Philadelphia, October 2017; proposal due 25 October 2016.
The Conference
Bibliography Among the Disciplines, a four-day international conference, will bring together scholarly professionals poised to address current problems pertaining to the study of textual artifacts that cross scholarly, pedagogical, professional, and curatorial domains. The conference will explore theories and methods common to the object-oriented disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology, but new to bibliography. The program aims to promote focused crossdisciplinary exchange and future scholarly collaborations. Bibliography Among the Disciplines is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and organized by the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School. For more information, please visit: http://rarebookschool.org/bibliographyconference-2017
"Manuscript in the Age of Print"
Session Organizers: Rachael King (University of California, Santa Barbara), Marissa Nicosia (Penn State University, Abington College)
Saturday, 14 October 2017, 10:45am–12:15pm
In the period after the rise of print culture(s) and public sphere(s), we now know that the production and circulation of manuscripts—from letters and diaries to scientific treatises and novels—continued and even flourished alongside innovative printing practices. Even so, many aspects of the relationship between manuscript and print remain to be explored by scholars.
How should we best describe the status of manuscript and print (and, for that matter, of orality and literacy): in terms of transition, transcendence, interaction, symbiosis, co-dependence? To what extent do the different affordances of the two media account for the ongoing prominence of manuscripts after the advent of printed publications? How do we (should we) avoid teleology while also noting progressive change in materials and processes over time? This panel seeks to address such questions through papers that investigate manuscript practices and texts and/or explore the interaction of manuscript and print in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. We invite scholars working in different geographical and linguistic contexts to contribute to this interdisciplinary effort.
During this conference session, three participants will give 20-minute presentations, followed by a half-hour discussion led by a moderator. Please submit a proposal of no more than 500 words by 25 October 2016 at: http://rarebookschool.org/bibliographyconference-papers
"The Social Life of Books: Uses of Text and Image Beyond Reading and Viewing"
Session Organizers: Aaron Hyman (University of California, Berkeley), Hannah Marcus (Harvard University), Marissa Nicosia (Penn State University, Abington College)
Saturday, 14 October 2017, 8:30–10:00am
Fish wrappers, cigarette rollers, toilet paper, the backing for embroidery, lining for baking pans, the raw material for papier mâché—these are but a few of the uses that the page was subjected to outside the normative economies of reading and viewing. But texts and images also often functioned in less pragmatic and more freighted ways: as numinously charged surfaces to be touched upon one's person, as personal possessions hidden inside mummy bundles for the enjoyment of the deceased, as symbols to be iconoclastically destroyed, or as divine conduits to be ceremonially ingested. Sometimes books and images, which by their nature inform, instruct, invite annotation, and implore users to follow their designs, incited such uses beyond mere reading or viewing. We seek interrogations of uses and reuses of the page that emphasize instances in which material necessity was charged with a semantic or symbolic dimension. When was the sheer need for paper or parchment complicated or compounded by the content of the page? Or when might repurposing have been prompted by alternative understandings of a book's materials, in their own right?
During this conference session, three participants will give 20- minute presentations, followed by a half hour discussion led by a moderator.
Please submit a proposal of no more than 500 words, along with an abridged CV, by 25 October 2016 at: http://rarebookschool.org/bibliographyconference-papers