Bethany Qualls

Public Humanities

S.W. Fores and Charles Williams, “Lady Paragraph Championizing,” 1814. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Here you’ll find a range of open-access materials I’ve made connected to my ongoing interests, roughly grouped by topics: archival recovery (hidden or forgotten stories, archives, gaps, history from below), sex work (18th-century prostitute narrative, prostitution, commodification), and digital humanities (cats, meme culture, new media history). Because knowledge-making happens all around us, not just inside institutions.

Archival Recovery

The Re(un)Covered Podcast, creator and producer

Join me, a literary researcher with a passion for the obscure, as I share recovered and uncovered stories from archives around the world. It’s archival recovery, out loud.
Season 1 covers what we know about women type designers of the hot metal type era (late 1800s to 1950s). Subscribe to Re(un)Covered wherever you get your podcasts.

Want more? Check out:

“Tangled up in Audio: Unseen Scripts, Shifting Affordances, and Modes of Typographic Design Histories,” a presentation at Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century (aka G21C or /gʁafematik/), University of Reading, UK. June 2026.
“Recovering the Forgotten Women of Metal Type Design,” part of Letterform Archive’s Salon Series, San Francisco, CA. March 2023.
“Recovering the Forgotten Women of Metal Type Design.” Mellon Public Scholars 2021 Showcase, University of California, Davis. Nov. 2021.

My timeline of typographic history (starting before Gutenberg’s press) in “ Type History Toolkit, Part 1: A Chronological Approach,” by Letterform Archive, 24 August 2023.

Sex Work

Encyclopedia entry on “Brothels” for Open-Access DIGITENS Digital Encyclopaedia on Sociability in Europe in the Long Eighteenth Century (June 2025). https://www.digitens.org/en/notices/brothels.html
The interactive collection “William Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress (1732) and Rake’s Progress (1734-35)” showing both series’ locations and contexts, mapped via Layers of London (Jan. 2024)
“Selling Sex, Work, and Literature: Then and Now.” Syllabus, 29 August 2023. https://syllabusproject.org/selling-sex-work-and-literature-then-and-now/.
“Sally Salisbury from Sex Work to Coffin Robbery: A Case Study in Eighteenth-Century Fame.” Open Digital Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies (ODSECS). 15 November 2023.

Digital and Other Humanities

As part of my talk “How Do Cats Meme? Signifying Felines in Imagetexts from the 1700s to 2020s” for the Digital Humanities Lab, University of Basel, Switzerland (March 2026) I made this Canopy IIIF website: you can see v1.0 of my cat imagetext corpus here. It’s looking like cats and memes have a long history even before the internet.
Erika Rappaport and I were guests talking about “Tea Tables and Empire” for The Global Tea Initiative’s Cha Chat Podcast, episode 8. Nov. 2021. I also made this bonus content on Tea Tables as Power in William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (1732).