Fall 2020/Spring 2021

Monday Sept 21, 2020 5-6:30pm opening event for the Boston-area book history community featuring flash talks by: Cynthia Brokaw (History Brown University), Alex Csiszar (History of Science, Harvard), and Kathryn James (Beinecke Library, Yale). Sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar in Book History. Please RSVP to histbook at fas.harvard.edu to get the zoomlink.

Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2020 3-5pm: a discussion of Joanne Rappaport and Thomas Cummins. Beyond the Lettered City. Indigenous Literacies in the Andes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, with authors present, sponsored by Latin American History Seminar and Workshop on “Administrating differences: Recent Scholarship on Indigenous and Afro-Latin America.” The format is a conversation with the authors regarding their book. Please RSVP to Prof T Herzog to get the zoomlink: therzog at fas.harvard.edu

Roundtable on New Directions in African American Studies and Book History: Part 1, November 16, 2020, 5:00-6:30 EST featuring:

Rhae Lynn Barnes (History, Princeton), “Called Everything But A Child of God: Great Migration Mothers and the Civil Rights Campaign Against Amateur Blackface Minstrelsy School Books”

Brenna Greer (History, Wellesley), “Black Lives Matter in Print”

Kinohi Nishikawa (English, Princeton), “Black Pagecraft”

Derrick Spires (English, Cornell), “Pseudonymous Networks and Literary Movement Making in the Antebellum Black Press”

Roundtable on New Directions in African American Studies and Book History Part II: February 8, 2021, 5:00-6:30 EST featuring:

Kim Gallon (History, Purdue), “The Black Anthology as Resistance”

Dorothy Berry (Houghton Library, Harvard), “Gotham Attucks Music Company: Excursions in Black Self-Determination”

Jacqueline Goldsby (English and African American Studies, Yale) and Meredith McGill (English, Rutgers), “Data Modeling Black Print, Re-Imagining Bibliography: The Black Bibliography Project”

Saturday Feb 13, 2021 1:30pm: “An Experimental Inquisition” an event focused on new books by Hannah Marcus, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy, and Jennifer Rampling, The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700 (in conversation with Ann Blair, Harvard, and Anthony Grafton, Princeton).

Thursday March 4, 2021 4pm Daniel Blank (Harvard Society of Fellows), "Tense Futures: Shakespeare's Macbeth and Gwinne's Tres Sibyllae". Co-sponsored by the Renaissance Colloquium, Dept of English, and the Early Modern History Workshop.

Tuesday March 23 2021 at 3:00pm (EDT): Karine Chemla (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study and CNRS, University Paris Diderot), "A historical approach to the reading of ancient mathematical texts and why this matters."

April 29, 2021 1pm Theodor Dunkelgrün (Cambridge University), "Isaac Abendana (c. 1638-1699): Rabbinic learning and the Hebrew book in Restoration Cambridge and Oxford." Co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, the Early Modern History Workshop and the Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar in Book History.

Monday May 3, 2021: “Materiality and Book History (in the age of Zoom),” a graduate student conference in Book History based at Harvard, Yale, and Brown.