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Professor of Publishing and Book Cultures; Programme Director for the MA Publishing; A&H Vice-Dean Wellbeing.
I teach and write on publishing and book related topics, with special interests in the culture of bookselling, editors and editing, bibliotherapy, publishing archives and publishing paratexts, bibliography, and academic publishing. I have also taught extensively on English Literature courses and have specialisms in Medieval and Arthurian texts.
I am the Vice Dean for Wellbeing in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, looking at ways to help support staff and students more effectively.
I enjoy collaborative and interdisciplinary project work, including knowledge transfer activities. I have been Chair for the Association of Publishing Education (APE), which works to foster links and shared practice between all publishing courses across the UK, and was the Director of CoDE at Anglia Ruskin University, with a remit to foster research in the Creative Industries.
I have been a member of the AHRC Peer Review Panel, and was the Principal Investigator on the AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future Project (see http://academicbookfuture.org/ ), as well as a member of the Advisory Board of the AHRC Reading Digital Fictions project (https://readingdigitalfiction.com/), and the AHRC Digital Library Futures project. I am a co-Chair for the Bookselling Research Network (see http://booksellingresearchnet.uk/) and of the Bloomsbury CHAPTER (a collaborative hub with the IES, covering Communication, the History of Authorship, Publishing, Textual Editing and Reading).
I am also a Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies (see https://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/fellowships/research-fellows), and the General Editor for a series of publishing and book culture Elements with Cambridge University Press (see cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/elements/publishing-and-book-culture) I have also served on the Board of UCL Press, and been the Deputy Editor for the Journal of the International Arthurian Society,
I am interested in proposals from potential PhD students wishing to undertake postgraduate studies in Publishing or Book-Related Studies (particularly around bookselling and bookshops), and am happy to discuss any research proposals prior to application. Please email me at s.rayner@ucl.ac.uk.
Contact details:
Professor Samantha J. Rayner
Director, Centre for Publishing, and Professor in Publishing and Book Cultures, Department of Information Studies,
Room G40 Foster Court
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
Email: s.rayner@ucl.ac.uk
For student hours in 2022/23, please email for an appointment
Twitter: @uclpublishing @samartha
www.ucl.ac.uk/information-studies/ucl-centre-publishing