Call for Papers: Harvard-Yale-Brown Conference in Book History: "Materiality and Book History (in the age of Zoom)"
CALL FOR PAPERS - 2021
Harvard-Yale-Brown Conference in Book History
Harvard University
Zoom | May 3, 2021
Materiality and Book History (in the age of Zoom)
Sponsored by the Yale University English Department, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Seminar in the History of the Book at the Mahindra Humanities Center (Harvard), and the Brown University John Carter Brown Library
The Seminar in the History of the Book at the Mahindra Humanities Center (Harvard) is pleased to announce the twelfth annual Conference in Book History, now sponsored by Harvard, Yale, and Brown. The conference will be held on Monday, May 3, 2021 on Zoom. The programs for the previous conferences are available here.
Proposals are invited from graduate students (at any stage) and postdocs for papers on any aspect of the History of the Book. Priority will be given to current students affiliated with Harvard, Yale, and Brown, though we are happy to receive submissions from students and postdocs at institutions throughout New England. Topics might include manuscript, print, and digital cultures; new media; authorship, forgery, and anonymity; readers and reading practices; publication, circulation, and transmission; censorship, copyright, and piracy; spaces for producing and consuming media; and the history of library and information science.
Our 2021 conference especially encourages submissions that address the methods and technologies employed in book historical scholarship, or consider the specific scholarly or pedagogical challenges posed for the field by ongoing limitations on physical access to collections. How might new book historical approaches complicate existing paradigms or expand disciplinary boundaries? What are the benefits and challenges of combining the methods of book history with digital technologies for cataloguing or virtually accessing material texts? What do digital methods and archives reveal or occlude about “the book,” books, or their uses, and what does the history of the book contribute to work in the digital humanities or virtual archiving? Speakers may engage with these questions to the extent they see fit.
Papers relating to all time periods and geographical locations are welcome. Please do not hesitate to contact us with questions about a proposed paper topic.
Proposals are due Friday, March 5, 2021. These should include a title and a brief abstract (approximately 200 words), as well as your university and departmental affiliation. Speakers will have 15 minutes to present their work, followed by 15 minutes of discussion.
Please submit proposals and questions to graduate coordinators Kelly Minot McCay (kmrafey@g.harvard.edu) and Carly Yingst (ceyingst@g.harvard.edu). Many thanks for your interest.