austrian author and journalist Hans Habe with a focus on his service in the US-Army during WWII in Europe and in postwar Germany.