#  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”