Sandars Readership in Bibliography
The Sandars Readership in Bibliography is one of the most prestigious honorary posts to which book historians, librarians and researchers can be appointed.
The Sandars Readership in Bibliography was instituted in 1895 with a bequest of £2000 left to the University by Mr Samuel Sandars of Trinity College (1837-1894), and continues today in the annual series of Sandars Lectures. Read more about the duties of the Reader here.
Sandars Lectures 2026
Flax to Folio: The Global Diffusion of Early Paper and the History of Textiles
The 2026 Sandars Lectures will take place on 17 and 18 November.
Paper is the most consequential writing material in human history, yet there is still much to reveal about its spread thanks to recent discoveries. This two-part series traces the thread of papermaking technology from ancient China to Europe, then inverts the perspective, starting in the flax fields of Egypt and ending at the writing desks of merchants, scholars, notaries, and officials across the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.
Together, the lectures argue that the history of texts and textiles are inseparable. Most premodern books and documents were crafted from recycled clothing with Egypt providing a particularly well-documented example of how a textile boom created a media revolution.
Lectures will be held in-person at Robinson College, live-streamed and recorded.
About the Sandars Reader 2025-26
Professor Marina Rustow
Professor Marina Rustow is a social historian of the medieval Middle East who works with sources from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of roughly 400,000 folio pages and fragments preserved in an Egyptian synagogue.
She received a B.A. (1990) from Yale University and two master’s degrees (1998), an M.Phil. (1999), and a Ph.D. (2004) from Columbia University. She taught at Emory University (2003–2010) and Johns Hopkins University (2010–2015) before joining the faculty of Princeton University, where she is currently a professor in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and History and director of the Princeton Geniza Lab.
Marina Rustow’s publications include Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (2008) and The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (2020).
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