Print & Power: Incarceration, Confinement, & Archival Silences (NYU, Nov 21, 2025)

NYU’s Material Texts working group warmly invites you to its inaugural fall event, “Print & Power: Incarceration, Confinement, & Archival Silences” on Friday, November 21st, 2:30PM – 4:00PM EST at the Event Space, NYU Department of English, 244 Greene St, New York.

This panel discussion will feature three short talks by eighteenth-century historiographer Marisa J. Fuentes (Rutgers), twentieth-century book historian, Kinohi Nishikawa (Princeton) and seventeenth-century media historian, Whitney Trettien (UPenn). Moderated by NYU’s own Lisa Gitelman, the panel will explore the book and its adjoined archival silences as lenses through which to examine contemporary power struggles, including the ongoing ICE raids, mass incarceration, impeachment proceedings, and persistent dispossession. 

Together, the panelists will consider what it means to study to ‘the book’ during eras marked by scientific, political, and cultural upheavals, examining how print media can psychologically shape mass perception; stand in for often incomplete and often replicated sources of authority; or become deliberately nested, much like the imposing layers of Matryoshka doll, within the systems shaped by Eurocentric and androcentric norms.

Taking up books as physical objects that are created, circulated, and consumed helps to illuminate the power structures that shape knowledge and control the flow of information. Significantly, this approach also highlights how these structures contribute to the injustices we continue to witness today. How can we approach a history of the book that is untethered to the tradition of racial, gender, and socioeconomic supremacy? What is book history in the hands of today’s experts, and how does it speak to present lived realities? 

Speakers:

·  Marisa J. Fuentes (Rutgers), author or Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016)

·  Kinohi Nishikawa (Princeton), author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (2018)

·  Whitney Trettien (UPenn), author of Cut/Copy/ Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (2021)

·  Moderated by Lisa Gitelman (NYU), Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014)

☞ Please RSVP here to ensure there are enough snacks and drinks for all!

☞ Questions? Please contact Sara Penn at sarapenn@nyu.edu.