The Bodleian CSB presents lectures, seminars, classes, workshops, prizes and opportunities for engagement with manuscripts, book history, and Bodleian Special Collections. Also find notices and links below to affiliated groups and programmes of book and manuscript studies. For schools, email: education@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
To register for email updates from the Centre for the Study of the Book, email bookcentre-newslist-subscribe[at]maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Trinity Term 2026
Monday 11 May at 5:15 pm Lyell Lectures 2026 Final lecture
Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, Muslim Books in Christian Hands: From Iberian Moriscos to Early Modern Europe
Weston Library
Tuesday 12 May at 5 pm
Printer in residence conversation
The Bodleian Libraries’ Printer in Residence 2025–26, James Freemantle, talks with Adam Smyth about the pleasures and challenges of making books by hand in the 21st century and about the work of his private press, the St James Park Press.
Weston Library
Tuesday 26 May at 5 pm
The 2026 McKenzie Lecture
Doing things with books: A conversation with William Kentridge
This public conversation examines the enduring role of the book in Kentridge’s work, from his iconic flip-book animations to his use of the page as a site of historical palimpsest and erasure.
Schwarzman Centre. Registration required.
Thursday 21 May at 5.15 pm Oxford Bibliographical Society talk
Alice Wickenden (Cambridge University) The ‘sticky’ materiality of early-modern book provenances
Oakeshott Room, Lincoln College
Thursday 11 June at 5.15 pm Oxford Bibliographical Society talk
Borna Izadpanah (Reading University) Printing the Qur’an across empires: state politics and print networks between Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire (1827-1895)
Shulman Auditorium, Queens College
Bodleian Special Collections Coffee mornings, Fridays at 10:30am in the Weston Library for Special Collections
All Bodleian Readers are welcome, every Friday in termtime, 10:30-11:30 at the Special Collections coffee morning in the Visiting Scholars’ Centre (Level 2, Weston Library).
A Bodleian Reader card or University card is required for access. Each week a guest speaker shows new acquisitions, discoveries or re-discoveries from the Special Collections. To subscribe to email updates for Friday coffee mornings, send an email message to coffee-mornings-weston-subscribe[at]maillist.ox.ac.uk
Oxford Bibliographical Society meetings
All welcome. See the OBS website for list of events.