2025 Conference

Harvard-Yale-Brown Graduate Conference in Book History
Collecting and Recollecting

Location: HQ 276, Yale University ❖ May 5, 2025

9:30–10:45: Collected Texts and their Afterlives
Chair: Erika Valdivieso (Classics, Yale University)

• Susan Paige Taylor, “The Library as ‘A Record of Friendships’: Memorialization and Provenance in the Donald F. and Mary Hyde Collection of Japanese Books”
• Nicolas Silva, “Hazlitt’s American Library: ‘Select British Poets’ and the Transatlantic Canonizing of British Romanticism”
• Osama Ahmad, “(Re)Collecting Lahore: the City as Material Text, Historical Memory, and Self-Fashioning”

10:45–11:05: Break

11:05–11:15: “Taught by the Pen: The World of Islamic Manuscripts” at the Beinecke Library
Presenter: Roberta L. Dougherty (Librarian for Middle East Studies, Yale University

11:15–12:30: Women as Readers, Writers, and Collectors
Chair: Ann Blair (History, Harvard University)

• Estelle Guéville, “Unknown Hands: Addressing the Scribal Gender Bias in Manuscript Studies”
• Christopher G. Lu, “Her Sexual Riddles: Erotic Enigmas Collected by a Seventeenth-Century Dutch Woman”
• Jeania Ree Moore, “Stash Stories: Moral Formation at the Site of the Romance Collection”

12:30–13:20: Lunch

13:20–13:30: Resources for graduate students at the Bibliographic Society of America
Presenter: Erin McGuirl (Executive Director, Bibliographic Society of America)

13:30–15:10: Collecting Distant Places
Chair: Cynthia Brokaw (History & East Asian Studies, Brown University)

• Noah Michaud, “Africa in the Mind of Alessandro Zorzi: Historicizing Collection and Contents of Banco Rari 236, an Early Sixteenth-Century Venetian Zibaldone in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze”
• Ida Beckett, “‘In the Power of this Turkish Spell’: Ottoman Influences on the English Coffeehouse as Seen Through English Publications, 1650–1900”
• Johannes Makar, “Knowledge as a Collectible: Rarities, Wonders, and Other Categories of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Egypt”
• Annalissa Lane, “Scrapbooking Settler Colonialism”

15:10–15:30: Break

15:30–16:45: Memorialization
Chair: Holly Shaffer (History of Art and Architecture, Brown)

• Lilla Attar, “Collecting Laws: The Case of the Fifth-Century BCE Gortyn Law Code”
• Jakob Lippert, “A ‘Knowledge-Bearing Community’: The Collection and Afterlives of Expellee Testimonies in Postwar Germany”
• Maeva O'Brien, “Hiroshima, 1985: The Politics of John Hersey’s Fifth Chapter”