Department of English

• Monday, April 13, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We are thrilled to welcome James Brophy (University of Delaware) for a talk titled “Printing Political Dissent: German Publishers in the Age of Revolutions.”

Professor Brophy writes:

"Marketing political dissent in Central Europe was no easy matter. Working within and around rigorous censorship regimes from the late Enlightenment into the 1850s, German publishers brought an array of print matter to market that critiqued, satirized, and denounced the social contract of late absolutism. Drawing on a long legacy of circulating forbidden print, publishers and authors transformed the nineteenth-century public sphere through market segmentation and a variety of print wares that amplified oppositional voices for both reform and revolution, yet democratic radicalism never achieved a breakthrough in mainstream readership. While liberalism gradually attained the status of permissible dissent, the print circuits and material formats of republicanism remained marginalized and inaccessible to common readers. Based upon my 2024 study, this presentation weighs the achievements and setbacks of German publishers, whose commercial drive and innovative maneuvers contested enduring governmental resistance to a free press."

James M. Brophy is the Francis H. Squire Professor of History at the University of Delaware, where he teaches modern European history. He has written extensively on the nineteenth-century public sphere and censorship. Recent publications include Print Markets and Political Dissent: Publishers in Central Europe, 1800-1870 (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Vormärzliche Verleger zwischen Zensur, Buchmarkt und Lesepublikum (Jan Thorbecke, 2023), co-edited with Bärbel Holtz and Gabriele Clemens.