The Living Bookshelf: The Ancient Library in Text conference (organised by Angharad Derbyshire and Charles Baker) was held between the 12-14 September 2025 at Corpus Christi College Oxford. Our theme was 'The Ancient Library in Text', and we encouraged participants to use the “library” as a conceptual tool that could be used to engage with Imperial and Late Antique literature. There was also a training goal for this conference: to provide graduates with training in academic communication.
Organising this conference proved a hugely valuable experience for Charles and I, the graduate organisers. We worked well as a team, and so were able to stay afloat amid organisational uncertainty and to balance responsibilities co-operatively. This has given us an insight into running larger events with numerous academic participants, which would be useful to any event management in the future (especially inside academia). We have both grown in confidence, both in terms of our ability to manage complex events and in our ability to contribute to academic discourse within a conference.
The conference featured 12 papers (8 by graduate students), each followed by brief response from a graduate respondent. Our invited speakers consisted of established academics: Dr Alexandra Leewon Schultz (Dartmouth), Dr Talitha Kearey (St Andrews), Dr Thomas Coward (Bristol) and Dr Emma Greensmith (Oxford).
The theme of ancient libraries, even when narrowed down to the Imperial and Late Antique periods, is a large one, with conceptual complexities which address broader questions of intellectual culture in these periods. Therefore, many papers did not address specific ancient libraries (though some did) but instead considered the ways in which literature might display the 'fingerprints' of a library in its composition. Over the course of the conference, we interrogated what it means to call something ‘bookish’, how far organising knowledge speaks to the underlying concept of the library, and what it means to call any collection of texts a ‘library’ in the first place.
We also held two graduate training workshops. The first was a workshop with the Corpus Christi College Librarian Joanna Snelling, who was joined by Conservator Nikki Tomkins and Cataloguer Sophie Floate. In this workshop the Corpus Christi Library collection was introduced and participants were able to handle material texts.
The second was a workshop led by our keynote speaker Alexandra Schultz, and was entitled 'Communicating Your Research.' In this workshop, Alexandra helped the attendees communicate their workshop in a manner pertinent to the academic job market.
We received very encouraging feedback on these workshops too, with several remarking that the second workshop was particularly helpful for those transitioning to the (competitive) next stage of academia.
Overall, this was an hugely rewarding event to organise and to participate in, and we are very grateful to the OOC DTP for their help.
