By Rivky Mondal 

April 30, 2026

On May 13, the University of Chicago will welcome renowned book historian Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews) for the 2026 Paleography and the Book Visiting Scholar Lecture. Titled “Was War Good for the Book Trade?” the talk will take place at the David Rubenstein Forum (with a remote viewing option). The lecture will be moderated by UChicago faculty Eric Slauter (English) and Adrian Johns (History), both leading scholars of literature, media, and the history of the book.

Pettegree, Wardlaw Professor of Modern History at St Andrews, is one of the foremost historians of early modern Europe and the history of communication. His scholarship has traced how ideas circulate through print—from the religious upheavals of the Reformation to the emergence of news culture and the modern book trade. His influential works include The Book in the Renaissance (2008), The Invention of News (2012), and Brand Luther (2015). Altogether, they illuminate how media ecosystems shape intellectual and political life. In recent years, his work has expanded to encompass the infrastructures of reading itself, from bookshops to libraries and the vast datasets of the Universal Short Title Catalogue, a survey of all books published before 1650, mapping hundreds of thousands of early printed works and their surviving copies.

Andrew Pettegree introduces The Book at War, reflecting on how books, readers, and libraries have shaped and been shaped by modern conflict.

At the center of this year’s lecture is Pettegree’s recent book, The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading (2023), a sweeping account of how warfare has transformed the production, circulation, and meaning of books. Ranging from the American Civil War to contemporary conflicts, Pettegree shows that books are never far from the front lines. Libraries become strategic sites as targets of destruction, instruments of propaganda, and repositories of cultural intelligence. Authors and publishers adapt to wartime conditions, sometimes opportunistically, producing new genres and responding to changing readerships. Soldiers carry books into battle; governments deploy them to shape ideology; and, in the aftermath of conflict, occupying forces must decide whether to preserve, purge or repurpose the literary heritage of defeated regimes.

One of the book’s most compelling insights is that written culture operates simultaneously as weapon and witness. Travel guides, scientific manuals, novels, and diaries—texts as varied as adventure fiction and the writings of Anne Frank—offer both tools for navigating conflict and records of its human toll. In tracing these entanglements, Pettegree reveals how the history of war is also a history of reading, and how the fate of books can illuminate broader struggles over memory, power, and truth. As Pettegree writes: “Self-interest played its part in these decisions, as did the continuing importance of libraries as ideological bastions in the front line of post-war ideological conflict, now fought out on a global scale.”

The Paleography and the Book Visiting Scholars Program brings an international expert to campus to teach and engage the University community in the study of manuscripts, print culture, and the transmission of ideas. Supported by former University of Chicago President Hanna Holborn Gray, the program reflects the Division of the Arts & Humanities’ deep commitment to primary sources and the material histories that shape intellectual life.

Pettegree’s lecture promises to bring these concerns into sharp focus, inviting audiences to consider the points of contact between conflict and culture.

You can register here. The lecture will be followed by a book giveaway (stock is limited) and reception with the speaker.