Events
Events
Last updated 10 June 2013
Disclaimer: While all efforts have been made to ensure the accuracy of the information included here, please check with the organisers of an event before making any special arrangements to attend.
Xu Bing: The sort of artist I am
The 18th D.F. McKenzie Lecture is delivered by the artist Xu Bing, printmaker and calligrapher. The exhibition, Landscape/Landscript, opens at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, on 28 February.
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Members may bring guests to any meeting.
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Dr Tom Freeman on The Making of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs
Dr Tom Freeman is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Essex. He was the Research Officer of the British Academy John Foxe Project. He is the co-author of Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The making of Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs' (Cambridge 2011) and numerous articles on many aspects of Foxe and his martyrology.
After the talk there will be refreshments and a chance to examine close up the three editions owned by Magdalen College: the first two editions (1563 and 1570), which were presented to the College by Foxe himself, as well as the copiously illustrated edition of 1631, which the College recently acquired. This term's Magdalen College Library & Archives exhibition, on medical manuscripts, early printed books, & archival material, will also be available for viewing.
The seminars are free and open to all. Refreshments will be provided.
For further details and to download the poster please visit the seminar webpage: http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/cofk/events/seminars-2011-12
Dr. Christopher Stray
Oxford University Press's Classical and Educational Publishing in the 19th Century: Culture and Commerce
Followed by a tour of the library at St John's College Oxford. Refreshments will be served.
Dr. Stray is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Classics at Swansea University, as well as Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London.
Hosted by the Library & Information History Group. The event is free, but numbers are limited. Please RSVP by 10 April to Renae Satterley at: r.satterley@middletemple.org.uk or on 020 7427 4830.
Professor Mark Rose, University of California, Santa Barbara
Tuesday 25th June 2013 Part I: 14.00 – 15.15 Part II: 15.30 – 17.00
Drawing on his huge bank of knowledge and experience in handling and studying parchment manuscripts, Jiří Vnouček will describe the most effective methods and tools employed to gain a sound and informative description of parchment as a support and the insights that such visual analysis can provide in terms of its origin and manufacture. Despite fast moving advances in the information we can now gain, such as the exact DNA of the animal, it is still the case that relatively simple visual examination can yield information that will enrich our knowledge not only about the parchment but about the whole production of manuscripts and their history.
The study of parchment provides essential information for the understanding of any manuscript whose primary support is made from animal skin and the best results will be obtained especially by interdisciplinary research involving historians, codicologists and researchers in manuscripts, who will combine their knowledge with that of experts in other fields such as archaeology, biology, conservation and forensic science.
The lecture will be presented by Jiří Vnouček, who has almost 30 years experience in the conservation of paper, parchment and bookbindings. Having been head of Conservation at the National Library in Prague, he currently works for the Royal Library in Copenhagen. For the past 15 years his focus has been upon the study of parchment, an interest that lead him to write his MA thesis in 2010 entitled 'Defects and Damage in Parchment Manuscripts.'
This lecture is presented by the Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford Colleges Conservation Consortium
Registration is essential and places are limited: email bookcentre@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Lectures and Seminars: Cambridge
Tea will be served at 4.30pm before the lectures
For further details, please contact the Hon. Secretary, Cambridge Bibliographical Society, The University Library, Cambridge CB3 9DR
Free Admission. Please note that these events are not ticketed and seats will be allocated on the night on a first come, first served basis. For further details see http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events
Meetings will be held at the Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BE, beginning at 5.30 p.m. Tea will be served at 5.00 p.m. Members are welcome to bring guests, both to meetings and to the tea beforehand.
The AGM will take place at 5.30pm at at the Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BE. Members may bring guests, but they may not vote in any motion that may be put to the AGM. Since The Society of Antiquaries will be the new home for the Bibliographical Society’s monthly lectures, beginning in November 2012, the Annual General Meeting will provide an opportunity for members to familiarise themselves with the premises. The AGM will not be preceded by tea, but refreshments will be served after the meeting. At the close of business, Heather Rowland, Head of Library and Collections, will introduce the collections and show some of their highlights.
Seminar convenors: Giles Mandelbrote (Lambeth Palace Library, London); Dr. Keith A. Manley (The National Trust / Institute of Historical Research); Professor Simon Eliot (Institute of English Studies); Professor Isabel Rivers (Queen Mary); Professor Henry Woudhuysen (University College).
Meetings will take place monthly during term-time on Tuesdays at 5.30p.m.. Meetings will normally take place in Senate House (enquire at South Block Reception), but rooms will vary. The November meeting will be held elsewhere, details below.
The seminars are jointly sponsored by the Institute of English Studies, the Institute of Historical Research, and the Library & Information History Group of CILIP.
Information concerning the Institute of English Studies may be found on its website, or email ies@sas.ac.uk.
Further information concerning the Institute of English Studies may be found on its website, http://ies.sas.ac.uk, or email Jon.Millington@sas.ac.uk.
The atmosphere will be informal, as will the presentations. We hope and expect that many of the talks will be illustrated by actual examples.
The sessions will be held in the University of London's Senate House (Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will run from 6.00 to 7.30 pm, usually on the second Tuesday of the month. All are welcome.
Full details can be found at: http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/seminars/358/Book+Collecting+Seminar+Series
Doors open 5.15pm (admission by Library exhibition entrance). Lectures will take place in the Guard Room, Lambeth Palace, at 6 p.m. Exhibition closes for ticket-holders at 8pm.
Lecture tickets (including free viewing of the exhibition before and after the lecture) £12 each. Season ticket for the series of four lectures £35. Tickets by pre-booking only. To book lecture tickets please telephone 0743 204 4820 or email visitor.manager@churchofengland.org.Royal Devotion Exhibition visitor information: Exhibition tickets cost £12 Adults, £10 Concessions (over 60s, student and unemployed), under 17s free. Price includes printed exhibition guide. To buy exhibition tickets and for more information visit www.lambethpalacelibrary.org or call 0844 847 1698
Opening times:
Tuesday- Friday 11.00-13.30 and 14.00- 17.00 (last entry 16.00)
Saturdays and Bank Holidays- 11.00-16.00 (last entry 15.00)
Attendance is free and all are warmly invited to attend.
Since the publication of Tiffany Stern’s ground-breaking Shakespeare in Parts (2007) and Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (2009), the question of how Shakespeare’s plays were transmitted from manuscript to print has re-emerged as central to discussions of Shakespeare and the printed book. These seminars will feature leading and emerging scholars in Shakespeare studies and focus attention on the impact that the “new” theatre history has had on how we now understand the origins and histories of early printed play texts.
Lectures and Seminars: Edinburgh
The Edinburgh Bibliographical, Society, founded 1890, promotes the study of books and manuscripts of any date, particularly Scottish, and prints bibliographical work in its Transactions and as Occasional Publications.
Society website: http://www.edinburghbibliographicalsociety.org.uk/
Lectures and Seminars: Elsewhere
In aid of the funds of the Cranston Library (1701–2012), the Trustees invite you to attend The Cranston Lecture 2012:
Please note: if building work currently under way is completed, the Lecture will take place in St Mary Magdalene Church as usual.
Refreshments will be served in the interval and the Library will be open during the evening
The Cranston Library founded in 1701 by the Revd Andrew Cranston, is situated in a small chamber above the vestry in St Mary’s, the parish church of Reigate. It was probably the first public lending library in England and contains works of literature, history, geography, mathematics and classics as well as theology. The library is a charity managed by a board of trustees who endeavour to maintain it as an early 18th century library. Many of the books have been there since its foundation, and funds are always needed for conservation.
Speakers
Dr William Jacob has written extensively about religion and society in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has published Laypeople and
religion in the early eighteenth century, (Cambridge University Press,
1996), The Making of the Anglican Church Worldwide, (SPCK, 1997) and The
Clerical Profession in the Long-Eighteenth Century, (Oxford University
Press, 2007). He is Archdeacon of Charing Cross in the Diocese of London
and a Visiting Fellow of King’s College London.
Hilary Ely was educated at St Anne’s College Oxford and the Polytechnic of North London, where she gained a Postgraduate Diploma in Library and Information Studies. She is a Chartered Librarian and retired from Surrey County Council in 2011 after a career of nearly 40 years in public libraries. She has been a Trustee of the Cranston Library since 1992 and Chairman of the Trustees since 2008. This is her fifth Cranston Lecture; previous papers have been on donors to the Cranston Library William Wotton (1997), John Flamsteed (2000) and Francis Maseres (2001) and on 'The Country Parson's Honest Advice' (2005).
Please note that the Cranston Library now has a website: www.cranstonlibraryreigate.com
This series has been organised by a small working group, led by Andrew Kelly, founder and director of the Bristol Festival of Ideas. It is presented in association with the festival. The lectures will run on six consecutive Tuesdays starting at 6 pm, in the Great Hall, Wills Memorial Building. Each of the lectures are free, but booking is required.
The Centre for the Comparative History of Print, University of Leeds (UK), is pleased to announce the following seminar, organized in conjunction with the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds:
Nicolas Barker FBA: The Making of 'Printing and the Mind of Man'
This seminar by will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the groundbreaking exhibition, 'Printing and the Mind of Man', held at the British Museum and Earls' Court in connection with the 1963 International Printing Machinery and Allied Trades Exhibition (IPEX).
8 May (Humss 188) Dr Lise Jaillant (University of British Columbia, Canada): Messy
Modernism: Looking for Woolf, Eliot, Joyce and others in Publishers'
Archives - Abstract: As literary scholars, what kind of archival documents do we
consider “valuable” and worthy of scholarly inquiry? Traditionally,
many scholars of modernism have favored the literary manuscripts and
the letters of writers preserved in well-catalogued collections, while
publisher’s archives have been neglected. In particular, the archives
of commercial publishers have received little attention. Yet, in the
late 1920s and early 1930s, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot and James
Joyce were no longer coterie writers published only by small presses
and little magazines. They were courted by large-scale, commercial
publishers and started appearing in cheap series of reprints. Drawing
on research in the archives of the Oxford University Press and Chatto
& Windus, I will argue for the need to engage in extensive work in
often-messy publisher’s archives to further our understanding of
modernism and the market.
13 May (Humss 106) Dr Billy Smart (Film, Theatre & Television, Reading): The BBC
Television Audience Research Reports, 1957-79: Recorded opinions and
invisible expectations
Seminar details: http://archivesandtexts.wordpress.com/
Scottish cultural history as illustrated by musical song collections , a talk by Karen McAulay, Music and Academic Services Librarian will be followed by a tour of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Library and Archives. The tour of the Archives will be led by Stuart Harris-Logan.
This is a free event, but please RSVP to Renae Satterley by 8 July: r.satterley@middletemple.org.uk
‘Shabby old man leaves collection worth millions’, Chicago Tribune, Dec 14, 1973
‘Organist dies at 90 in Home Filled with Rare Sheet Music’, New York Times, Dec 14, 1973
‘Pauper’s Collection for Oxford Library’, New York Times, Jan 18, 1975
These were some of the newspaper headlines announcing Walter Harding’s legacy to the Bodleian Library.
Walter Newton Henry Harding was not an academic or a book dealer. He worked as a ragtime pianist in Chicago. Yet he was able to build an enormous collection of poetry and song, sheet music, and opera scores. His important collection of music ranged from French and Italian opera scores to English music hall songs, and his legacy enriched Bodleian collections in such print genres as broadside ballads, chapbooks and poetic miscellanies.
At an event in the Bodleian Library on 18 January 2012, Abigail Williams (English Faculty) will recount the surprising history of how Harding’s collection came from the basement of his family home in Chicago to the Bodleian. Michael Burden (Music Faculty) assesses the legacy of Harding in the Bodleian music collections.
The event takes place in the Divinity School and Convocation House, 5-7 pm. The talks will be followed by music from the Harding Collection, performed by Alva (voice and violin duo), including ballads and songs from an 18th-century collection, ‘The Yorkshire Garland’.
An invitation is attached. Tickets are free but places are limited. Please telephone 01865 277000, or email rsvp@bodleian.ox.ac.uk, with Subject line: HARDING MUSIC to reserve a ticket.
Selected material from the Harding Collection will be on display in the Bodleian Library Proscholium during the month of January 2012.
Principal Investigator Dr Martin Conboy, Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield
Outline of the Research Network
There is much work currently being undertaken in the history of newspapers in
the USA and the UK and it is the purpose of this network to bring leading
scholars in the field together to discuss how their research interrelates and
how it can be enhanced by broader disciplinary dialogue drawing on the
traditions and methodologies of history, language studies, literary studies,
and journalism studies. This interdisciplinary project is made more urgent by
the growing number of digital newspaper archives from the 19th and 20th
centuries from the USA and the UK. As we move from a research economy of
archive scarcity to one of plenty, we need to be able to set out a new, more
integrated set of methodologies which enable the wealth and diversity of these
resources to be more appropriately mined.
Each of the seminars will seek to attract high quality, publishable research which contributes to the themes of the Research Network. The seminars, located as they are in the UK, the USA and Switzerland will aim to bring together leading researchers and emerging scholars so as to enhance the international and interdisciplinary ambitions of the project. The Research Network will also co-ordinate publication with the Media History Exchange, an archive and social network sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities.
Aims and Objectives
Core Group
Adrian Bingham, University of Sheffield
Kevin Barnhurst, University of Illinois at Chicago
Martin Conboy, University of Sheffield
David Copeland, Elon University
Bob Franklin, University of Cardiff
Jane Hodson, University of Sheffield
Andreas H. Jucker, University of Zurich
Chandrika Kaul, St Andrews
Ed King, Head of Collections, British Newspaper Library
Elliot King, Loyola University Maryland
David Machin, University of Cardiff
John Nerone University of Illinois
Michael Schudson, Columbia University
Terry Threadgold, University of Cardiff
Joel Wiener, CUNY
Key Dates
14 January 2011 (Sheffield) -
Exploring digital newspaper archives
12 March 2011 (New York) -
The long popularization process: Anglo-American perspectives
18 January 2012 (Zurich) - Historical pragmatics and the language of popular newspapers
28 March 2012 (Cardiff) -
The social semiotics of popular journalism: a long view
8 July 2012 (Sheffield) -
Research methodology and digital newspapers: feasibility and sustainability
What are the competences needed for the heritage librarians of the future, and how can these competences be taught at different levels of library education? Those questions will be discussed during an international conference at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), on 1 and 2 February 2012. During two days, librarians and people in charge of library teaching programmes will be invited to confront their ideas. It is hoped that presentations of best practices during the conference will serve as inspiring models of new programmes in the future, and that at the end of the conference, some consensus may be reached about the range of competences needed.
The conference is organized by the Library and Information Science Department of the University of Antwerp and Flanders Heritage Library, with the collaboration of the École nationale supérieure des sciences de l'information et des bibliothèques (ENSSIB, Lyon), FARO - Flemish interface centre for cultural heritage, and under the auspices of the IFLA-Rare Books and Manuscript Section, the LIBER Steering Committee for Heritage Collection and Preservation, and the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL). The conference will be held in English.
Submissions
Submissions are invited for 30 minute presentations on the competences that librarians in charge of special (or heritage) collections should acquire during their training, and how library training programmes can teach these competences. Participants may also want to discuss related issues such as the re-training of library staff or the ways in which skills can be kept up-to-date. We welcome both presentations of best practices (e.g. discussions of existing programmes) and papers discussing these matters at a more fundamental level.The deadline for submission is 31 August 2011. Submissions received after this date will not be considered for acceptance.
If you wish to put forward a paper for the conference, please send the following information in the form of a Word-document to prof. dr. Pierre Delsaerdt, chair of the organizing committee, at pierre.delsaerdt@ua.ac.be:
Deadlines
August 31, 2011: Deadline for submission of proposals
September 30, 2011: Notification of acceptance or rejection of proposals
October 15, 2011: Deadline for confirmation of acceptance by presenters.
Background
It seems trivial, these days, to state that libraries have been challenged by recent technological, social and economic developments. On the other hand, these developments have not minimized the library's mission as a memory institution, quite the contrary. Among the many roles that libraries will continue to play in the 21st century and beyond, their responsibility for the preservation of the written heritage is perhaps the one that is questioned least.
This role of libraries, ancient as it may be, implies that library staff be trained adequately to meet the specific requirements of heritage collections in libraries. These requirements are multiple. Expertise in preservation and conservation is a major one, but it certainly has to be supplemented - and perhaps even preceded - by other competences, e.g. an insight into heritage policies, a profound knowledge of the management of collections and acquisitions, a familiarity with the material aspects of books and manuscripts, with the history of libraries and book collecting and with techniques of bibliographical description, an awareness of the need to open the collections to the public and of the challenges of digitisation, an understanding of the marketing of heritage collections... Will heritage librarians who are equipped with such diverse qualities be able to serve as the future Ambassadors of the Book?
Registration is now open for Unlocking the Private Library, a symposium which will be held at Winchester College, in partnership with the University of Birmingham, on Saturday 9 February.
This symposium is open to anyone interested in the past and future of private libraries as resources for scholars and communities. It will showcase new research into a range of collections, including early modern books at Hereford Cathedral and Petworth House. There will also be an opportunity to view an exhibition of books from the Fellows' Library of Winchester College in the course of the day.
The keynote address will be given by Mark Purcell, Libraries Curator to the National Trust.
Registration: £10 standard, £5 students (includes lunch and refreshments).
For details of the programme and how to register, please visit our website: http://unlockingtheprivatelibrary.wordpress.com/
In the context of a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (http://www.dfg.de/index.jsp) the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in cooperation with the Centre for the Study of the Book of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, (http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/csb/) organizes the international conference 'An experimental phase in the history of early printing: Fifteenth-century blockbooks'. During the conference, the exhibition "From the ABC to the Apocalypse. Life, Faith and Death in Late Mediaeval Blockbooks" will be opened which will be on show until 6 May 2012 in the treasure room of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
Blockbooks (xylographs) are books with a comparatively small number of pages which were produced in the fifteenth century from woodcuts and represent a form of transition between hand illuminated manuscripts and illustrated printed books. They count among the rarest and most precious items collected by libraries. Up to today, they raise numerous questions for bibliographical, art historical and philological research. Until recently, the problematic state of conservation of many blockbooks has severely hindered their scholarly examination. While cataloguing projects abroad, most recently in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, have produced important new insights regarding blockbooks, a systematic analysis of the xylographic holdings of German libraries is still outstanding.
Since 2009, all c. 90 copies of blockbooks owned by Bavarian institutions have been digitized after restoration of the damaged copies in the course of a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The watermarks in the paper were documented with a newly developed technology (thermography or infra-red photography). The project thus constitutes an organic continuation of the projects funded by the DFG for digitizing the incunabula and 16th-century books printed in German territories held at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The digital reproductions of all blockbooks are accessible on the website of the Bayerische Landesbibliothek Online: http://www.bayerische-landesbibliothek-online.de/blockbooks
Alongside digitization, scholarly descriptions of the blockbooks are created which aim at a high bibliographic standard equivalent to the more recent international catalogues which reflects the importance of the items. After the end of the project, the descriptions will be made accessible in electronic form via the internet as well as in a printed catalogue.
The conference will provide an opportunity to discuss the results achieved by the project so far with representatives of various academic disciplines. The first day will focus on questions with regard to the materiality of the blockbooks, while the second will be devoted to questions of content, function and reception relating to a selection of examples.
Prospective participants are asked to register by 31 January 2012 online: http://www.bsb-muenchen.de/Veranstaltungen-fuer-Fachpublikum.339.0.html Participation in the conference is free.
Conference programme:
http://www.bayerische-landesbibliothek-online.de/xylographa-tagung
http://www.bayerische-landesbibliothek-online.de/images/blo/startseiten/Blockbuecher/Blockbuchtagung_Programm.pdf
A one-day event exploring all aspects of Street Literature and Popular Print Traditions
Organised jointly by the English Folk Dance & Song Society and Traditional Song Forum
Contact Jo Breeze - jo@efdss.org - to be put on the mailing list for further information - with 'Broadside Day 2012' in the subject line. Even if you came last year, please still register your interest so that we get all the information in one place.
or contact Steve Roud - sroud@btinternet.com - with questions, suggestions, or to volunteer a paper or presentation.
The year 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of J. C. T. Oates, editor of the incunabula catalogue of Cambridge University Library. To commemorate Oates's contribution to incunabula studies, the Cambridge University Library Incunabula Cataloguing Project and the EIRI Project of Keio University are co-organising a one-day conference, Incunabula on the Move.
Papers will cover a diverse range of topics including the production of incunabula in Germany and England, Henry Bradshaw, the provenance of individual copies of the Gutenberg Bible, the exchange of incunabula between London and Cambridge, and J. C. T. Oates and Bibliophiles in Cambridge. Confirmed speakers include John Goldfinch (British Library), Lotte Hellinga (formerly British Library), Paul Needham (Scheide Library, Princeton University), Toshiyuki Takamiya (Keio University), Eric White (Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University), and Satoko Tokunaga (Keio University). For more details, please visit the conference website: http://incunabulaonthemove.wordpress.com/.
If you would like to attend, please return your completed registration form (available from http://incunabulaonthemove.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/regist-form-26.doc) and the registration fee (not refundable) to the conference organiser. The full registration fee is £30 (£25 for students), which includes lunch and refreshments. The registration deadline is 14 February 2012. For further information and enquiries please contact Dr Satoko Tokunaga (satoko@flet.keio.ac.jp).
Organised and Sponsored by:
The EIRI Project of Keio University, Tokyo
http://www.eiri.keio.ac.jp/
Cambridge University Library Incunabula Cataloguing Project
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/rarebooks/incunabulaproject.html
Morning: Bilateral agreements in the mid-nineteenth-century: France, Britain and Belgium
9h30-10h30
Jean-Yves Mollier, Université Versailles St-Quentin-en-Yvelines: De
la contrefaçon belge aux accords de 1852-1854.
Laurent Pfister, Université Versailles St-Quentin-en-Yvelines :
Internationalisation du droit d'auteur et droit comparé: la
convention franco-anglaise du 3 novembre 1851.
10h30-10h45 Discussion
10h45-11h15: coffee break
11h15-12h15
Blaise Wilfert, ENS: Droit d'auteur et stratégie d'éditeur :
Hachette, Dickens et la Bibliothèque des meilleurs romans étrangers.
Susan Pickford, Université Paris 13 : Les traducteurs face aux enjeux
du copyright au 19ème siècle.
12h15-12h30 : discussion
12h 30: Lunch
Afternoon: Copyright and the United States
14h-15h30:
Michael Winship, University of Texas at Austin: Napoleon Comes to
America: The Publishing of Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon Buonaparte
(1827)
Will Slauter, Université Paris 8: Marks of Ownership and
Acknowledgment: The Transformation of Newspaper Texts in 19th-Century
America.
Ellen Gruber Garvey, New Jersey City University: Mark Twain's
Self-Pasting Scrap-Book, the Authorship of Blank Books, and
Intellectual Property
15h30-16h: discussion and conclusion : future perspectives for the field
Contacts:
Claire Parfait claire.parfait@univ-paris13.fr
Susan Pickford, susan.pickford@univ-paris13.fr
Getting to Université Paris 13: http://www.univ-paris13.fr/acces-aux-campus.html
Campus map: http://www.univ-paris13.fr/images/stories/plans_des_campus/acces_v.pdf
Conference presented by Bodleian Libraries, Centre for the Study of the Book
The territorial and temporal map of the dissolved collections
CHAIR: Richard Ovenden, Associate Director, Bodleian Library, Oxford
The political and economic context that led to the phenomenon of monastic dissolution -- mapping the different territorial processes in a longue durée perspective
Fiorenzo Landi, Professor of Economic History, Università di Bologna: The dissolution of monasteries in Europe – an overall look and the economic implications
Richard Sharpe, Professor of Diplomatic, University of Oxford: The consequences of an early dissolution: the English experience in the sixteenth century and after
Different ways of breaking up monastic libraries: confiscation, destruction or clandestine removal of books
Rudolf Gamper, Librarian, Kantonsbibliothek Vadiana, St. Gallen: From Reformation to Säkularisation: the dissolution of religious houses in Switzerland and the fate of their libraries
Martin Germann, Zuürich: Zurich and the books of the monasteries: from the Reformation to the 19th century.
Mariía Luisa Loópez-Vidriero Abelloó, Librarian, Biblioteca del Palacio Real, Madrid: Dissolved monastic collections in Spain from Philip II’s suppression to the 19th-century Desamortización
Tuomas Heikkilaä, Assistant Professor of History, University of Helsinki, Finland: The Scandinavian situation, including the effect of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany
Jeffrey Garrett, Assistant Librarian for Special Libraries, Northwestern University: The expropriation of monastic libraries in Central Europe, 1773–1814
State policy toward book collections
CHAIR: Ian Maclean, Professor of Renaissance Studies, University of Oxford
Different approaches of government policy towards the dissolution of monasteries. Were governments aware of the library treasures and of their patrimonial or cultural value?
Dorit Raines, Dep. Studi Umanistici, Università Ca' Foscari, Venice: From predator to prey: The Venetian librarian Jacopo Morelli under Venetian, French, and Austrian governments, 1778-1819
Vincenzo Trombetta, Professor of the History of the Book, Università di Salerno: La politica delle soppressioni e i nuovi poli bibliotecari a Napoli tra regalismo illuminista e Restaurazione, 1767-1815
Luiís Cabral, Librarian, Câmara Municipal do Porto: State policy concerning the dissolution of monastic book collections in Portugal, esp. during the 19th century
Marie Pierre Laffitte, Dep. MSS, Bibliotheèque Nationale de France, Paris: Napoleon and the sequestration of Italian monastic book collections
Sequestration, redistribution, or contribution to the foundation of public libraries
CHAIR: Kristian Jensen, Head of Arts and Humanities, The British Library, London
Dissolution from the perspective of libraries--How did the dissolution contribute to the opening of new public libraries or influence the contents of those already established?
Jos A. A. M. Biemans, Curator of MSS, Amsterdam University Library: The 1578 foundation of the library due to the confiscation of Catholic book collections Emmanuelle Chapron, Maîre de conferences, Histoire moderne, Université Aix-en-Provence: Libraries and dissolved monastic collections in Tuscany from Pietro Leopoldo to Napoleon
Marina Venier, Dep. Rare Books, Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Roma: Andreina Rita, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, La dispersione delle biblioteche degli ordini religiosi a Roma, dalla prima Repubblica romana (1799) a Roma capitale del Regno d'Italia (1873)
Marek Derwich, Professor of History, Wrocław University & Oleh Duch, Faculty of History, University of Lviv (Ukraina): The dissolution of monasteries in Silesia and Poland (with contemporaries Belorusse, Lithuanie and Ukraine) and the fate of their libraries, 18th–19th centuries
Migration of books, access to new publics
CHAIR: Kasper van Ommen, Coordinator Scaliger Institute, Leiden University
Journeys from religious to secular reading -- changes in reading habits -- new reading publics
Antonella Barzazi, Dep. Storia, Università di Padova: Migration and re-use in the development of Italian religious collections (late 16th - 18th century)
Bart op de Beeck, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels: Jesuit libraries in the Southern Netherlands, their eighteenth-century holdings, and the dispersion after 1773
Javier Anton Pelayo, Universitat Autó́noma de Barcelona: The secularization of books and the change in the habit of reading in Catalonia during XVIIIth and XIXth centuries
Bettina Wagner, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich: 1803 secularization in Bavaria and the book auctions of 1815–50
Impact on book trade and the emergence of private collections
CHAIR: Giles Mandelbrote, Librarian, Lambeth Palace
What was the impact of the massive flow of books and manuscripts into the market? -- The emergence of a new type of collector
Dominique Varry, ENSSIB, Lyon: French book trade after the Revolution [provisional]
Marino Zorzi, Istituto Veneto di lettere, scienze ed arti, Venice: The 19th-century book trade
in Venice [provisional]
Richard Linenthal, Antiquarian bookseller: Monastic collections and the 19th-century English book trade
William Stoneman, Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library, Harvard University: North American collection building: gathering monastic books from long ago and far away
TOOLS FOR RESEARCH SESSION: Presentation of databases which allow for the reconstruction of dispersed collections: such as Medieval Libraries of Great Britain (MLGB3), Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI), Index Possessorum Incunabulorum (IPI), and CERL Thesaurus.
Conclusions
CHAIR: Nigel Palmer, Professor of Medieval German Literature, University of Oxford
Organised by:
Cristina Dondi, Dept. Modern Languages, University of Oxford, Secretary of CERL
Dorit Raines, Dep. Studi Umanistici Universitaà Ca' Foscari, Venice
Richard Sharpe, Prof. of Diplomatic University of Oxford
Conference website: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/csb/MigrationofKnowledge.htm
Organised by Professor David Finkelstein of Queen Margaret University and Professor Claire Squires
Plenary Speakers will include Dr Danielle Fuller of the University of Birmingham.
A significant development in the environment of literature and the book at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries has been the growth of literary festivals and book towns. As part of the literary marketing mix, book festivals and towns offer publishers the opportunity to promote their authors and sell their products. Such locations also provide physical and sociological spaces in which readers encounter writers and literature, and become book consumers. Book festivals and towns have clear links to regional economies, and are heavily used in the promotion of tourist destinations, as testified by the strategic partnerships and sponsorship arrangements with a variety of agencies. As part of this process, concepts of cultural identity are forged and commodified, conjoining literature to cultural heritage, the creative industries and political ideology. In the era of new media and digital delivery, the opportunity to meet authors and fellow readers face-to-face, to buy books and other merchandise, and to align a liking for literature with travel and tourism, is being taken up by hundreds of thousands of readers every year. Literary festivals and towns, while heavily promoted by digital marketing activities, afford physical meeting spaces for authors, books, readers and ideas.
To explore these events and environments, the Book Cultures, Book Events conference will bring together academic and student researchers from different disciplines with practitioners and stakeholders, to their contemporary perspectives and historical precedents. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
Proposals for papers of 20 minutes are invited. Details of the submission procedure will be available shortly.
This conference is supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and as such registration costs for the conference will be minimal.
The conference is part of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Workshop Book Events: The Transnational Culture, Commerce and Social Impact of Literary Festivals, organised in association with the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication at the University of Stirling, Queen Margaret University, and Bookfestival Scotland.
Conference website: http://www.publishing.stir.ac.uk/2011/10/23/book-cultures-book-events-conference/
For any enquiries, please contact: publishing@stir.ac.uk
To mark the AHRC project: 'The Impact of Distribution and Reading Patterns on the History of the Novel in Britain, 1880-1940' at the University of Reading, 2008-12
Confirmed speakers: Dr Mary Hammond and Dr Nickianne Moody
This one day symposium will examine the role of publishers, readers and the distributing agents of fiction on literary culture and the history of the novel from 1880-1940. It will investigate the impact that the literary marketplace had on the production of fiction in this period and consider the role that it played in the minds of authors and their publishers. How far were publishers and authors consciously seeking to produce fiction that would be acceptable to the market, and what constraints did this involve? To what extent did changes in reading patterns and in the cultural status of fiction influence what was written and produced? What contribution can the analysis of changes in distribution and reading patterns make to a new understanding of one of the most revolutionary periods in the history of English fiction?
Key areas that we suggest will be covered include:
As with the AHRC project which the symposium is designed to mark, the day aims to be interdisciplinary and will bring together publishing experts, book historians and literary critics. It will be held at the University of Reading Special Collections, where the nationally designated archive of British printing and publishers is held. The significance of publishers' archives lies in the insight they can give into the network of relations between author, publisher, retailer and consumer; the publishers' archives held at Reading have been used extensively as part of our project. The potentialities for research and the use of publishers' and book trade archives in literary studies will form part of the day's focus.
Proposals for papers should be emailed to Dr Nicola Wilson, n.l.wilson@reading.ac.uk no later than 16 December 2011. Proposals should be about 250 words in length. Please include your telephone and e-mail address on your proposal.
Organisers: Professor Patrick Parrinder, Dr Andrew Nash and Dr Nicola Wilson Department of English Language and Literature, University of Reading
http://www.reading.ac.uk/english-language-and-literature/Research/deal-novelproject.aspx
Principal Investigator Dr Martin Conboy, Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield
Outline of the Research Network
There is much work currently being undertaken in the history of newspapers in
the USA and the UK and it is the purpose of this network to bring leading
scholars in the field together to discuss how their research interrelates and
how it can be enhanced by broader disciplinary dialogue drawing on the
traditions and methodologies of history, language studies, literary studies,
and journalism studies. This interdisciplinary project is made more urgent by
the growing number of digital newspaper archives from the 19th and 20th
centuries from the USA and the UK. As we move from a research economy of
archive scarcity to one of plenty, we need to be able to set out a new, more
integrated set of methodologies which enable the wealth and diversity of these
resources to be more appropriately mined.
Each of the seminars will seek to attract high quality, publishable research which contributes to the themes of the Research Network. The seminars, located as they are in the UK, the USA and Switzerland will aim to bring together leading researchers and emerging scholars so as to enhance the international and interdisciplinary ambitions of the project. The Research Network will also co-ordinate publication with the Media History Exchange, an archive and social network sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities.
Aims and Objectives
Core Group
Adrian Bingham, University of Sheffield
Kevin Barnhurst, University of Illinois at Chicago
Martin Conboy, University of Sheffield
David Copeland, Elon University
Bob Franklin, University of Cardiff
Jane Hodson, University of Sheffield
Andreas H. Jucker, University of Zurich
Chandrika Kaul, St Andrews
Ed King, Head of Collections, British Newspaper Library
Elliot King, Loyola University Maryland
David Machin, University of Cardiff
John Nerone University of Illinois
Michael Schudson, Columbia University
Terry Threadgold, University of Cardiff
Joel Wiener, CUNY
Key Dates
14 January 2011 (Sheffield) -
Exploring digital newspaper archives
12 March 2011 (New York) -
The long popularization process: Anglo-American perspectives
18 January 2012 (Zurich) - Historical pragmatics and the language of popular newspapers
28 March 2012 (Cardiff) -
The social semiotics of popular journalism: a long view
8 July 2012 (Sheffield) -
Research methodology and digital newspapers: feasibility and sustainability
Registration is now open for the workshop.
Programme details available (PDF).
To register, please send an email before 26 March to tara.andrews@arts.kuleuven.be with your name and institutional affiliation, the day(s) you expect to attend, and whether you will join us for lunch.
When William Stead died on the maiden voyage of the Titanic in April 1912, he was the most famous Englishman on board. He was one of the inventors of the modern tabloid. His advocacy of ‘government by journalism’ helped launch military campaigns. His exposé of child prostitution raised the age of consent to sixteen, yet his investigative journalism got him thrown in jail. A mass of contradictions and a crucial figure in the history of the British press, Stead was a towering presence in the cultural life of late Victorian and Edwardian society.
This conference marks the centenary of his death. We aim to recover Stead’s extraordinary influence on modern English culture and to mark a major moment in the history of journalism. In 2012 the British Library will open its state of the art newspaper reading rooms. In Stead’s spirit we will also investigate our own revolution in newspapers and print journalism in the age of digital news.
With Stead as a focal point, we will use aspects of his career to develop multiple avenues into the history of his time and ours. This is not a narrowly focused specialist conference, but one that aims to adopt wide cultural perspectives.
Conference Organizers:
Call for Papers
We are currently calling for initial expressions of interest in this conference. Please send any proposals for papers (tentative is fine), suggestions for topics, or general queries to the organizers at stead2012@googlemail.com. We will accept expressions of interest until the end of July 2010. A full call for papers will follow in 2011.
We welcome initial proposals for papers or expressions of interest in any aspect of Stead's life, career or times. You might address any of the following topics:
Conference website: https://sites.google.com/site/stead2012/home
The Leeds Library is delighted to announce a one-day conference in collaboration with the University of Leeds, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and CILIP:s Library and Information History Group
This one-day conference will discuss the foundation and development of libraries as institutions for reading and sociability in the long-eighteenth century. The conference will cover various aspects of library history from the private library to circulating and subscription libraries.
Programme
9.30 am Registration and tea/coffee
10.00am David Allan (Reader, School of History, University of St. Andrews, UK):
Politeness and the Politics of Culture: An Intellectual History of the
Eighteenth-Century Subscription Library
11.00 am Break
11.30 am Keith Manley (National Trust, UK): Conflict and Censorship in Private Subscription Libraries Before 1825
12.30 pm Lunch (provided)
1.30 pm Rebecca Bowd (PhD Student, History of Science, University of Leeds, UK):
New Readers, New Institutions: 'Public' Libraries in Georgian Leeds
2.30 pm Mark Towsey (Lecturer in Modern British History, University of
Liverpool, UK): 'The Talent Hid in a Napkin': Informal Book Lending Practices in
Eighteenth-Century Households
3.30 pm Break
4.00 pm James Raven (Professor of Modern History, School of History,
University of Essex, UK): Bibliomania and The Private Library in the Eighteenth Century
5.00 pm Close
Booking fee: £50 - fee includes delegate pack on arrival, refreshments and lunch. Spaces are limited so early booking is recommended. Please submit fee with booking form to reserve your place. Please book by no later than Tuesday 1st May 2012.
For more information/to book a place please download a booking form from the news section of the Leeds Library website and return it with the booking fee to the Leeds Library.
Or alternatively contact Rebecca Bowd: his5r2eb@leeds.ac.uk
Programme
9.15 Registration
9.30 Technology and the mysteries of trade (Treehouse)
Ayesha Mukherjee (Exeter), The economy and philosophy of manure in Hugh Platt (title tbc)
Paddy Bullard (Kent), Isaac Walton and Joseph Moxon, on technical manuals. (title tbc)
Eleanor Decamp (Oxford), [Keep] sharpe Instruments...as neere as you can, ever hidden from the eyes of the Patient’: the visibility of surgical objects in seventeenth-century literature
10.45 Coffee
11.15 Invention, Rhetoric and the rhetoric of invention, Part 1 (Treehouse)
Tullia Giersberg (King's College, London), Cornelis Drebbel’s Perpetuum Mobile and the Contested Meanings of Invention in Ben Jonson’s Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court (1614-15)
Raphael Hallett (Leeds), ‘Invention’, ‘Creation’ and Early Modern Laboratory Culture
12.00 Lunch
1.00-1.45 Invention, Rhetoric and the rhetoric of invention, Part 2 (BS/008)
Helen Hills (York), Inventio and invenzione: from saintly relic to art and back in baroque Italy
Adam Ganz (Royal Holloway), 'Close, naked, natural' How the Lens changed writing
2.00 Making things and the cost of labour (BS/008)
Michael Harrigan (Warwick), Plantation, Labour and Technology in the Early Modern Antilles
Katherine Hunt (London Consortium, University of London) , From procedural to miscellany: how to make a firework in the mid-seventeenth century.
Cesare Pastorino (Sussex), Francis Bacon and the State Promotion of Innovation: the Early Stuart Patent System
3.30 Coffee
4.00 Getting Dirty in Early Modern England: Mines and Drains (BS/008)
Daisy Hildyard (Queen Mary's), 'The Workmen could give me very little Account of any thing': John Locke and Daniel Defoe meet miners.
Will Calvert (Cambridge), Invention, National Power, and the Limits of the Possible in Early Stuart England
Claire Preston (Birmingham), Big Dig: the poetics of early-modern drainage.
Contact Kevin Killeen (kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk) for more details.
Though print was undoubtedly in the ascendant during the period, it was through manuscript practices of writing and archiving – not print – that most people had contact with the written word. The conference investigates the relationship between an expanding print culture and the continuing power of the hand-written form.
Plenary speakers are Thomas Keymer (Toronto) and Susan Whyman (Princeton).
Deadline for proposal for papers is Friday 16th March. Send to manuscriptandprint@sheffield.ac.uk
Register here: http://history.dept.shef.ac.uk/print/
Deadline for submissions: 30 September 2011
As part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project 'Early Modern Manuscript Poetry: Recovering our Scribal Heritage', this conference will explore the role of manuscripts in the production of individual and corporate identities in early modern culture, including the commissioning, copying, circulation, and collection of manuscripts. The conference welcomes multidisciplinary approaches and is keen to consider the relationships between manuscript and print identities in the period.
Topics might include: ownership and commissioning; selection criteria (authorial, thematic, generic, miscellaneous); scribal identities; collection and donation; manuscripts and place; the construction of poetic, religious, political, and regional identities in manuscript; coteries; circulation and dissemination; manuscript afterlives; editing
Confirmed speakers include: Julia Boffey (Queen Mary, London), Arthur Marotti (Wayne State University), Steve May (Sheffield University), Mary Morrissey (Reading University), Fred Schurink (Northumbria University), Jeremy Smith (Glasgow University), and Henry Woudhuysen (University College, London)
Please submit 200-word proposals for 20-minute papers by Friday 30 September to Alan Bryson (a.bryson@sheffield.ac.uk) and Cathy Shrank (c.shrank@shef.ac.uk).
Enquiries should be directed to a.bryson@sheffield.ac.uk.
The Material Texts Network at Birkbeck convenes and encourages innovative work on the materiality of texts.
Programme
Session 1: manuscripts
Daniel Wakelin (St Hilda's College, Oxford): 'Her faileth thing that is nat yt made': imagined omissions in early English manuscripts
Eleonor Collins (Oxford University Press): Transcribing early modern theatre history: Henry Herbert's lost 'office-book'
Karen Britland (Wisconsin-Madison): Acting or sighing: royalist letters and encryption in the English civil wars
Session 2: bodies / sexualities
Jason Scott-Warren (Trinity College, Cambridge): Lambarde's Pandecta: The Book Last Seen in Queen Elizabeth’s Bosom
Heather Tilley (NPG): 'It ought never to be published': Old-maidish scruples and the disappearance of Lesbia Brandon
Session 3: remembering
Bethan Stevens (Nottingham Trent University): Spekphrasis: writing about lost works of art
Luisa Cale (Birkbeck): Re-membering the Missing Collection of Charles I
Caroline Archer (Birmingham City University): Paris underground: the missing memory of the city
Session 4: multi-media
Gill Partington (Birkbeck): A Humument
Patrick Davidson (Steinhardt School of NYU):Reading YouTube Comments: The Diamond Is The Rough
Dr Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@bbk.ac.uk) and Dr Gill Partington (g.partington@bbk.ac.uk)
Papers of 20 minutes or proposals for panels of up to three speakers are invited on any aspect of the theme 'news in early modern Europe', for a multi-disciplinary postgraduate conference to be hosted by the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
Please send abstracts of papers (max. 200 words) or panel theme with list of speakers and abstracts to Simon Davies (S.F.Davies@sussex.ac.uk) by 31st January 2012. Please http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cems/emnews/ for more information.
Limited places available
The first of 5 workshops to be held around the world aimed at promoting the preservation of and access to literary archives
The workshop will bring together a group of established scholars and experts from a variety of institutional backgrounds, and across different discplines and regions:
http://www.diasporicarchives.com/international-workshops/reading/
For more information
Contact: Ann Livingstone [a.livingstone@reading.ac.uk]
Network Facilitator
Diasporic Literary Archives Project
An Early Modern Research Centre colloquium at the University of Reading
This colloquium aims to bring together people researching the history of libraries over a wide chronological period and from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Papers and discussion will focus not only on particular cases but also on broader methodological questions about the current practice and possible future directions of library history. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.
Fee: £15 (£10 students and unwaged)
For further information, including a programme and booking form, please visit the Reading EMRC website: http://www.reading.ac.uk/emrc/events/emrc-events.aspx
What is the history of the book? This interdisciplinary event, supported by the Book History Research Network (http://www.bookhistory.org.uk/book-history-research-network) and the Merton History of the Book Group offers scholars the opportunity to share research and take part in specially-arranged events relating to book history. Researchers in all relevant disciplines (e.g. history, literature, classics) are encouraged to attend.
Programme
Meaghan Brown: 'By Examples Passed in this Realme': Narratives of Print-Production in The Mirror for Magistrates
Ruth Bush: An Ambiguous Adventure: Researching Francophone African Book History
Catherine Feely: 'Books Against Barbarism': British Marxism and the Politics of Reading
Kelsey Jackson Williams, Aubrey's Books: Reconstructing the Reading Practices of a Seventeenth-Century Scholar
Katherine Meier, The Evolution of Dublin's Book Trade: The Case of James Duffy
Liv Robinson, Booklet and Sammelband: Alain Chartier in Manuscript and Print
Thomas Roebuck, William Camden’s Britannia Through Time
Jonathan Roscoe, 'The kind of thing that makes converts': A Paratextual Publishing History of George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937-1975
John Tholen, Unique Yet Very Common: The Private Library of a Dutch Lawyer in the Early 17th Century
Lynda Yankaskas: 'The Training Up of Our Youth': Apprentices' Libraries and Republican Citizenship in Antebellum America
Special events on the day:
Julia Walworth will offer a tour of Merton College Library
Paul Nash will lead a hand-press printing demonstration at the Bodleian Hand-Printing Workshop at the Story Museum
To register, email bhrnoxford@googlegroups.com
Registration £10 full rate, £5 concession (payable on arrival). NB: numbers for special events are limited: please indicate interest/preference when registering
Keynote Speakers:
Helen Berry (Newcastle University) on Sex, Marriage and the Castrato
Joseph Bristow (UCLA) on Oscar Wilde's Sexual Practices
Cora Kaplan (Queen Mary, University of London) on Rape, Representation and Slavery
Richard C. Sha (American University) on Romanticism and the Paradoxes of Free Love
From the publication of John Cleland's Fanny Hill (1748) to D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), literature has imaginatively exploited the relationship between freedom, coercion and sexual pleasure, constantly pushing at the boundaries of what it is permissible to describe, represent and perform. At the same time, the history of print, film and theatre censorship has been told as a story of progressive unshackling from constraint. In this narrative, these ever-widening freedoms and challenges have been understood as positively beneficial to individuals and to societies. Yet the idea of sexual liberty as an unqualified good has increasingly come under scrutiny, giving way to the realization that freedom from sexual constraint can sometimes mean imprisonment in new and alternate structures of power, frustration and denial. This international, multidisciplinary conference seeks to complicate and enrich our understanding of the relation between sex, pleasure and coercion in a liberal context. It will explore the many ways in which literary and visual texts and performances can be understood to create, reinforce, question and/or dissolve these structures, as well as interrogate the complicity of publishing and the law in their framing and dismantling.
Key conference questions are:
We are interested in literary and visual texts/performances from across the cultural spectrum. We welcome papers from English, Drama, Film & Visual Culture, History, Law, Modern Languages, Sociology and Geography. Possible topics include:
Proposals of up to 300 words should be emailed by 1 November 2011 to TakingLiberties@ncl.ac.uk. Other inquiries should be directed to Dr Ella Dzelzainis at ella.dzelzainis@ncl.ac.uk.
The conference is organized at Newcastle University by the Long Nineteenth Century Research Group (School of English), with the support of the Gender Research Group and the Newcastle Institute for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities.
Call for Papers
We are seeking four or five papers of approx. 30 minutes each, one at 11.15 a.m. and the others after lunch, with ample time for discussion after each paper. Papers dealing with any aspect of printing and book production in Continental Eastern and Western Europe are warmly invited, as are papers dealing with other aspects of historical bibliography, editing, and the history of the book and reading. Papers giving an account of work in progress or offers to introduce discussion of bibliographical interest are a long-standing feature of the seminar.
Please let us know by the end of April if you are willing to give a paper.
We should be grateful if you would send us the names and addresses of potential new participants in the seminar, especially postgraduate students.
Barry Taylor (barry.taylor@bl.uk; tel 020 7412 7576); Susan Reed (susan.reed@bl.uk; tel 020 7412 7572)
There are still some openings for further participants in the 'From Text(s) to Book(s)' international and SHARP-sponsored conference that we will be hosting on 21-23 June 2012 at Université in Nancy, in France, just before SHARP Dublin. We therefore invite you to send your proposals to 21 - 23 June 2012
href="mailto:monica.latham@univ-nancy2.fr">monica.latham@univ-nancy2.fr and 21 - 23 June 2012
href="mailto:david.ten-eyck@univ-nancy2.fr">david.ten-eyck@univ-nancy2.fr before January 20th. A provisional programme will be available in Spring 2012.
Currently, sixty or so speakers, including our four keynotes, have confirmed their participation in the conference. We have listed their names and affiliations on the updated conference web page, which you can find at the following address:
The London Rare Books School (LRBS) is a series of five-day, intensive courses on a variety of book-related subjects to be taught in and around Senate House, University of London.
The courses will be taught by internationally renowned scholars associated with the Institute's Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies, using the unrivalled library and museum resources of London, including the British Library, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Senate House Libraries, and many more. All courses will stress the materiality of the book so you can expect to have close encounters with remarkable books and other artefacts from some of the world's greatest collections. Each class will be restricted to a maximum of twelve students in order to ensure that everyone has plenty of opportunity to talk to the teachers and to get very close to the books.
The courses planned for 2012 are:
Week 1: 25 June - 29 June
1. The Book in the Ancient World
2. Children's Books, 1470-1980
3. European Bookbinding, 1450-1820
4. A History of Maps and Mapping
5. An Introduction to Bibliography
6. The Medieval Book
7. The Printed Book in Europe, 1450-2000
Week 2: 2 - 6 July
1. The Early Modern Book in England
2. The History and Practice of Hand Press Printing, 1450-1830
3. The History of Writing; a wider view
4. An Introduction to Illustration and its Technologies
5. Modern First Editions; Dealing, Collecting and the Market
6. Reading, Writing and Sending Texts, 1400-1919
7. Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600: palaeography, codicology and contextualisation
Each course will consist of thirteen seminars amounting in all to twenty hours of teaching time spread between Monday afternoon and Friday afternoon. There will be timetabled 'library time' that will allow students to explore the rich resources of the University's Senate House Library, one of the UK's major research libraries. The evening programme will include an opening reception and talk, a book history lecture, and a reception hosted by a major London antiquarian bookseller.
Postgraduate credit is available for these courses at the Institute, which is one of the ten member-Institutes of the University of London's School of Advanced Study. In order to achieve the award of credit a student will have to complete and pass a 5,000 word essay within two months of the course (an extra fee to cover marking and other costs will be charged).
The fee will be £600 which will include the provision of lunch, and coffee and tea throughout the week. A small number of bursaries are available.
A range of different sorts of accommodation will be available including cheap student housing close by Senate House; Senate House is next to the British Museum in the heart of Bloomsbury.
Further details and application forms can be found at: http://ies.sas.ac.uk/cmps/events/courses/LRBS/index.htm
Fourth Annual Workshop of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP)
Intellectual property rights are generally supposed to function as means of stimulating and diffusing cultural production. This instrumentalist understanding of how intellectual property works as a cultural technology has survived for more than two centuries; it has been amplified and refined by a long tradition of economic analysis and economic history, and it has now been retrenched as the basic premise of contemporary debates about public domains, digital commons, and the expansion of corporate semiotic power. How plausible or illuminating is this pervasive representation of the agency of intellectual property rights?
There are some familiar ways of testing this representation. Lawyers and economists ask whether patent laws work as they should in the domains of, for example, software or biomedical innovation, they speculate as to the reasons why creativity in the fashion industry seems to flourish in a 'negative space' (a domain unframed by copyright law), and they ask how formal intellectual property rights work with 'social norms'. But these lines of inquiry still reduce culture to what can be rendered in terms of scarcity, efficiency, and instrumentality.
The theme of this workshop seeks to elicit alternative approaches to the cultural implications of intellectual property and cultural property laws. A rubric that turns on the terms 'culture' and 'technology' can only be open-ended, but the following questions might be taken as a rough starting point for reflection:
We invite contributions from established and doctoral scholars working in the broad field of the humanities and the social sciences, including anthropology, economic history, history of science, media studies, literary theory, science studies, and critical theory, as well as legal history and legal theory.
Papers selected for presentation at the workshop will be circulated in advance to registered participants. A maximum length of 9,000 words is recommended. Abstracts of proposed papers (together with a brief author bio) should be submitted by 1 March 2012.
Important dates
Submission of proposal (abstract and bio): 1 March 2012
Notification of acceptance: 31 March 2012
Submission of paper: 1 June 2012
Workshop: 25-26 June 2012
Contacts
For information and program updates visit the ISHTIP website at: http://www.ishtip.org.
Please also visit the 2012 LSE workshop website at: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/law/IPconference.htm
Abstracts and author bios can be submitted to any of the following for circulation among the Program Committee:
Alain Pottage -- r.a.pottage@lse.ac.uk
Tatiana Flessas -- t.flessas@lse.ac.uk
Dev Gangjee -- d.gangjee@lse.ac.uk
In 2012 Trinity College Library Dublin will mark the tercentenary of the laying of the foundation stone of the Old Library, one of the great libraries of the Western world. The balance and symmetry of the architecture have made the building an icon for the organisation of human thought and expression. Its collections span over a millennium of recorded thought.
To commemorate the occasion a one-day conference will be held on the 25th June 2012. The conference will examine aspects of the physical structure of the Library, and its alterations through the centuries, as well as focusing on the context within which its renowned early printed books and manuscripts holdings have developed.
The day promises to deliver fascinating insights into the progress of social and intellectual endeavour in Ireland, and the emergence of a world-class research library in Dublin.
Our panel of eminent speakers includes:
The conference will be held on Monday 25 June, 2012 in The Thomas Davis Theatre, at Trinity College Dublin, followed by a celebratory reception in the Long Room.
For details about the conference and how to register please go to: www.tcd.ie/library/tercentenary
Programme available and registration open!
Conference website: http://sharp2012.org/
Organised by the Centre for Postgraduate Quaker Studies, University of Birmingham, UK.
We invite all with an interest in the study of travel writing to the eleventh Borders and Crossings conference from 2-5 July 2012. The conference will be held at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, a residential study and conference centre with comfortable accommodation, good food and wonderful gardens in Birmingham, England.
Proposals for 20 minute papers and for full panels are sought from scholars working in all areas of travel writing, including literary studies, book history, geography, art history, book trade history, translation studies, anthropology, history and media studies. Current travel writers are also very welcome and there will be space for readings.
Proposals for all periods and travel writing topics are welcome. In addition to more general panels, however, there will be special panels on gay and lesbian travel writing. circulation and reception of travel books, writing of pilgrimage, travel and translation, publishing history, contemporary travel writing, Quaker travel writing, travel writing and science, and missionary travel writing. If you wish your paper to be considered for one of the special panels, please mention this in your proposal.
The conference languages are English and French and papers can be delivered in either language.
E-mail submissions are preferred. Please send a 300 word abstract. Please also include a note of your institutional affiliation, your e-mail address, a postal address at which you can be reached during the first half of 2012 and any expected audio-visual needs.
The deadline for proposals is 31 March 2012.
Proposals should be sent to betty.hagglund@woodbrooke.org.uk
Enquiries by email or to Dr. Betty Hagglund, Centre for Postgraduate Quaker Studies, 1046 Bristol Road, Birmingham B29 6LJ, England. Telephone: +44 121 415 6761
Call for papers: Extended deadline to 17th October 2011
The 4th Media History conference will focus on the ways in which people have understood the social, cultural and political roles of the media from the 15th to the 20th century. The concept of 'the media' will be interpreted broadly, so as to include print culture (including the press and publishing), cinema, broadcasting, and other visual and electronic media.
A great deal of work has been done by scholars on the institutional, political and cultural history of various media. 'Perception, Reception' will build on this literature to explore the ways in which the media have historically been understood, conceptualised, and imaginatively represented. Thus the conference will not focus on the content of the media as such, so much as the depiction, perception and reception of the media in different contexts over time.
How have readers, consumers, and the respective media industries themselves framed arguments about the media as a force for good (or evil) at different points in time? Have contemporaries always seen the media as agents of change, or is there a counter-history of the media to be written in terms of promoting conservatism, deference and order? How have people understood and represented the media in terms of concepts of personal and geographical space, time, or changing belief systems? Can we think 'internationally' about perceptions of the media in different states and nations over time, or is the media still best understood and examined in largely local or regional contexts?
We welcome proposals from a range of chronological, geographical and methodological backgrounds
Abstracts, of around 200 words for papers of between 20 to 25 minutes duration, should be sent by close of business on 17th October 2011 to mediahist2012@aber.ac.uk
'Perception, Reception' is jointly organised by the Centre For Media History, Aberystwyth University http://www.aber.ac.uk/history/research/centreformediahistory.html, the journal Media History http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/carfax/13688804.html ,the Trinity Long Room Hub http://www.tcd.ie/longroomhub, Trinity College Dublin and Swansea University. Additional enquiries can be directed to one or more of the following: Dr Sian Nicholas (shn@aber.ac.uk), Professor Tom O'Malley (tpo@aber.ac.uk),Dr Jason McElligott (jmcellig@tcd.ie) , or Professor Kevin Williams (K.M.Williams@Swansea.ac.uk).
Principal Investigator Dr Martin Conboy, Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield
Outline of the Research Network
There is much work currently being undertaken in the history of newspapers in
the USA and the UK and it is the purpose of this network to bring leading
scholars in the field together to discuss how their research interrelates and
how it can be enhanced by broader disciplinary dialogue drawing on the
traditions and methodologies of history, language studies, literary studies,
and journalism studies. This interdisciplinary project is made more urgent by
the growing number of digital newspaper archives from the 19th and 20th
centuries from the USA and the UK. As we move from a research economy of
archive scarcity to one of plenty, we need to be able to set out a new, more
integrated set of methodologies which enable the wealth and diversity of these
resources to be more appropriately mined.
Each of the seminars will seek to attract high quality, publishable research which contributes to the themes of the Research Network. The seminars, located as they are in the UK, the USA and Switzerland will aim to bring together leading researchers and emerging scholars so as to enhance the international and interdisciplinary ambitions of the project. The Research Network will also co-ordinate publication with the Media History Exchange, an archive and social network sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities.
Aims and Objectives
Core Group
Adrian Bingham, University of Sheffield
Kevin Barnhurst, University of Illinois at Chicago
Martin Conboy, University of Sheffield
David Copeland, Elon University
Bob Franklin, University of Cardiff
Jane Hodson, University of Sheffield
Andreas H. Jucker, University of Zurich
Chandrika Kaul, St Andrews
Ed King, Head of Collections, British Newspaper Library
Elliot King, Loyola University Maryland
David Machin, University of Cardiff
John Nerone University of Illinois
Michael Schudson, Columbia University
Terry Threadgold, University of Cardiff
Joel Wiener, CUNY
Key Dates
14 January 2011 (Sheffield) -
Exploring digital newspaper archives
12 March 2011 (New York) -
The long popularization process: Anglo-American perspectives
18 January 2012 (Zurich) - Historical pragmatics and the language of popular newspapers
28 March 2012 (Cardiff) -
The social semiotics of popular journalism: a long view
8 July 2012 (Sheffield) -
Research methodology and digital newspapers: feasibility and sustainability
This event, aimed at PhD students and early career researchers, is part of a long-standing collaboration between Warwick's Centre for the Study of the Renaissance and the Newberry Library and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Interdisciplinary in nature, it will especially explore and contextualize how books, both Latin and vernacular, both in manuscript and in print, were produced, distributed, and consumed in diverse fields such as literature, magic, philosophy, and medicine. The workshop will consist of a mixture of presentations by the organisers (Simon Gilson, David Lines, and Maude Vanhaelen), invited speakers, and the workshop participants, in addition to site visits such as to the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Further details are available at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/warwicknewberry/mellon-newberry/renaissanceandearlymoderncommunities/readingpublics/workshopsummer2012/
Funding (travel, meals, and housing) is available and applications are welcomed. Applications (deadline, 9th March) are submitted electronically through a link provided on the website.
Queries can be directed to Professor Simon Gilson (s.gilson@warwick.ac.uk) and/or to the Centre's administrator, Jayne Brown (renaissance@warwick.ac.uk).
A conference organized jointly by 'Print Networks' and the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester
Guest speakers:
Adam Fox, University of Edinburgh, Author of Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700
Sheila O’Connell, British Museum, Author of The Popular Print in England
Online booking is now open. Book soon to take advantage of our 'early-bird' discount!
Follow the link on the British Book Trade Index website at www.bbti.bham.ac.uk or go straight to our pages at 'shop@le' - http://shop.le.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=119&deptid=1&catid=49
Either of these links will take you to the conference programme and booking information. Any questions, please email me on jh241@le.ac.uk
Call for Papers & Conference Fellowship
Offers are invited for conference papers of 30 minutes' duration. The theme of Street Literature: Cheap Print, Popular Culture and the Book Trade is broadly defined. Papers may relate to aspects of the production, distribution and reception of ‘street literature’ (chapbooks, ballads, broadsides, newspapers, popular prints and other cheap printed matter) in the British Isles, or in other English-speaking parts of the world, between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, inclusive.
An abstract (up to 650 words) of the offered paper and a biographical statement (up to 100 words) should be submitted, preferably as an email attachment, by 31st January 2012 to: jh241@le.ac.uk A Conference Fellowship is offered to one or two postgraduate students (or independent scholars of equivalent status) whose research falls within the conference theme, who wish to present a paper. The fellowship covers the cost of attending the conference and assistance towards costs of travel. A summary of the research being undertaken, accompanied by a letter of recommendation from a tutor or supervisor, should be sent to jh241@le.ac.uk or posted to the address below by 31st January 2012.
The papers presented may be considered for publication and must therefore comprise original work not presented or published elsewhere.
Organizing committee: Susanne Bauer, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany; Maria Rentetzi, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece; Martina Schlünder, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany
The topic:
We invite proposals from scholars in the history of science, technology,
and medicine, science and technology studies, the humanities, visual and
performing arts, museum and cultural studies and other related
disciplines for a workshop on the uses and meanings of mundane things
such as boxes, packages, bottles, and vials in shaping knowledge
production. In keeping with the conference theme, we are asking
contributors to include specific references to the ways in which boxes
have played a role--commercial, epistemic or otherwise--in their own
particular disciplinary frameworks.
Boxes have always supported the significance of the objects they contained, allowing specific activities to arise. In the hands of natural historians and collectors, boxes functioned as a means of organizing their knowledge throughout the eighteenth century. They formed the material bases of the cabinet or established collection and accompanied the collector from the initial gathering of natural specimens to their final display. As 'knowledge chests' or 'magazining tools' the history of box-like containers also go back to book printing and the typographical culture. The artists' boxes of the early nineteenth century were used to store the paraphernalia of a new fashionable trend. In the late nineteenth century the box became the pharmacist's laboratory and a device for standardizing and controlling dosage of oral remedies. In the twentieth century radiotherapy the box was elevated to a multifunctional tool working as a memory aid to forgetful patients or as 'knowledge package' that predetermined dosages, included equipment, and ready-made radium applicators.
Focusing on medicine, boxes have played a crucial role since the eighteenth century when doctors ought to bring instruments to their patient's house for surgical or obstetrical interventions. In modern operating rooms boxes organize the workflow and build an essential part of the aseptical regime. Late twentieth century biomedical scientists store tissue samples in large-scale biobanks, where samples contained in straws are placed in vials, then the vials in boxes which in turn are stacked up in 'elevators'. This storage system facilitates retrieval with barcodes, indexing each individual sample so that additional variables can be retrieved from a database. Thus the container and its content are tied up in a close epistemic and material relationship.
As it is usually the case the box embodies the knowledge that goes into the chemical laboratory and its function; it classifies objects into collections of natural history; it meaningfully orders letters in a printer's composition or painting equipment for the artist' convenience; it standardizes pharmaceutical dosage forms and allows pharmacists to control the production and consumption of their remedies; in the commercial world it misleads or informs customers; it persuades consumers for the integrity of the product that they enclose; it hides the identity of the object(s) that contains, it shapes professional identities and is essential for mobilizing, transporting, accumulating and circulating materials and the knowledge they produce and embody.
Furthermore, if we do understand matter and materiality not as given, solid, continuous, and stable but rather as something being done, performed, shaped and embedded in practices, then we should examine closer how bottles and boxes themselves materialize differently in a set of diverse practices. How do they change their ontologies by migrating from the kitchen to the laboratory, from the workshop to the operating room?
We welcome innovative understandings of the role that boxes and containers have played historically and continue to play in technology, medicine, and science. We see the workshop as contributing to an ongoing interest in science and technology studies on the importance of mundane things in scientific practice and technological innovations.
Submission guidelines:
Deadline for proposals: January 15, 2012 Please submit a 300-words
abstract along with your name, institutional affiliation, email and
phone number as a word or pdf attachment to the organizers of the
conference
Proposals will be reviewed and notification of the outcome will be made in February 15, 2012. We are pursuing publication outlets for selected papers from the workshop. Therefore we expect full papers from those that will participate by May 30, 2012. Details will be provided after notification.
Conference registration fee: 50 euros
Place
The venue of the conference is a wonderful tobacco warehouse renovated
to host the tobacco museum of the city of Kavala in northern Greece.
Contact info
For further information please contact the organizers: Susanne Bauer
sbauer@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de, Maria Rentetzi mrentetz@vt.edu, Martina
Schlünder m.schluender@gmx.de
Between the Hall of Memory and Baskerville House in Birmingham, stands a sculptural tribute to John Baskerville. On the columns of Portland Stone are reversed bronze letters spelling 'Virgil', the Roman poet whose works were printed by Baskerville in 1757 in the famous typeface that bears his name. A poem in praise of the printer appeared in Aris's Gazette in 1751, entitled 'Industry and Genius' from which the sculpture takes its name.
The contribution made by printers, processes and products to their industry and the wider political and cultural world will be examined in this two day conference organised jointly by the Printing Historical Society and the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design.
If you would like to attend and have not already registered, please complete and submit the online conference registration form that is available on the Society's website. The registration fee, which includes lunch and refreshments during breaks (but not overnight B&B) is just £30.00 for PHS members and £45.00 for non-members. More information is available from theTypographic Hub website.
Wednesday 5 September 2012
1030 – 1100 Caroline Archer: Leonard Jay and the Birmingham School of Printing
1100 – 1130 Anne Brady: The Queen's primer
1130 – 1200 Tea and coffee break
1200 – 1230 Val Loggie: 'Both useful, elegant, and ornamental': James Bisset's Magnificent Directories of Birmingham
1230 – 1300 Geff Pulaski: The Grasshopper
1300 – 1400 Lunch
1400 – 1430 John Hinks: 18th century provincial printing in its urban context
1430 – 1500 David Osbaldestin: the making of the Baskerville and Caslon animations
1500 – 1530 Tea and coffee break
1530 – 1630 Show & Tell [presenters to be announced]
To request suggestions of possible hotel accommodation in Birmingham, please email the PHS Hon. Secretary (secretary@printinghistoricalsociety.org.uk).
A conference organised by the Centre for Material Texts, University of Cambridge
The shared origin of text and textile in the Latin texere, to weave, is a critical commonplace. Many of the terms we use to describe our interactions with words are derived from this common linguistic root, and numerous other expressions associated with reading and writing are drawn from the rich vocabulary of cloth. Textiles are one of the most ubiquitous components of material culture, and they are also integral to the material history of texts. Paper was originally made from cotton rags, and in many different cultural and historical settings texts come covered, wrapped, bound, or decorated with textiles. And across the domestic, public, religious, and political spheres, textiles are often the material forms in which texts are produced, consumed, and circulated.
In the light of the CMT's current research theme on the material text in material culture , we invite papers which consider any of the many dimensions of the relationship between texts and textiles. There are no historical, geographical, or disciplinary limitations. Areas to be addressed could include:
the shared language of texts and textiles
the stuff of books
textile texts
Proposals of up to 250 words for 20-minute papers should be sent to Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk) and Lucy Razzall (lmfr2@cam.ac.uk) by 30 April 2012
This year’s annual conference of the Rare Books & Special Collections Group of CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals) is now open for booking.
As hard times hit, special collections are going to have to fight for attention to ensure their survival. How do they justify their retention and help demonstrate their worth to their owners? This year’s conference is based around three themes: Does the world need special collections? What can special collections do for an organisation? What can special collections contribute to communities? Drawing together speakers from a variety of sectors, it is aimed primarily at senior managers but would be interesting and useful to anyone in the profession who holds, or may hold in the future, managerial positions.
For full details see: http://www.cilip.org.uk/get-involved/special-interest-groups/rare-books/events/pages/annual-conference.aspx
Call for papers
The parameters and interiors of British middlebrow writing and reading
have increasingly received scholarly attention in recent years.
Middlebrow writing, in fiction in particular, has been identified in
terms of a particular kind of novel, produced by a combination of
particular conditions: the writer, the market, the reader, the
publisher, the critics, the period, the theme, the setting, and the
message. Middlebrow is now understood as a highly complex sociological
phenomenon, with boundaries that are almost too flexible. It is
getting harder to be able to say: 'this, and not this, is middlebrow',
since in a certain sense, middlebrow can be demonstrated to permeate
all aspects of creative production and consumption from the early
twentieth century. While accepting that definitions are useful, it is
important to recognise that a precise definition of the boundaries of
'the middlebrow' may in reality be unhelpful for its exploration. By
focusing too fixedly on the interfaces between middlebrow and that
which is clearly, or not so clearly, not middlebrow, we lose sight of
the fluid nature of the middlebrow state of mind, and of the social
and literary contributory conditions that enabled such texts to evolve.
This conference aims to investigate the complex relationship between middlebrow writing and categories of space and place. For the exploration of this topic we seek to encourage discussion along two main trajectories: firstly, we would like to invite participants to consider the spaces and places where middlebrow writing was supported. This includes the social geographies of middlebrow as well as the topography and archaeology of middlebrow production and consumption. We are interested in hearing about research on middlebrow culture that encompasses spaces of refuge, spaces of social power, and spaces of industry and production. We want to hear about loci for writing: areas in a country, a county, a town, a village, even of a building. Where did middlebrow happen?
Secondly, we invite papers that explore the literary representation of place and space in middlebrow writing. Participants are invited to discuss the contribution of middlebrow writers to the spatial discourses that harbour the collective's sense of national, cultural and social identity. How do middlebrow writers image the places of gender, ethnicity, and class? What are their strategies for the appropriation of space and place for generating cultural meaning? We are particularly interested to learn about the experience of Empire in the first half of the twentieth century and middlebrow conceptions of home and exile, the country and city, the centre and the margins. How does middlebrow reflect and negotiate the spatial practices of society?Abstracts
The conference will be organised by Professor Christoph Ehland of the University of Paderborn, Germany, and Dr Kate Macdonald, Ghent University, Belgium. Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be
sent to kate.macdonald@skynet.be and cornelia.waechter@uni-padeborn.de by 15 February 2012. Those abstracts selected for presentation will be announced not later than 5 March 2012.
Participants: Scott Lucas, Mike Pincombe, Liz Oakley-Brown, Jennifer Richards, Angus Vine, Jane Griffiths, Jessica Winston, Kavita Mudan Finn, Cathy Shrank, Paulina Kewes, Harriet Archer, Gillian Hubbard, Meredith Skura, Matthew Woodcock, Bart van Es, Tom Davies, Michelle O’Callaghan, Anthony Martin, Andrew Hadfield.
The first major conference on the Mirror for Magistrates, ‘Fame and Fortune’ will bring together scholars from around the world to explore what’s next for this rich and undervalued work. Broadening investigation into the Mirror’s development during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, papers will take in the intellectual and political contexts of the Mirror’s inception, the later editions which appropriated and reconfigured the original text, and the profound influence the collection had on prose fiction, verse historiography, tragedy and complaint. We will consider the impact of successive editorial strategies on our interpretation of the text, while a range of interdisciplinary critical approaches will extend the framework within which the Mirror has been analysed, and prompt new directions for research.
The Mirror for Magistrates (1559) looks like a collection of verse complaints by unfortunate figures from England’s past. These complaints catalogue the fates of kings and rebels, for whom ambition, envy and betrayal have led to violent deaths, and a tendency to moralise.
But the verses alternate with a prose narrative which describes how they came to be written and collected. William Baldwin, and the poets he enlisted to help him, run into problems as they try to reconstruct late medieval history from the chronicles they have to hand: who do we trust when sources disagree? Should a bad character’s complaint be badly written? Is it right to rebel against a corrupt ruler, and is it the poet’s business to get involved in politics? Cutting to the heart of early modern debates on tyranny, duty and free speech, and critiquing contemporary historiographical practice, the hubbub of voices must be kept at a safe fictional remove to avoid the censor, or worse.
Part encyclopaedia, part project blog, the text keeps the Mirror we are promised tantalisingly out of reach as Baldwin and his band of co-authors rampage through British history, bickering about art, impersonating headless corpses, and uncovering the risks we take when we surrender the written or spoken word to interpretation.
The 1559 Mirror grew as it was reprinted in expanding editions between 1563 and 1578, to satisfy huge popular demand. Meanwhile, John Higgins and Thomas Blenerhasset wrote prequels to Baldwin’s late medieval material, extending the scope of the project back into ancient British legend and capitalising on its commercial success. The texts were read by Spenser, Shakespeare, Harvey, and Jonson; they are named-checked in Bartholomew Fair, and underpin the plots of Cymbeline and King Lear, as well as inspiring countless imitations in poetry and prose, on and off the early modern stage. In 1610, Richard Niccols brought almost all of the disparate Mirrors together in the final early modern edition; Joseph Haslewood edited the collection in 1815. Most recently, Lily B. Campbell published critical editions of Baldwin, Higgins and Blenerhasset’s work in 1938 and 1946. Unwieldy and unconventional, the Mirror has always evaded firm definitions. This conference aims to celebrate its complexity, innovation and vast influence, which even today continue to surprise.
Please visit www.mirrorconference2012.com or email mirrorconference2012@gmail.com to register or for more information.
This conference is generously supported by the Royal Historical Society and the Society for Renaissance Studies.
Keynote speakers: Prof. James McLaverty (English Department, Keele University) and Dr. John Hinks (Chair of the Printing Historical Society and Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leiecester)
Attendance: Attendance at the conference, including lunch and drinks, is free, but space is limited. To register and for further details, please contact Dr. Jenn Chenkin and Dr. Tessa Whitehouse at textandtrade15sept@gmail.com.
This interdisciplinary conference will explore relations between book production, distribution and content to re-examine our notions of textual culture in the eighteenth century. Taking intersections in current scholarship between Book History and Literary Studies as its starting point, it will explore the ways in which we can expand our knowledge of eighteenth-century literary production by revisiting the circumstances of material life in the period.
The book as object is fraught with issues of critical feedback, textual instability, editorial intervention and branding, all of which challenge our notions of author-ity. By focusing on cultural exchange, the conference will pursue questions about the significance and necessity of viewing material culture and print in conjunction. It will address theoretical and historical understandings of the complex ideological, technological and social processes that bear on the creation of print.
Programme
To mark a decade of the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) s work at the Bodleian Libraries, producing searchable, full-text transcriptions of works in Early English Books Online (EEBO), we invite proposals for research papers and posters reflecting the various ways in which TCP texts are being used.
Is EEBO-TCP revolutionizing research and teaching in early modern studies? What features would be desirable but are not yet available? What improvements could be made in the decade to come?
The TCP is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, the University of Michigan and ProQuest. It is funded internationally by a consortium of partner institutions, and in the UK through JISC Collections. TCP editions power full-text searching of ProQuest s EEBO database, and contribute to many other projects work.
To date, the TCP has produced over 40,000 full-text XML editions of books printed between 1473 and 1700. Phase I produced over 25,000 texts, and Phase II, currently underway, will complete the corpus of about 70,000 unique titles in English.
Keynote speakers: Dr John Lavagnino, King's College London; Dr Emma Smith, University of Oxford.
For people interested in using TCP texts for research, one-to-one text clinic sessions are available.
We welcome proposals for papers and posters on:
Proposals for 20-minute papers should be a maximum of 500 words, and for posters, 250 words. Deadline for proposals is 7 May 2012.
Invitations to present will be sent by 1 June 2012.
If you would like your paper to appear as part of the conference proceedings (registration required) in the Oxford University Research Archive, the deadline for submission of final papers is 29 August 2012.
We welcome proposals from graduate and post-doctoral students as well as established scholars. If you would like to be considered for a financially assisted place at the conference, please indicate this when you submit your proposal.
For further details, see http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/eebotcp/eebotcp2012. For proposal submission, details of the conference venue, and registration, please visit the University Stores. For any queries, and to book a text clinic session, please email Pip Willcox, pip [dot] willcox [at] bodleian [dot] ox [dot] ac [dot] uk.
On Tuesday 25 September 2012, Cambridge University Library will be repeating the masterclass ‘Integrating Images in the Fifteenth-Century Book’, led by Roger Gaskell, of Roger Gaskell Rare Books (http://www.rogergaskell.com/About.htm).
The invention of printing meant that identical copies of verbal texts could be produced. However the provision of exactly reproduced images, the same in each copy, lagged behind, and hand-drawn or pasted-in illustrations continued to be used. Using examples from the UL collection, this class will provide hands-on instruction in identifying and analysing the technologies of picture printing by which standardised text-image relationships were achieved.
The seminar will be held in the Sir Geoffrey Keynes Room at the Library. It will start at 2.30pm and will last approximately 90 minutes, allowing time for questions and discussion. Attendance will be limited in order to allow all attendees a chance to see the books under discussion up close, and to participate in the discussion.
To book your place, please email incunabula@lib.cam.ac.uk.
Somerville College and the Taylor Institution will host a one-day conference on manuscript culture in medieval Germany and the Low Countries, in honour of Nigel F. Palmer, whose research on late medieval writing culture has built a bridge between Anglo-Saxon and continental manuscript scholarship. The conference brings together an international group of literary scholars and art historians; please see the attached poster and programme for details. Colleagues and graduate students are welcome - if you would like to attend the conference or the public lecture by Barbara Newman, please email almut.suerbaum@some.ox.ac.uk
This is a forum for the discussion of new research and critical debates about print culture in Africa, with contributions from leading scholars in African literature, book history and postcolonial studies and publishers of African literature. Speakers include: Karin Barber, Khalid Bekkaoui, Ruth Bush, Becky Ayebia Clarke, James Currey, Archie Dick, Robert Fraser, Kate Haines, David Johnson, Beth le Roux, Peter McDonald, Jeff Opland, and Ranka Primorac.
This event is being jointly organised and funded by the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes University and the Department of English at the Open University. It has also received funding from the British Academy.
Further information, a provisional programme with abstracts and registration details are available on the symposium webpages: http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/events/ies-conferences/BookInAfrica
International Board on Books for Young People UK
National Centre for Research in Children's Literature, University of Roehampton
Now, more than ever, people are debating what constitutes a book. With the development of ebooks, apps, self-publishing and fan fiction -- as well as the popularity of book adaptations to film, TV, stage and other venues -- book boundaries are extended and broken all the time. The boundaries of children’s books have always been flexible, with merchandise included with John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket Book, published in 1744 and J.M. Barrie's classic character Peter Pan appearing in various guises before being immortalised in fiction. The 19th IBBY UK/NCRCL MA conference will consider the many incarnations of stories that take place ‘beyond the book’, as well as the impact of children’s books on wider culture, including discussions of the publishing industry and book design, digital developments, marginalia, adaptation, festivals, museums, collections, and more.
The conference will include keynote presentations by well-known writers, publishers and academics. Proposals are welcomed for workshop sessions (lasting about 20 minutes) on the following or other relevant issues/areas from any period in the history of international children’s literature:
We welcome contributions from interested academics and others researchers in any of these areas. Brief accounts of the papers that are presented at the conference will be published in the Spring 2011 issue of IBBYLink, the journal of British IBBY.
The deadline for proposals is July 31st 2012. Please email a 200-word abstract (for a 20-minute paper), along with a short biography and affiliation to Laura Atkins: l.atkins@roehampton.ac.uk
Digitization initiatives around heritage library materials are now underway across Europe. They range from single libraries working with commercial content providers, through to national, Europe-wide and even global programmes.
At this one-day conference, we will hear from those involved in the creation of these products and services, and about issues such as funding, licensing models, content selection, product design, and sustainability. We will also hear about the experiences of researchers and educators who use these digital resources in their work.
Speakers will include:
The day will conclude with a panel discussion where researchers will share their experiences of working with digitized research collections, and the impact that content selection, licensing and product design have had on their work.
The event is organized in association with the British Library and the Rare Books & Special Collections group of the Chartered Institution of Library & Information Professionals. It will provide an opportunity for librarians, students and researchers to make contacts, ask questions, and share information.
A full programme will be circulated shortly.
Attendance is free, but please register by email with your name and any institutional affiliation at: secretariat@cerl.org
Victorian Print and Popular Culture Seminar Series
4-5pm Workshop on teaching with digital resources – hosted by LJMU and Cengage Learning
5.30-6.30pm - launch of the Punch and the Victorian Periodical Press Special Collection by Dr Clare Horrocks
Dr Clare Horrocks, convenor of the VPPC strand, has been working on building a special collection at LJMU’s Special Collections and Archives entitled Punch and the Victorian Periodical Press Collection (http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/lea/114802.htm). The accompanying Digital Project is an interactive database of the contributors to Punch currently only recorded in the Punch Archive at the British Library. In December 1842 Bradbury and Evans became sole owners of the magazine, introducing the Contributor Ledgers in 1843 which started to detail who were regular contributors on the salaried staff, the title and length of their work for each week. Given the anonymous authorship characteristic of much of the periodical writing of the Victorian period, this project, in identifying these contributors, will provide crucial data for understanding not only the character of the magazine but also the social network of writers and illustrators who worked in the literary marketplace of the nineteenth century.
For more information on the Seminar Series or the Punch Digital Project, please contact: Dr Clare Horrocks (Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture and Communication) C.L.Horrocks@ljmu.ac.uk Tel: 0151 231 5035
Registration for the conference is now available – please visit The Permissive Archive: Online Registration, on the Queen Mary, University of London Events website.
Call for papers
For ten years, the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) has pioneered original archival research that illuminates the past for the benefit of the modern research community, and beyond. To celebrate this anniversary, in November 2012 we will be holding a conference examining the future of the 'Permissive Archive'.
The scope of archival history is broad, and this conference seeks presentations from a wide range of work which opens up archives - not only by bringing to light objects and texts that have lain hidden, but by demystifying and demonstrating the skills needed to make new histories. Too long associated with settled dust, archival research will be championed as engaged and engaging: a rigorous but permissive field.
We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of early modern archival work, manuscript or print, covering the period 1500 ? 1800. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Please send 300-word proposals tohjgrahammatheson@hotmail.co.uk
Submissions are not limited to the 25-minute paper. CELL will be holding a work-shop on the use of archival materials, and we are keen to hear from scholars with ideas for alternative presentations such as group sessions, trips or guided walks. Submissions will be peer-reviewed by Professor Lisa Jardine.
The 'Research on Authorship as Performance' project at Ghent University invites proposals for 20-minute papers as well as for complete panels, for a conference on the theme of 'Reconfiguring Authorship'. This three-day conference will explore facets of authorship in the Anglophone world from the Middle Ages to the present; confirmed keynote speakers include Richard Wilson (Cardiff), Margaret Ezell (Texas A&M), Dame Gillian Beer (Cambridge), and Paul St Amour (Pennsylvania).
The conference program will include keynote talks and concurrent sessions as well as a conference dinner and an optional museum excursion on the final day of the conference.
Proposals
The Romantic concept of the solitary genius (if indeed such an entity
ever existed) has for decades now been the subject of intense critical
scrutiny and revision. Recent work in the burgeoning field of
authorship studies has turned to the analysis of cultural formations
of 'authoriality' as they developed historically in a variety of
geographical locations, in relation to cultural networks and social
change, to transformations of the media, as well as to changing
perceptions of gender and personhood. The notion of authorial agency
is therefore now submerged within an elaborate tissue of critical
feedback, textual instability, editorial intervention, and accidents
of publishing, branding, and spin. And yet the Author persists, as a
nomenclature, as a catalogue entry, as a biographical entity, as a
popular icon, and as an assumed agent of creativity and innovation. As
a result, current studies of authors and authorship have to contend
with the complex issues of authorial authority, independence or
interdependence, and self-fashioning in a large variety of historical
and discursive settings.
'Reconfiguring Authorship' aims to showcase the latest, most exciting developments in authorship studies by providing a venue in which to debate theoretical and historical understanding of the complex ideological, technological and social processes that transform a writer into an author. For that purpose, we take a wide view of the notion of 'authorship' and the figure of the 'author' to include a broad range of approaches and topics. Possible topics that participants might discuss include (but are by no means limited to):
Proposals for 20-minute papers are due via email (authorship.conference@gmail.com) by March 31, 2012, and should take the form of a 1-page abstract accompanied by a short CV; in the case of complete panels, proposals should consist of an abstract and short CV for every panelist together with a short CV for the chair (if different). We aim to inform participants in late April.
The Conference theme is: 'Writing Against the Grain: Dissent, Minorities and the Press in History'.
Key note speakers:
Panel themes will include: Minorities and the Press; Labour, Politics and the Press; and Dissent and the Press.
Registration:
1 day: €40/£30 (waged); €20/£15 (student/unwaged)
2 day: €60/£50 (waged); €30/£25 (student/unwaged)
To register or for further information please see www.newspapersperiodicals.org Or contact: Dr Mark O'Brien, School of Communications, Dublin City University, Dublin 9 (mark.obrien@dcu.ie)
The DigiPal team (http://digipal.eu/) at King s College London are delighted to announce that registration is now open for their second symposium, to be held with the University of Westminster. You can register by emailing digipal [at] kcl.ac.uk
This year's theme is the implications of the increasing reliance of the scholarly community upon digital images and technologies. Bringing together art historians, palaeographers, medievalists and the Digital Humanities, the symposium will share theoretical approaches and methodologies and, crucially, test prevalent assumptions. Potential topics include:
Invited speakers include
Organisers: Robin Myers, Michael Harris, Giles Mandelbrote and The Antiquarian Booksellers Association
Authors, booksellers, hawkers and readers have always formed part of a commercial enterprise geared to the ancient formulas of profit and loss and cash flow. Finance has generally been the heart of the matter and during this conference leading specialists in book history will discuss some of the ways in which books and money intersect in the market.
http://www.aba.org.uk/fairs-a-events/details/41-book-trade-history-conference-londonProgramme
Monday 26 November
10.00 - 10.30 am Coffee
10.30 - 11.45 am Christine Ferdinand: Business plan: the case of James Rivington
11.45 - 12.15 pm Coffee
12.15 - 1.30pm William St Clair: The political economy of book illustration
1.30 - 2.30pm Lunch
2.30 - 3.45pm Mark Turner: Earning a living: Wilde’s books and journalism in the
1880s
3.45pm Conference ends
4.00 - 5.00pm Visit to Bank of England Museum
Fees
The conference fee includes coffee and lunch on both days, the reception on Sunday evening and the concluding visit to the Bank of England Museum. Registered students may apply for a limited number of reduced-rate places, sponsored by the Bibliographical Society.
Conference fee: £90
Conference fee, student: £55*
Single-day fee: £55*
Single-day fee, student: £40*
* Limited availability in each category
Early booking is recommended and places will be offered in order of receipt.
This interdisciplinary colloquium will explore the tools and environments of women's writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It aims to create new connections between texts and material objects, linking intellectual history with its material medium - paper, quills, desks, letter-cases, ink and inkwells.
Speakers and participants include:
To make sure of a place register now for this one and a half day conference!
The first day at King's College, London is FREE and OPEN ACCESS to all. To register: please email Kate Spiller: k.spiller@Swansea.ac.uk
The full day at the V&A is very reasonably priced at £25 or less so you are advised to book now to avoid disappointment: http://www.vam.ac.uk/whatson/event/1965/writing-materials-women-of-letters-from-enlightenment-to-modern-3203/
Dr Catherine Armstrong and Dr Catherine Feely, Study Day Organisers
From the pamphleteers of the English Civil War to the library of Occupy Wall Street , the image of the book has often been a central element of political propaganda. But in what ways have cultures of books and reading shaped political action and ideologies? Or, conversely, how has politics affected the form and understanding of texts?
Registration: £10/ £5 concessions (includes lunch and refreshments), payable on the day (cheque preferred), but please register in advance by emailing cathfeely@gmail.com.
Places are limited due to the size of our special venue, so please do e-mail soon to ensure your place.
For more information on the Book History Research Network, please visit http://www.bookhistory.org.uk/book-history-research-network
This conference aims to open the conversation between economic historians and historians of the book and stimulate publications and research in a truly global history of knowledge formation from the Tang dynasty to the Industrial Revolution. It will provide a timely opportunity and forum for reviewing the debate on economic divergence between occident and orient after more than twelve years of debate and feed suggestions into the now rapidly growing field of global history. As an interdisciplinary conference linked to more than three decades of widespread research on the history of the book it should interest scholars in the fields of history, economics, law, sociology, religious and area studies, and education as well as scholars in libraries and museums concerned with the storage and preservation of knowledge in book form.
Speakers:
Professor Tim Barratt (SOAS), Professor Joerg Baten (Tübingen), Professor Laurence Brockliss (Oxford), Professor Peter Burke, (Cambridge), Professor Michela Bussotti (Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient), Dr Hilde De Weerdt (King's College London), Professor Jean-Pierre Drège (EPHE), Professor Simon Eliot (SAS, University of London), Dr Aileen Fyfe (University of St Andrews), Professors Qi Han (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Professor Ian Inkster (Nottingham Trent), Professor Peter Kornicki (Cambridge), Professor Maarten Prak (Utrecht), Professor James Raven (Essex), Professor Joan-Pau Rubiés (LSE), Professor Dagmar Schaefer (Manchester), Professor Hans Ulrich Vogel (Tübingen), Professor Harriet Zurndorfer (Leiden), Professor Manel Ollé (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Public Lecture and Panel Discussion: Professor Ken Pomeranz (Chicago): Knowledge Formation and Economic Divergence between China and the West
Respondents: Professor Bill Bell (Edinburgh), Professor Mark Elvin (Oxford), and Professor Peer Vries (Vienna)
Conference Convenors: Professor O'Brien (LSE) P.O'Brien@lse.ac.uk and Dr Ting Xu (LSE) T.Xu1@lse.ac.uk
This event is FREE but registration is required.
Programme available here: http://www.britac.ac.uk/events/2013/the_production_and_circulation_of_printed_books.cfm
Our fourth annual one-day event exploring all aspects of Street Literature and Popular Print Traditions
Organised jointly by the English Folk Dance & Song Society and Traditional Song Forum
See website for booking details: http://www.efdss.org/events/eventsdetails/eventsId/684/displaydate/2013-02-23
The morning session will include short papers on our usual range of street literature topics. Some half-hour slots are still available if anyone wishes to submit a proposal.
Contact Steve Roud: sroud@btinternet.com
The afternoon will be devoted to a presentation and demonstration of the important IBBA project (Integrated Broadside Ballad Archive), described in its funding application as:
The new integrated website will be officially launched, demonstrated, and tested on the day, with plenty of opportunity for participants' questions and comments.
Call for papers
This conference in the History of Reading will bring together scholars working on the private libraries of some of the major literary figures in world literature. The aim of the conference is to explore reading habits, note-taking practices, marginalia and other traces of reading experience and book collecting in a comparative context. At the same time, the conference will offer a forum for the discussion of theories and methodologies that underpin this kind of research, as well as the problems and challenges of reclaiming, representing and editing the evidence of reading writers and writing readers from the archive.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers that explore writers' private libraries -- regardless of whether the library is real or virtual. We welcome contributions from any world culture, language, field, and period. Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged.
The following list is meant to be indicative of the possible strands, themes and topics that might be covered:
Deadline for proposals (300 words): 15 July 2012.
Note: A collection of essays from selected papers will be published.
Inquiries and proposals may be directed to: Patricio Ferrari (Universidade de Lisboa) ferraripatricio@gmail.com, Dr Jerónimo Pizarro (Universidad de los Andes) jeronimopizarro@gmail.com, Dr Wim Van Mierlo (Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London) Wim.Van-Mierlo@sas.ac.uk
For an example of a writer's private library visit Fernando Pessoa's Private Library on-line at http://casafernandopessoa.cm-lisboa.pt/bdigital/index/index.htm
Conference blog: http://writersandtheirlibraries.wordpress.com/
Speakers include Eric Kindel, James Mosley, Clare Backhouse and Angela McShane.
The registration fee of £10 includes refreshments and lunch.
For further details, including a full programme and booking form, please visit Reading University’s Early Modern Research Centre website or contact Rebecca Bullard on r.bullard@reading.ac.uk.
Organised by the Baskerville Society in conjunction with The Typographic Hub, Birmingham Institute of Art & Design [BCU] and the Centre for West Midlands History at the University of Birmingham
This conference explores the life context and significance of the eighteenth-century typographer, printer industrialist and Enlightenment figure, John Baskerville (1706-1775), from the perspective of different subject disciplines.
Baskerville was a Birmingham inventor, entrepreneur and artist with a worldwide reputation who made eighteenth-century Birmingham a city without typographic equal, by changing the course of type design. Baskerville, who made his fortune as a maker of japanware, not only designed one of the world’s most historically important founts, he also experimented with casting and setting type, improved the construction of the printingpress, developed a new kind of paper and refined the quality of printing inks. His typographic experiments put him ahead of his time, had an international impact and did much to enhance the printing and publishing industries of his day. Yet despite his importance, fame and influence many aspects of Baskerville’s work and life remain unexplored and his contribution to printing, the arts, technological change and the Enlightenment are largely unrecognized.
Call for papers
This conference will consider Baskerville’s contribution to both
typographic and eighteenth-century history. Proposals for papers
are welcome on one or more of the following themes:
Sources and bibliography
Papers of 25 minutes duration are invited from:
Please supply a 300 word proposal plus a 200 word resumé, preferably by e-mail attachment in Word to both Caroline Archer and Malcolm Dick at the addresses shown by: Monday 1 October 2012
Fees for speakers
£40 - one day; £70 - two days
Booking details will be provided in due course
Contact Details
Dr Caroline Archer
caroline.archer@bcu.ac.uk
0121 331 5871
The Typographic Hub
Birmingham Institute of Art & Design [BCU]
Corporation Street, Gosta Green, Birmingham B4 7DX
www.typographichub.org
Dr Malcolm Dick
m.m.dick@bham.ac.uk
0121 415 8253
The Centre for West Midland History
School of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT
www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/cwmh/index.aspx
A Conference on the Occasion of the Publication of Ina Kok, Woodcuts in Incunabula printed in the Low Countries
Hes & De Graaf Publishers, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands (KB) and the Dutch Book Historical Society (NBV) are organising a conference on 12 April 2013 on the occasion of the publication of the long awaited revised edition of Ina Kok's widely admired and groundbreaking dissertation on the woodcut illustrations in incunabula printed in the Low Countries between 1475 and 1501.
At the start of the conference, the book Woodcuts in Incunabula printed in the Low Countries will officially be presented, after which an international selection of speakers will present the world of the early printed book, their cataloguing and digitisation, and of course the woodcuts they contain. Speakers are Paul Needham (Scheide Library, Princeton), Lotte Hellinga (British Library, London), Bettina Wagner (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München), John Goldfinch (British Library, London),Cristina Dondi (University of Oxford), Marieke van Delft (Koninklijke Bibliotheek), Truusje Goedings and Andrea van Leerdam (Utrecht University).
Conference fee: 25 euro, including coffee, lunch and drinks (10 euro for students and members of the NBV, please mark on your payment).
Further details: http://www.boekgeschiedenis.nl/default.asp?keuze=detail&id=918
Opening times are Saturday 12 Noon-6pm, Sunday 10am-4pm. Admission £2.00.
It is a Premier PBFA Book Fair which has been held in Oxford every year since 1975 and this year is oversubscribed with almost a hundred exhibitors from all parts of the country.
This Fair is for anyone interested in books and reading and is a great place to start collecting. There will be a wide range of antiquarian, out of print and rare books for sale, from a few pounds to several thousand pounds. Selected highlights can be viewed on the website as well as detailed information about all aspects of the Fair. www.oxfordbookfair.org.
Although the past twenty years have seen a rapid growth in scholarship on early modern English manuscripts, the study of handwriting in the period still seems to be in its infancy. Methods of describing, distinguishing and identifying hands differ from scholar to scholar and, although the work of individual early modernists is often based on very substantial unarticulated ‘tacit knowledge’ about the dating and differentiation of script styles, little detailed work on the topic has been published. Most of the scholarship in the area focuses, in an ad hoc way, on high-status manuscripts and on the identification of hands associated with major figures. This one-day workshop will explore the potential for future collaboration on more comprehensive and systematic ways of understanding the variation between different hands in the period, and specifically the possibilities for a new project which will aim to produce substantial publicly-available material mapping key elements in the development of English handwriting between 1500 and 1700. Speakers and chairs will include: Carlo M. Bajetta (Aosta), Peter Beal (Institute of English Studies, London), Giles Bergel (Oxford), Colin Burrow (Oxford) Guillaume Coatalen (Cergy-Pontoise), Julia Craig-McFeely (Oxford), Tom Davis (Birmingham), Jonathan Gibson (Open University), Gabriel Heaton (Sotheby’s), Simon Horobin (Oxford), Steven W. May (Sheffield), William Poole (Oxford), Daniel Wakelin (Oxford), Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library), Henry Woudhuysen (Oxford).
It is organized by the Centre for Early Modern Studies and Merton College History of the Book Group, with the co-operation of the Bodleian Library Centre for the Study of the Book.
The workshop has been timed so that delegates can also attend one of Professor Richard Beadle’s Lyell Lectures, 'Medieval English Literary Autographs 1: Fugitive Pieces', in the same venue at 5pm.
Registration (£20, graduates £15, including light lunch) through a link on the CEMS home page, http://www.cems-oxford.org/ and a timetable and fuller details will be provided there shortly. For queries please contact Dr Jonathan Gibson, Jonathan.Gibson@open.ac.uk. Please register by Thursday 18 April.
The study of print culture or book history is an interdisciplinary challenge that has been met in different ways across the globe. The subject has been burgeoning in the Anglophone academic world for nearly two decades now, and 2013 marks the 21st anniversary of the first annual meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). While the German tradition in the study of the book was established many decades before, it seems to us that scholars from German-speaking countries are rather thinly represented internationally. We want to change this!
Please register by April 26 via email: bookhistorynetwork@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de. The registration fee is €20 (€10 for SHARP members). This includes coffee breaks. Please let us know whether you will join us for dinner so we can make reservations.
Conference programme: http://www.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/seminar/abteilungen/literaturwissenschaft/ls_korte/Bilder/networkconf
Organisation:
Doris Lechner & Stefanie Lethbridge, Freiburg
Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Mainz
A one-day symposium to engage in the conversation between performance and text.
We wish to provide a space to explore editorial practices on both sides of publication (from preparation to practice) and to explore how we use, compose, and conceptualise critical editions of Renaissance plays. The day will include a plenary panel of editors and theatre practitioners and two practical workshops.
Speakers are invited to submit proposals for 10 minute ‘provocations’ in which a question may be posed, a sticky editorial decision worked through, a long-standing practice interrogated, a new methodology explored, or something else entirely queried, crowd-sourced, considered, contested or created. Suggested topics include but are not limited to:
We also welcome proposals for 15-20 minute papers or workshops. A limited number of volunteer actors may be available for workshops; anticipated requests ideally would be included in your proposal. Please submit 150-word abstracts, along with brief biographical statement to C K Ash at cxa052@bham.ac.uk by Friday 15 March. Accepted proposals will be notified 22 March. Please do not hesitate to e-mail her with any questions about the event.
Organised by the Children's Books History Society
Programme
10.15 Pat Garrett & Matthew Grenby - Welcome
10.30 Andrea Immel: Rewriting the history of children's book illustration: The contribution of the House of Newbery
11.15 David Stoker: The pitfalls of seeking respectability: the rise and fall and rise again of John Marshall
12.00 Jill Shefrin: Pasted on Boards, for Hanging up in Nurseries: the Engraver, the Printer and the Juvenile Novelty Market, 1660-1825
12.45 LUNCH
1.45 Nigel Tattersfield: Saint or Sinner? Thomas Saint of Newcastle. Bookseller, printer and pirate
2.30 Matthew Grenby: William Godwin's Juvenile Library: 'a talent for the production of books for children' versus 'Things as they are'
3.15 Brian Alderson, and speakers: Summation and 'looking ahead
4.00-4.30 Close and Tea
Nearest Stations: Hammersmith (District, Hammersmith & City, Piccadilly Lines); Olympia (Rail and District Line) The school is about a 5 minute walk from Hammersmith Station, and a 10 minute walk from Olympia.
Bus routes 9, 10, 27, 33, 72, 190, 211, 220, 266, 267, 283, 391
Parking: There is pay and display parking (£3.00 per hour for up to 8 hours) on Brook Green and the surrounding roads.
Entrance through large main door, ring bell.
Fee: £25 CBHS Members, £30 non-members. This includes refreshments and a sandwich lunch. Please contact The Secretary, Robert Kirkpatrick rkirkpatrick.molesworth@virgin.net for a booking form.
This conference will question the relevance of the notion of a common European reader with regard to the evolution of reading practices from the so-called reading revolution in the 18th century until the current digital revolution. Europe is known as the birthplace of books, and it remains a major seat of book publishing and translating. Since an early stage its strongly established book culture has implied the durable circulation of books. This tradition has contributed to cultural exchanges and to the creation of reading communities across national borders. A relationship to the book and to reading, as well as their promotion and enhancement, seems to be a common value and a significant component of European identity. However, book policies and reading practices in Europe have varied from one region to another throughout history. Such idiosyncrasies – whether regional, national, social, economic, cultural or legal -- make European identity recognizable even though nowadays globalization and the digital revolution tend to reduce those specificities.
Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier's A History of Reading in the West (Polity Press, 1999) has taught us that reading is not an abstract action: it realizes itself through practices, situations, and readers, who “are never faced with an abstract, ideal text detached from everything material: they manipulate objects; they listen to words whose modalities govern the way they read or listen, but in the process also govern ways of comprehending the text.” Taking into account the strong link between texts, forms and readings as well as the fact that reading has not remained immutable, this interdisciplinary conference will study the elements of continuity and disruption that are characteristic of the uses of texts and of reading practices in 18th-21st-century Europe.
The conference welcomes proposals on the following topics
We have planned a pre-workshop for early career researchers (including PhD students and post-docs) interested in all aspects of children’s, teenagers’ and young adults’ reading practices. This pre-workshop will consist of a poster session with a moderator.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Proposals for 20-minutes presentations should be sent to the program committee before December 7th, 2012: Prof. Brigitte Ouvry-Vial Textes-Formes- Lectures2013@univ-lemans.fr
Proposals of posters (A1) for the pre-workshop should also be sent to Corinna Norrick-Rühl norrick@uni-mainz.de
SCHEDULE:
Deadline for submission of proposals: 7th December 2012
Notification of acceptance: 15th January 2013
Deadline for confirmation of participation: 1st February 2013
Practical details (registration fees etc.) will be sent with the notification of acceptance
GUEST SPEAKERS:
Opening lecture by Prof. Roger Chartier (Collège de France)
Closing lecture by Prof. Bernard Lahire (Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et
Sciences Humaines)
PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Laurent Bazin (University Versailles - Saint-Quentin-en- Yvelines), Jean-François Botrel (University Rennes II), Lodovica Braida (University Milano), Hans-Jurgen Lüsebrink (University Sarreland), Brigitte Ouvry-Vial (University Maine), Nathalie Richard (University Maine), Jürgen Ritte (University Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle)
INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERS: SHARP; Universitédu Maine (Le Mans) ; Lab 'Langues, Littératures, Linguistique' Universities of Angers and Maine; Dipartimento di Studi storici from Università degli Studi Milano and APICE; Ville du Mans ; Carré Plantagenêt, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire (le Mans).
LOCATION : Le Mans is located 50 mn from Paris by train. In the middle of Region Pays-de-la-Loire, it is famous for its white wines, its /Rillettes/ special pâté, and aside from the formula One race '24 heures du Mans', it features several theater companies and a stunning historical district, Cité Plantagenêt (the film Cyrano de Bergerac was shot there), where conference participants will enjoy crawling.
Organised by Early Modern Studies in Scotland Seminar
A one-day symposium exploring the agency of the hand in textual transmission
Programme
1-2.45: Scribes and Scripts
Sebastiaan Verweij (Oxford): In Praise of Scottish Scribes
Steve W. May(Emory/Sheffield): Matching Hands in English Renaissance
Manuscripts: A Case Study
Jonathan Gibson (Open University): Varieties of Italic
2.45-3.15: Tea and Coffee
3.15-4.30: Re-descriptions: the hand in the printed text.
Katherine Acheson (Waterloo): Writing in Bibles: The Example of
Folger 2190 (1603)
Fred Schurink (Northumbria): Re-Reading Tudor Translation from the
Margin: Gabriel Harvey's Annotations to Richard Morison's Stratagems
(1539)
For further information please contact the organiser Andrew Gordon: a.gordon@abdn.ac.uk
A Book History Research Network Study Day
Programme
9.30 Registration (tea and coffee available)
10.00 Welcome
10.15 Session 1
Daliah Bond (Aberdeen) Defining the Scottish Chapbook: a description of the
'typical Scottish chapbook'
Gervase French (Leicester) Newcastle's Chapbook Literature: rival identities
and popular culture, 1750-1832
Jack Mockford (Hertfordshire/British Museum) Flash Notes: imitation paper
money in late Georgian England
11.30 Tea/Coffee
12.00 Session 2
Geraldine Marshall (Birmingham City) Birmingham’s Graphic DNA: reading the
'word city' through signage, architectural letter forms and the typographic landscape
Sandro Jung (Ghent) The Topography of Urban Architecture: Peacock's The
Polite Repository, 1800-1820
Caroline Archer (Birmingham City) Paris Underground: the missing memory of
the city
1.15 Sandwich lunch
2.00 Sarah Kirby, Printmaker, Artist in Residence at the Centre for Urban
History
2.30 Session 3
Rosa Smurra (Bologna) 'Studium', Manuscript Books and Urban Landscape:
Bologna, 13th/14th centuries
Sarah Laseke (Oxford) Scribes in the City: the urban manuscript production of
romances in the 15th Century
3.20 Tea/Coffee
3.50 Session 4
Matt Harle (Birkbeck) Tomorrow's London: the GLC and London's abandoned
future of the 1960s
Rathna Ramanathan (Central St Martin’s) London's Little Presses
4.40 Final discussion
5.00 End
Fuller details (PDF): http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/urbanhistory/news/Text%20and%20Image%20in%20the%20City%20CfP.pdf
COST: £10 (PAY CASH ON THE DAY) FOR REFRESHMENTS AND A SANDWICH LUNCH. To reserve a place email John Hinks: jh241@le.ac.uk.
Programme
11.00 Registration and Coffee
11.45 PABLO ALVAREZ (University of Michigan), The Literary Sources of Alonso Víctor de Paredes’s Institución, y origen del arte de la imprenta, y reglas generales para los componedores [Madrid, 1680]
12.30 Lunch (Own arrangements).
1.45 ALESSANDRO TEDESCO (University of Udine), Texts and images in printed
editions of accounts of pilgrims' journeys to the Holy Land: the characteristics
and evolution of the editorial genre of Itinera ad Loca Sancta, from the fifteenth
to the eighteenth century
2.30 JONATHAN HENSHER (University of Manchester), 'Cover Girls' - The
representation and changing roles of women in illustrated title pages from Italian
and French editions of Orlando furioso, circa 1600-1850
3.15 Tea
3.45 GODFRIED CROENEN (University of Liverpool), Reconstructing a publication
history in the manuscript age: identifying and dating authorial and scribal versions
of Book I of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles
4.30 SUSAN REED (British Library), A tale of two cities: print culture of the 1848
revolution in Berlin and Vienna
The Seminar will end at 5.15 pm.
Please notify us by email or by post using the form below if you are able to attend.
Barry Taylor (barry.taylor@bl.uk; tel 020 7412 7576)
Susan Reed (susan.reed@bl.uk; tel 020 7412 7572)
An international conference on collecting, editing, performing, producing, reading, and reviving Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle
Keynote Speaker: Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA)
Call For Papers
This conference places Romanticism at the core of the British Fin de Siècle. As an anti-Victorian movement, the British Fin de Siècle is often read forwards and absorbed into a 'long twentieth century', in which it takes the shape of a prehistory or an embryonic form of modernism. By contrast, Fin-de-Siècle authors and critics looked back to the past in order to invent their present and imagine their future. Just at the time when the concept of 'Victorian' crystallized a distinct set of literary and cultural practices, the radical break with the immediate past found in Romanticism an alternative poetics and politics of the present.
The Fin de Siècle played a distinctive and crucial role in the reception of Romanticism. Romanticism emerged as a category, a dialogue of forms, a movement, a style, and a body of cultural practices. The Fin de Siècle established the texts of major authors such as Blake and Shelley, invented a Romantic canon in a wider European and comparative context, but also engaged in subversive reading practices and other forms of underground reception.
The aim of this conference is to foster a dialogue between experts of the two periods. We welcome proposals for papers on all aspects of Fin-de-Siècle Romanticism, especially with a cross-disciplinary or comparative focus. Topics might include:
Deadline for abstracts: 30 January 2013 (extended!) Please email 300-word abstracts to romanticfin@bbk.ac.uk
Conference organisers: Luisa Calè (Birkbeck) and Stefano Evangelista (Oxford). This conference is co-organised by the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the English Faculty of Oxford University with the support of the MHRA
Applications are now invited for London Rare Books School (LRBS), taking place 24 - 28 June 2013 and 1 - 5 July 2013.
The application form is available from the Institute of English Studies website: http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/study-training/research-training-summer-schools/london-rare-books-school/application-bursaries.
Courses are £600, and a £100 deposit is requested upon application. A limited number of bursaries are available. Placements are offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Courses may be taken for academic credit http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/study-training/research-training-summer-schools/london-rare-books-school/fees-credit
The courses are taught by internationally renowned scholars associated with the Institute's Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies, using the unrivalled library and museum resources of London, including the British Library, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Senate House Libraries, and many more. All courses stress the materiality of the book, and each class is restricted to a maximum of twelve students.
Applications should be submitted to IESEvents@sas.ac.uk.
The course programme is below. For further details, see the LRBS website: http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/london-rare-books-school
Week one: 24-28 June 2013
The Book in the Ancient World
Children’s Books, 1470-1980
An Introduction to Bibliography
Mapping Land and Sea before 1900
The Medieval Book
The Printed Book in Europe, 1450-2000
Type and its Uses, 1455-1830
Week two: 1-5 July 2013
The Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian Book, c600-1050
European Bookbinding, 1450-1820
The History and Practice of Hand Press Printing, 1450-1830
The History of Libraries from the Middle Ages to the Present
An Introduction to Illustration and its Technologies
Modern First Editions: Dealing, Collecting and the Market
Modern Literary Manuscripts
This interdisciplinary seminar will bring researchers together to explore the question of how reading is implicated in diverse forms of conflict, including class conflict, military conflict, and conflict over political questions such as race and immigration. Presentations of cutting edge research on reading from the 19th century to the present day will be followed by group discussion of current knowledge and future directions for research and publication.
Programme
10.00 Tea / coffee
10.15 Welcome and introductions
10.30 Rosalind Crone, History, The Open University: Reading in the 19th century prison
11.00 Edmund King, English, The Open University: Reading in a conflict zone: E.W. Hornung, the YMCA, and the reading soldier in the First World War
11.30 Catherine Feely, History, University of Sheffield: Fighting for the right reading : the struggle for Karl Marx's
Capital
12.00 Lunch
13.00 Daniel Allington, Language and Communication, The Open University: Not reading in conflict: the status of The Satanic Verses during the Satanic Verses controversy
13.30 Vincent Trott, History, The Open University: Horror, heroism, and the humble Tommy : reader responses to Great War autobiographies in the 21st century
14.00 Alex Laffer, Language and Communication, The Open University: Conflicted positioning: how reading groups talk about a fictional asylum seeker
14.30 Tea / coffee
14.45 Group discussion
16.00 Close
Attendance is free but booking is essential. For booking and queries, please contact Alex Laffer (a.laffer@open.ac.uk).
Organized by Sietske Fransen (Warburg Institute) and Niall Hodson (Durham University) in collaboration with Prof. Joanna Woodall (Courtauld Institute), Dr Eric Jorink (Huygens ING) and Prof. Peter Mack (the Warburg Institute).
Keynote speaker: Prof. Sven Dupré (Freie Universität Berlin)
Paper proposals are invited for a one-day colloquium on the role of translation and translators in the circulation of knowledge in Early Modern science.
In recent decades, scholars have offered myriad new insights into the exchange and propagation of scientific ideas in the early modern Republic of Letters. Within this vibrant field, however, the part played by translation and translators remains little studied. This colloquium will explore the role of translation in early modern science, providing a forum for discussion about translations as well as the translators, mediators, agents, and interpreters whose role in the intellectual history of the period remains ill defined and deserves greater attention. The topics listed below offer some guidance for proposals:
Proposals for 25-minute papers should be submitted to Niall Hodson (n.d.hodson@durham.ac.uk) and Sietske Fransen (sietske.fransen@postgrad.sas.ac.uk) by 28th February 2013. A dedicated committee will evaluate the proposals and respond to submissions by 15th March 2013.
Proposals should ideally take the form of a 500-word abstract.
This colloquium is supported by the Warburg Institute and Durham University, and is organized in collaboration with the Visualizing Knowledge in the Early Modern Netherlands project at the Courtauld Institute, London
Tim Munby pioneered the historical study of British book collecting and the use of sale catalogues to trace the history of taste in books. His work brought sale catalogues into the academic domain as important literary and historical documents worthy of study. Munby's five-volume Phillipps Studies provided the first comprehensive account of bibliophiles and book dealers of the nineteenth century. His other works include The Cult of the Autograph Letter in England, Connoisseurs and Medieval Miniatures, 1750–1850 and a book of ghost stories, The Alabaster Hand.
Munby was Fellow and Librarian of King's College, Cambridge, from 1947 to 1974, having worked previously in the antiquarian book trade. He was Lyell Reader in Bibliography at Oxford 1962-63, a Founding Trustee of the British Library, President of the Bibliographical Society and co-founder of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society. His scholarship, kindness and sense of fun won him many admirers.
King's College will hold a conference on 28-29 June 2013 to mark the centenary of Munby’s birth. The theme, 'Floreat Bibliomania - Great Collectors and their Grand Designs' will provide an opportunity to map current and future developments in the study of collectors and collecting.
Principal speakers include Nicolas Barker, Penelope Bulloch, Christopher de Hamel, Anthony Edwards, Anthony Hobson, Peter Jones, David McKitterick, David Pearson, and Toshiyuki Takamiya. Reflecting Munby’s generosity to students, the event will also feature panels of young bibliographers and book collectors. Delegates will have the chance to visit private exhibits in the Founder’s Library of the Fitzwilliam Museum and in the King’s College Library, as well as a special Munby exhibit at the Cambridge University Library.
A celebratory reception and dinner will take place on the first evening of the conference.
Conference website: http://www.kingsmembers.org/Munby2013
Reminder - the deadline for bookings is 7 June.
Library and Information History Group's 2013 Conference, at a satellite to CILIP Umbrella (which starts on the Tuesday)
The conference is packed with papers that are bound to generate discussion. From the effects of austerity on collection development to the organisation of voluntary libraries, the historical perspective is strikingly relevant to the challenges facing libraries today. Papers cover a range of topics from mobile libraries to academic liaison.
It is very reasonably priced and highly accessible, with registration from 10.30 to allow for travel time.
The full programme, further details about the venue, and booking form are all available from www.lihg.org/conference
Speakers:
Antonio Castillo Gómez (Universidad de Alcalá)
Marina Garone (Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
Victor Infantes (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Alberto Montaner Frutos (Universidad de Zaragoza)
Fermín de los Reyes Gómez (Universidad Complutense)
Enrique Villalba (Universidad Carlos III)
Organiser: Benito Rial Costas (benito@ombrettaetc.net)
Registration now open: http://transitionsbtp.wordpress.com/fees-registration/
Bath Spa University's Book, Text, and Place 1500-1750 research centre hosts a biannual conference devoted to early modern literary culture, place, and the history of the book. Following upon the success of our inaugural conference, Book Encounters, 1500-1750, this year’s conference will focus on the theme of Transitions, whether material, spatial and/or temporal in the period 1500-1750. This conference will held 4-5 July, 2013 at our wonderful Corsham Court centre, just outside Bath.
Plenary Speakers:
Professor Julie Sanders (University of Nottingham)
Professor Marcus Walsh (University of Liverpool)
Professor Henry Woudhuysen (Lincoln College, University of Oxford)
Transitions 1500-1750 aims to explore a wide range of transitions from a variety of critical and historical perspectives. We are particularly interested in papers that reflect on the impact that such transitions had on early modern subjects, institutions, material culture, habits of thought as well as literary, social and cultural practices. Different disciplinary perspectives are especially encouraged. Possible topics of study include:
Please send proposals for papers (20mins) and any queries to transitionsatbathspa@gmail.com by 31 March 2013 [extended deadline].
The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) will hold its annual conference at the University of Salford, on 12th and 13th July 2013. As always, proposals for papers that address any aspect of nineteenth-century British magazines or newspapers will be considered. However, this year, we particularly encourage proposals on ‘tradition and the new’ in the nineteenth-century press. Possible topics might include:
Please e-mail two-page (maximum) proposals for individual presentations or panels of three to RSVP2013@rs4vp.org. Please also include a one-page C.V. with relevant publications, teaching, and/or coursework. Several merit-based travel grants will be made available to students; please indicate if you would like to be considered for one of these. Final papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) to present. The deadline for submissions is February 1st, 2013.
For more information about the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, visit RSVP's website at http://rs4vp.org
Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers for Gendering the Book, a one-day conference to be held at the University of Leeds on the 13th of July 2013. The conference will close with a keynote address from Professor Richard Cronin (University of Glasgow).
This conference aims to connect recent scholarship in the areas of book-history and material culture to work on Romantic constructions of masculinity and femininity by considering how men and women in the long eighteenth century imagined their relationship to textual objects. How did cultures of production, consumption, and exchange contribute to the construction of gendered identities? Did these practices and identities change over time, and how far was the book itself a gendered object?
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
Please send abstracts of 250 words and any other queries to Cassie Ulph and Alys Mostyn at genderingthebook@gmail.com. Deadline for submissions: March 1st 2013.
Conference website: http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/lectures/SHARP2013/
Guest speakers: Professor Bill Bell (Cardiff University) and Anthony Payne (Anthony Payne Rare Books & Manuscripts).
Booking is now open! Programme and booking details (payment by PayPal) are here: www.bookhistory.org.uk/print-networks/events
The thirty-first Print Networks Conference on the History of the British book trade will take place at the University of Chichester on 23rd-25th July 2013.
Due to the proximity of the conference venue to the south coast, ‘Travel, Topography and the Book Trade’ has been chosen as the theme for the conference. The theme is broadly defined, and any papers relating to the production, distribution and reception of texts and images about travel, imagined and real, from the Middle Ages to the modern era will be considered.
The Print Networks Conference also offers an annual fellowship to a postgraduate scholar whose research falls within the parameters of the conference brief, and who wishes to present a paper at the conference. The fellowship covers the cost of attending the conference and some assistance towards costs of travel. A summary of the research being undertaken accompanied by a letter of recommendation from a tutor or supervisor should be sent to the above address by 31st January 2013.
The papers presented will be considered for publication; details to follow at the conference. It is understood that papers offered to the conference will be original work and not delivered to any similar body before presentation at this conference.
En-suite accommodation will be provided on the Bishop Otter campus of the University of Chichester. In addition to a full programme of papers, there will be a conference dinner and a visit to the special collections of the University of Chichester library.
Posted by John Hinks on behalf of the Print Networks conference committee. Please direct all enquiries to Catherine Armstrong: C.M.Armstrong@mmu.ac.uk
Keynote speaker: Dr Helen Smith (University of York)
Paratexts, as Gérard Genette describes them, are liminal textual elements -- such as prologues, glosses, notes, title pages -- that mediate relationships between the parties interested in the book. This conference seeks to explore how these elements manifest themselves and function within early modern literature. A range of speakers will present their research across seven panels: People of the Paratext; Prefacing the Text; 'And Another Thing...'; The Paratext Proper; Disrupting Reading; Shaping and Reshaping; Reading Materials. Further details can be found in the programme, and the call for papers, downloadable from the conference website.
Conference website: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/events/2013/1489.html
If you have any queries, please contact the organising committee by emailing earlymodernparatexts2013@gmail.com.
'News Networks in Early Modern Europe', a research network funded by the Leverhulme Trust and based at Queen Mary, University of London, is delighted to announce a three-day international symposium, to be held in Summer 2013 on the topic 'News and the Shape of Europe, 1500-1750'. The symposium is the culminating event of the News Networks project, a two-year interdisciplinary research project with members in England, France, Italy, the Low Countries and Spain, and with associates in Scotland, Portugal, Austria and Germany. Through a series of co-ordinated research meetings over two years, the project has examined methodological challenges and developed new approaches to a European history of news.
There has been much work done by historians and literary scholars on national histories of news. Yet news in early modern Europe was a distinctively transnational phenomenon; its topics were international in scope; the forms and terminologies of news, as well as the news itself, crossed national boundaries; practices of news-gathering relied on networks of international agents; it was widely translated; it travelled along commercial routes, or through postal networks that developed in express imitation of one another and were designed to be mutually connected; and the forces attempting to control the press operated, or attempted to operate well outside of their actual jurisdiction. The spread of news and the appetite for it reflect changes in the geopolitical and confessional maps of Europe, spreading through ethnic and religious diasporas as well as diplomatic, mercantile, and scholarly networks. It helped forge communities on a local, national and international scale.
This event will combine contributions from graduate students, emerging scholars and established academics with presentations of the research findings of the network. Proposals for papers are invited on topics sympathetic to the theme News and the Shape of Europe, 1500-1750. These might include, but are not limited to:
Proposals for papers of 20 minutes should be submitted by the 28th of February 2013, in the form of abstracts of not more than 250 words. Please send abstracts, as well as all other enquiries about the event, to: n.j.moxham@qmul.ac.uk
The conference is intended as an opportunity to explore the current state of early modern textual studies and editing, and to consider possibilities for the future. There will be a particular focus on developing potential for collaborative work through scheduled networking sessions. Proposals including project demonstrations or ideas are encouraged, as are submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers.
Please send proposals of no more than 300 words, together with a brief biography (100 words maximum), to eebotcp@bodleian.ox.ac.uk. Acceptances will be notified by Monday 29 April 2013.
Conference website: http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/eebotcp/conferences/conference-eebo-tcp-2013/
Programme now available: http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/eebotcp/conferences/conference-eebo-tcp-2013/programme/
To celebrate the re-opening of the largest public library in Europe and its outstanding special collections The Library of Birmingham, Newman University College Typographic Hub at Birmingham City University and The Library of Lost Books have united to host a three-day conference on the theme of 'Resurrecting the Book'.
The conference will run in conjunction with 'The Library of Lost Books Project', a major exhibition of 50 de-accessioned books which have been given new life as objects redesigned into works of art and which will form part of the opening festival for the new Library of Birmingham in 2013. The conference will include an opportunity to visit the 'The Library of Lost Books Project' and attend artists’ talks on re-working the books.
With e-book downloads outstripping the purchase of hard copies, with libraries closing and discarding books and with the value of the book as physical object being increasingly questioned, this interdisciplinary conference will bring together academics, librarians, artists, creators, designers, and users of books to explore a wide variety of issues pertaining to the creation, design, construction, use, reuse, preservation, loss, and recovery of the material book, electronic and digitized books, and of collections and libraries.
Abstracts on the conference themes and their intersection and covering any historical period are invited.
Application Process: Abstracts of no more than 400 words accompanied by a 50-word biographical profile should be sent to both
Dr Matthew Day
m.day@newman.ac.uk
0121 476 1181
Dr Caroline Archer
caroline.archer@bcu.ac.uk
0121 331 5871
Deadline - Friday 1st February 2013. Further details are available at www.resurrectingthebook.org
Call for papers: Deadline for paper proposals: 1 June 2013
The 10th conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship will be organised at the École normale supérieure in Paris by the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM, UMR 8132) and the research team 'Textes, histoire et monuments, de l'Antiquitél au Moyen Âge' (THEMAM, UMR 7041 ARSCAN).
Treated either as a deviation to be eliminated or as a creative transformation, variation is central to every form of textual scholarship. It is high time to confront the various conceptions of what constitutes a variation, to see what they have in common and what irreconcilable differences remain - though it would be paradoxical for a conference devoted to variance to aim at absolute uniformity.
ESTS conferences are characterised by a combination of formal plenary sessions and traditional paper presentations in panel sessions with three speakers, followed by lively exchange, dialogue and interaction between speakers and audience in many small groups. There will also be an opportunity for poster presentations of current projects.
We encourage submissions related to any of the following topics:
The conference is organised according to a number of thematic sessions. Submissions are welcome on all topics related to the theme of the conference, regardless of linguistic contexts, time periods, geographic areas or types of documents and texts. This includes interdisciplinary perspectives from all branches of scholarly editing, as long as the focus of the proposals is on the guiding principles and practices of editorial scholarship. Graduate students are encouraged to participate.
Please submit your proposal before 1 June 2013, by email to ests2013paris@gmail.com. You will be notified by 1 July 2013 whether your proposal has been accepted or not.
Proposals for papers
Abstracts in English (500 words maximum) are to be submitted to the organising
committee, along with the presenter’s name, concise biography, address,
telephone, email and institutional affiliation. Speakers will have 20 minutes
to deliver their paper, leaving room for a 10-minute discussion.
Proposals for panel sessions
A typical panel should include 3 (exceptionally 4) speakers and one moderator
(session chair). Each session lasts for 1 hour and a half, always allowing 30
minutes for questions and discussion. Proposers should submit the following
elements:
1. Session title and introduction (approximately 100 words)
2. Titles of the papers
3. Abstracts for each paper (500 words maximum)
4. A short biography for each participant and for the panel chair
(approximately 100 words)
5. Institutional affiliation and address for each participant
6. Audio-visual and other technical requirements
Proposals for poster presentations
There will be a poster gallery. A poster should be a visual representation
and/or a demo of your material. The aim is to present information and initiate
informal discussion among delegates. Posters should not exceed 80 cm × 120 cm.
If you provide a photograph of yourself and a mobile phone number, other
attendees will be able to get in touch with you. Please submit a one-page
proposal with an overview of the poster and your contact details.
Participation and registration
Participants who contribute to the conference through a paper, a panel or a
poster session need to pay the conference fee and have to be members in good
standing of the European Society for Textual Scholarship for 2013 (except
invited speakers). More information about registration and possibilities of
accommodation will be published soon on a conference website.
For more information about the ESTS, please see
http://www.textualscholarship.eu/. Your current membership status is indicated
at http://ests.huygensinstituut.nl/.
Plenary Speakers
Paddy Bullard (University of Kent)
Valerie Rumbold (University of Birmingham)
Abigail Williams (University of Oxford)
Registration
There will be a conference fee of £20 which will cover lunch, coffee, and tea.
Participants will be invited to a reception at St Peter's to celebrate the publication of the Cambridge edition of Swift's Journal to Stella, edited by Abigail Williams, and a collection supplementary to the edition, Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book, edited by Paddy Bullard and James McLaverty.
All enquiries should be addressed to the Conference Coordinators, Abigail Williams and James McLaverty, at swift@spc.ox.ac.uk.
Keynote speakers: Professor Kristin Bluemel, Monmouth University, Professor Christoph Ehland, Universitüt Paderborn, and Professor Dirk De Geest, Katholiek Universiteit Leuven
This two-day conference intends to extend the well-established study of 20th-century anglophone middlebrow texts and authorship, to investigate how European literary cultures from 1880 may be examined for evidence of middlebrow writing, reading and production. This may be as a borrowed literary phenomenon through translation and assimilation, or as an indigenous pan-European cultural movement that has hitherto been obscured by a focus on modernist cultures. Since the 1980s, the study of middlebrow literary productions and authors has become a strongly emergent movement in anglophone literary research. 'Middlebrow' was first used to describe a particular stream of cultural production in the 1920s, first in British and Irish newspapers, and soon after in critical writing by notable cultural authorities such as Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, and Q D Leavis. 'Middlebrow' was always a pejorative term, used to demarcate writing and reading, and initially also musical taste, from, simultaneously, the modernist and the lowbrow. Middlebrow books and authors were rejected by those who required intellectual innovation in their leisure reading, and who privileged challenge and complexity over enjoyment, familiarity and ease in what they read, and wrote. Readers of middlebrow writing had intellectual expectations, but these were moderate rather than extreme. Middlebrow writing was concerned with established literary traditions, and was 'an imaginative projection of lived experience conducive to a negotiation of identity and emotional 'entertainment' in the sense of providing sustenance' (Habermann 2010, 35). Yet this categorisation was fluid. 'Middlebrow could be a mode of reading, a stratum of society, a class of book, or a state of mind' (Macdonald 2011, 11).
The importance of the study of middlebrow is derived from its close relationship, in the British context, with class, and, in the American context, with the rise of twentieth-century consumerism. These socio-historical dimensions offer a rich resource for the scholar in analysing many different aspects of middlebrow cultures, from different perspectives. Examining middlebrow texts will reveal a non-normative and non-restrictive understanding of literary dynamics in terms of how texts were constructed and how they were received. Most of the recent publications and conferences on middlebrow focus on anglophone texts, authors, publishing and marketing. There has been very little scholarly work published on non-anglophone middlebrow cultures, until the last five years: Van Boven et al (2008 & 2012), Sanders (2008), Van Boven (2009), Provenzano and Sindaco (2009), and Rymenants and Verstraeten (2009 & 2011). However, despite this recent work, without the input of research and scholarly discourse on middlebrow cultures in Europe, in languages other than English, the continuing study of middlebrow is artificially truncated by being limited to only authors working in English, and the interpretation of the anglophone world. An emerging community of researchers on middlebrow in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France (and undoubtedly in other European countries) need a forum to meet, discover each other's work and initiate new collaborations. This call for papers for a conference aims to attract a wide range of international researchers working on questions around middlebrow outside the anglophone sphere. These may include:
The primary aim of the conference will be to offer a platform for these researchers to present their work and discuss methodologies, and network informally on subjects of mutual interest. Secondary aims will be to discern strands of middlebrow research that make connections across languages, cultures, historical moments, and authors and texts. Publication of a volume of scholarly essays is planned, drawing on papers presented at the forum, and by commissioning essays from specialists.
By offering this contact forum for researchers in European middlebrow cultures, this conference will rebalance the anglophone dominance of the field, and make space to discuss research on European middlebrow cultures in the twentieth century. The conference will be open to papers on either of two strands of investigation: (1) research into European middlebrow cultural productions in languages other than English, and (2) research into the reception of anglophone middlebrow cultures in mainland Europe.
The language of the conference will be English, for practical reasons, but informal translation and interpretation into and out of Dutch, German and French may be possible.
We invite abstracts (of no more than 300 words, in any European language) that describe the background, subject and preliminary findings of your presentation. If you plan to present your paper in a language other than English, please provide an English translation of the abstract as well. Please send these to euromidd@gmail.com, by 1 September 2013, and include a contact email and postal address. We welcome abstracts from independent scholars as well as those from university researchers. Enquiries can also be sent to the above email address.
Kate Macdonald, Universiteit Gent, Belgium
Koen Rymenant, independent scholar
Mathijs Sanders, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Netherlands
Erica Van Boven, Groningen Universiteit, Netherlands
Pieter Verstraeten, Katholiek Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
We are delighted to announce the launch of a new AHRC-funded international research network on Community Libraries, which aims to establish a dynamic, interdisciplinary research forum to investigate the role of libraries in shaping communities in the long eighteenth century. Developed by Dr Mark Towsey (University of Liverpool) together with partners at Loyola University Chicago, the Newberry Library, and Dr Williams's Library (London), the Network will explain the emergence of libraries in the 'public sphere' between 1650 and 1850. We will assess the contribution made by libraries to the circulation and reception of print of all kinds, and to the forging of collective identities amongst local, national, and international communities of readers. In addition, the network aims to explore the emergence of libraries in comparative perspective, asking how far models of library provision and administration were disseminated, discussed, imitated, and challenged as they travelled between different social environments and political regimes.
The Network will organise three two-day colloquia in the UK and the US. Each colloquium will focus on a specific theme, and will feature methodological workshops, work-in-progress presentations, pre-circulated papers, and roundtables.
Colloquium 1: Libraries in the Atlantic World, to be held in Liverpool on 24-25 January, 2014
Colloquium 2: Digital Approaches to Library History, to be held in Chicago on 30 May-1 June, 2014
Colloquium 3: Libraries in the Community, to be held in London on 23-24 January 2015
Call for proposals
The project team invites initial expressions of interest from scholars interested in any element of the Community Libraries research programme. If you feel you can make a significant contribution to any or all of our colloquia, please send abstracts of 500 words, together with a brief summary of your research interests and career to date, to the Principal Investigator Dr Mark Towsey (towsey@liverpool.ac.uk) by 1 September 2013. For further information, please visit our website at www.communitylibraries.net.
At a time of growing academic interest for the adaptation of fictional narratives across a range of different contemporary media (film, TV series, comic books, graphic novels), we would like to engage with illustration as the earliest form of visual adaptation of novelistic works.
The general aim of this conference is to explore illustration in its specifically narrative dimension. The notion of narrative construction provides an interesting paradigm to analyse the relationship between text and image within illustrated works of fiction. Though each illustration may be said to have a narrative potential of its own which is revealed by the eye perusing it, it is the sequential dimension of narrative which will be our particular focus here.
The object of the conference is to examine how a series of images accompanying a narrative does not simply illustrate separate moments singled out from the text but forms a visual narrative through its dynamic relationship with the text. We shall thus study the different processes at stake and the ways in which images, in their three-fold articulation to the work as a whole—namely to the passage which they illustrate, to what precedes and follows in the narrative, and to the sequence of interlinked images-- suggest a reading of a text and open up one of its narrative possibilities.
The conference will focus on European novels from the early modern period to the present.
Possible topics include:
Submission for papers including an abstract (300 words maximum) and a short biographical notice should be sent to both Carole Cambray, Université Paris- Diderot (carolecambray@yahoo.fr) and Xavier Giudicelli, Université de Reims-Champagne Ardenne (xgiudicelli@yahoo.fr)
Deadline for proposals : 10 September 2013.
We are delighted to announce the launch of a new AHRC-funded international research network on Community Libraries, which aims to establish a dynamic, interdisciplinary research forum to investigate the role of libraries in shaping communities in the long eighteenth century. Developed by Dr Mark Towsey (University of Liverpool) together with partners at Loyola University Chicago, the Newberry Library, and Dr Williams's Library (London), the Network will explain the emergence of libraries in the 'public sphere' between 1650 and 1850. We will assess the contribution made by libraries to the circulation and reception of print of all kinds, and to the forging of collective identities amongst local, national, and international communities of readers. In addition, the network aims to explore the emergence of libraries in comparative perspective, asking how far models of library provision and administration were disseminated, discussed, imitated, and challenged as they travelled between different social environments and political regimes.
The Network will organise three two-day colloquia in the UK and the US. Each colloquium will focus on a specific theme, and will feature methodological workshops, work-in-progress presentations, pre-circulated papers, and roundtables.
Colloquium 1: Libraries in the Atlantic World, to be held in Liverpool on 24-25 January, 2014
Colloquium 2: Digital Approaches to Library History, to be held in Chicago on 30 May-1 June, 2014
Colloquium 3: Libraries in the Community, to be held in London on 23-24 January 2015
Call for proposals
The project team invites initial expressions of interest from scholars interested in any element of the Community Libraries research programme. If you feel you can make a significant contribution to any or all of our colloquia, please send abstracts of 500 words, together with a brief summary of your research interests and career to date, to the Principal Investigator Dr Mark Towsey (towsey@liverpool.ac.uk) by 1 September 2013. For further information, please visit our website at www.communitylibraries.net.
More details to follow.
We are delighted to announce the launch of a new AHRC-funded international research network on Community Libraries, which aims to establish a dynamic, interdisciplinary research forum to investigate the role of libraries in shaping communities in the long eighteenth century. Developed by Dr Mark Towsey (University of Liverpool) together with partners at Loyola University Chicago, the Newberry Library, and Dr Williams's Library (London), the Network will explain the emergence of libraries in the 'public sphere' between 1650 and 1850. We will assess the contribution made by libraries to the circulation and reception of print of all kinds, and to the forging of collective identities amongst local, national, and international communities of readers. In addition, the network aims to explore the emergence of libraries in comparative perspective, asking how far models of library provision and administration were disseminated, discussed, imitated, and challenged as they travelled between different social environments and political regimes.
The Network will organise three two-day colloquia in the UK and the US. Each colloquium will focus on a specific theme, and will feature methodological workshops, work-in-progress presentations, pre-circulated papers, and roundtables.
Colloquium 1: Libraries in the Atlantic World, to be held in Liverpool on 24-25 January, 2014
Colloquium 2: Digital Approaches to Library History, to be held in Chicago on 30 May-1 June, 2014
Colloquium 3: Libraries in the Community, to be held in London on 23-24 January 2015
Call for proposals
The project team invites initial expressions of interest from scholars interested in any element of the Community Libraries research programme. If you feel you can make a significant contribution to any or all of our colloquia, please send abstracts of 500 words, together with a brief summary of your research interests and career to date, to the Principal Investigator Dr Mark Towsey (towsey@liverpool.ac.uk) by 1 September 2013. For further information, please visit our website at www.communitylibraries.net.
Due to the way that the Provincial Book Fairs Association presents its calendar on its website, it has become too time-consuming to import the data over to HoBo. Consequently, I'm afraid that I won't be including PBFA fair information.
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