Punch’s Pocket Book Archive - Phase 1 (2024-2026)

The Creators:

Françoise Baillet is the Principal Investigator of Punch’s Pocket Book Archive (2024-2029), and a Professor of British History and Culture at Université Caen Normandie. A specialist of nineteenth-century print culture and a long-standing Punch scholar, she is the author of Visions et divisions. Discours culturels de Punch et ordre social victorien, 1850-1880. Recent activities include contributions to edited collections Issues and Singularity in the British Media and British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820-1845.

Sonja Lawrenson is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she co-directs the Long Nineteenth-Century Network and hosts the North-West Long Nineteenth-Century Research Seminar. Her research centres on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s writing in Ireland, and more broadly on Irish transnationalism, global imperialism, theatre history, and popular print culture. She has published on a range of Irish Romantic writing, including the works of Frances Sheridan, Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, and Charles Robert Maturin.

Clare Horrocks (FRHistS), Liverpool John Moores University. Clare has been Co-Investigator for the Punch’s Pocket Book Archive during its formative pilot years (2024-2026). She has been Principal Investigator on a major collaboration with Gale Cengage Publishers—appointed as Academic Advisor for the online Punch Historical Archive—and has pioneered a number of attribution projects on Punch. Plans for 2025-27 include a major public engagement project with Sambourne House, for which she has received a British Academy Small Research Grant.

Bethany Qualls, Université Caen Normandie. Bethany is the first postdoctoral fellow for Punch’s Pocket Book Archive (2024–2026). A scholar of British periodicals in the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she also works on gossip, new media, print culture, sex work history, and feminist archival recovery. Her scholarship has been supported as a Lewis Walpole Library fellow (Yale), American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies Women’s Caucus Catharine Macaulay Prize winner, and UC Davis Mellon Public Scholar.

The Technical Experts:

Julia Roger, Pôle Document Numérique (PDN), Université Caen Normandie: One part of our dynamic duo of digital humanities experts, Julia is the deputy director of the PDN. She completed her PhD thesis in philosophy and book history on Descartes and has taken an interest in the relationship between publishing and philosophy. She has worked on numerous open access digital projects, including one of the PDN’s pioneering projects: the Corpus Descartes, the online edition of René Descartes’ works and correspondence.

Subha-Sree Pasupathy, Pôle Document Numérique (PDN), Université Caen Normandie. The other part of our dynamic duo of digital humanities technical experts, Subha-Sree plays a major role in the Punch’s Pocket Book Archive website’s conception and design, with support from the PDN. She holds a PhD in French Literature, worked on a digital critical edition of l’Abbé Castel de Saint-Pierre, and continues to work on open-access digital projects of various sources - manuscript, printed, and numismatic - such as Les Écrits de l’abbé Castel de Saint-Pierre, an online edition of Castel de Saint-Pierre’s work; the register of deliberations for the eighteenth-century French anti-slavery group Société des Amis des Noirs and Nummus, a virtual library of monetary coins, spanning the ancient, medieval, to modern periods.

The Administrator and Advisor:

Pascal Buléon - Research Director at CNRS. Pascal is the Head of Caen Normandie’s Digital Centre of Excellence for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CAeSAR), a funding managed by the French National Research Agency under the France 2030 initiative, and by the Normandy Region. He is a member of the Scientific Council of CNRS Humanities.

Géraldine Gradel - Head of Strategic International Partnerships. Géraldine designs and implements dedicated partnerships strategies and assists the researchers in their partnership approach. With a background in both Museology (DESS from Ecole du Louvre) and Fundraising (Master’s degree) she serves as intermediary between institutional missions, researchers, and philanthropists.