Alternate Tuesdays, during term time
CRASSH
Michaelmas Term 2011: 12.00-14.00
Light lunch provided

The eighteenth century was the century of ‘stuff.’ Public production, collection, display and consumption of objects grew in influence, popularity, and scale. The form, function, and use of objects, ranging from scientific and musical instruments to weaponry and furnishings were influenced by distinct features of the time. Eighteenth-century knowledge was not divided into strict disciplines, in fact practice across what we now see as academic boundaries was essential to material creation. This seminar series will use an approach based on objects to encourage us to consider the unity of ideas of the long-eighteenth century, to emphasise the lived human experience of technology and art, and the global dimension of material culture. We will re-discover the interdisciplinary thinking through which eighteenth-century material culture was conceived, gaining new perspectives on the period through its artefacts.

11th October: Professor Simon Schaffer and Professor Nick Thomas on the Nature of “Artefacts”
25th October: Dr Kim Sloan and Dr Charlie Jarvis on the Understanding of “Botany”
8th November: Dr Richard Dunn and Dr Alexi Baker on the Universe of the “Telescope”
22nd November: Dr Catherine Eagleton and Dr Martin Allen on the Meaning of “Money”

THINGS poster

An Interdisciplinary Research Colloquium in the Arts and Humanities
Supported by Pembroke College and the Faculty of English

Pembroke College, Saturday 24th September 2011

For more information, or to register (£5), please contact Katarina Stenke (ks446@cam.ac.uk)

Draft Program:

8.45am-9.15am: Registration.

9.15am-9.30am: Welcome.

9.30am-10.40am: Panel One – The Fragments of History.
Mario Wimmer (ETH Zürich, Swiss Institute of Technology), ‘Archival Bodies and philological factish’
Mark Williams (Faculty of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic), ‘Austin Clarke and the de-fragmentation of Irish myth’

10.40am-11.00am: Coffee Break.

11.00am-12.10pm: Panel Two – Fragmentation and Authorship.
Joanna Bellis (Faculty of English), ‘Fragmentation or assimilation? The case of a fifteenth-century war poem’
Ian Goh (Faculty of Classics), ‘Lucilian Satire: Already Fragmentary in the Roman Republic’

12.20pm-1.30pm: Panel Three – Fragments and Knowledge.
Cassie Gorman (Faculty of English), ‘Not quite ‘ALL THINGS’: Thomas Traherne and the Commentaries of Heaven (c. 1670-74)’
Sarah Weaver (Faculty of English), ‘Fragments as Raw Material: Julius Charles Hare and Guesses at Truth’

1.30pm-2.30pm: Lunch.

2.30pm-4.10pm: Panel Four – Micro-Fact and Micro-Fiction.
Lucy Bell (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages), ‘Collecting Fragments: Augusto Monterroso’s Anthology of Flies and the Aesthetics of Micro-Fiction’
Rebecca Varley-Winter (Faculty of English), ‘Frightening fragments: Félix Fénélon’s ‘novels in three lines’ and photographic captions’
David Jiménez Torres (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages), ‘Part or Whole? The Journalistic Article as Fragment’

4.10pm-4.30pm: Coffee Break.

4.30pm-6.00pm: Fragments across the Disciplines: Round-table Discussion
Chaired by Charlotte Roberts, Harriet Phillips and Katarina Stenke

6.00pm: Wine Reception.

“Text, Image and the Digital Research Environment: Parker Library-Keio EIRI Conference on Medieval Manuscripts and Printed Books”

Friday 9 September 2011

Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

The Parker Library and the EIRI Project at Keio University (Tokyo) are co-organising a one-day conference focusing on new and future advances in digitisation and digital resources and on the ways in which they are creating new research environments for medieval manuscripts and rare books. Papers will range from individual research papers to institutional projects. More information about speakers and the registration is available at:

http://parkerkeio2011.wordpress.com/

For further information, please contact: 　Gill Cannell and Suzanne Paul (Parker Library): parker-library＠corpus.cam.ac.uk 　Satoko Tokunaga (Keio University/Corpus Christi College): satoko＠flet.keio.ac.jp

The Cultures of the Digital Economy Institute (Anglia Ruskin University) and the Centre for Material Texts (University of Cambridge) present:

Seminar 1: Renaissance Texts and Publishing

Monday 23rd May 2011 5-6.45pm, Morison Room, Cambridge University Library

Professor Jane Taylor (Durham University) on matters of taste in sixteenth-century publishing

and

Professor Eugene Giddens (Anglia Ruskin University) on preparing digital editions of early modern literature

For more information please contact Dr Leah Tether: leah.tether@anglia.ac.uk

22nd July, University of Warwick

Keynote: Professor Margaret Ezell, Sara and John Lindsey Chair of Liberal Arts, University of Texas A&M

Speakers: Helen Hackett, Gillian Wright, Elizabeth Clarke, Sarah Ross, Jayne Archer, Rebecca Bullard, Johanna Harris, Sajed Chowdhury, Elizabeth Scott Baumann

This interdisciplinary one day symposium will explore meanings and dynamics of the structures of early modern female miscellanies and commonplace books, the histories of reading they reveal, notions arising of authorship and miscellaneity, the role of women as ‘vouchers’ or adjudicators of literary materials, and the transmission of knowledge in these female compilations.

For registration & programme see website: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/femalemiscellanies

For more information contact Dr Femke Molekamp (Warwick): f.s.molekamp@warwick.ac.uk

Seminars take place on Thursdays within term at 5:30 in S-R24 in the Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge.

For more information, contact Daniel Wakelin, Faculty of English (dlw22@cam.ac.uk) or Sarah Cain, Corpus Christi College (stc22@cam.ac.uk).

5 May Professor James Raven (University of Essex): The Sites of Printing and Bookselling in London in the Eighteenth Century

19 May Reading group on recent work on paratexts and the history of the book. Texts for discussion (below) are online via the Faculty Library’s CamTools site: please email Sarah Cain (stc22@cam.ac.uk) for further details or hard copy.
– William Sherman, ‘On the Threshold: Architecture, Paratext, and Early Print Culture’, in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Baron/Lindquist/Shevlin (Amherst, 2007), 67-81; and
– Franco Moretti, ‘Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740-1850)’, and Katie Trumpener, ‘Critical Response I: Paratext and Genre System: A Response to Franco Moretti’, Critical Inquiry, 36 (2009), 134-74.

1 July 2011
Corsham Court Centre, Bath Spa University (deadline: unspecified, but ‘still open’)

Bath Spa University’s newly formed Book, Text and Place (1500-1750) Research Centre is pleased to announce its inaugural conference, ‘Book Encounters, 1500-1750’. In keeping with the Centre’s focus on early modern literary
culture, place, and the history of the book broadly defined, this conference invites exploration into early modern encounters with the book. The central theme of the conference will be the role that the book as material vehicle
played in the transmission of ideas. Possible topics of study include

• literary circles
• knowledge communities
• book ownership
• marks in books
• the destruction of books
• letterwriting
• scribal publication
• the intersection of book and manuscript cultures
• private and public libraries

The aim of this conference is to consider a wide variety of encounters with the book: not only from different cultural and geographical sites of production, circulation and reception but also from various periods within early
modernity. Different disciplinary perspectives are particularly encouraged. Proposals for papers (20-25 mins) are still welcome. Please send queries to Chris Ivic (c.ivic@bathspa.ac.uk).

Information on the Book, Text and Place (1500-1750) Research Centre is available at www.bathspa.ac.uk/schools/humanities-and-cultural-industries/research/book-text-and-place/

Plenary speakers:

David Pearson, Director, Libraries, Archives & Guildhall Art Gallery

Mark Towsey, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of
Liverpool

Interdisciplinary Early Modern Seminar, 2pm, Wednesday 23rd February, St Catherine’s College OCR

Dr Jason Scott-Warren will be speaking on ‘Library Catalogues and Laundry Lists’: Refurbishing the Early Modern Reader’. Tea and biscuits served; all welcome!

For more information, please contact Harry Stevenson (hes23), Stephen Cummins (stc28), Laura Kounine (lk279) or Harriet Phillips (hp278).

7.30pm, Monday 21st February, Erasmus Room, Queens’ College

Dr Becca Weir (Jesus) will be speaking to the Queens’ Arts Seminar on ‘Pay, Poetry, and the Culture of Reprinting: Soldiers in the Anglo-African, 1863-1865′ (abstract below). Wine served; all welcome. For more information, contact Harriet Phillips (hp278) or Natasha Moore (nlm31).

Abstract:

In the latter half of the American Civil War, Robert Hamilton’s Anglo-African newspaper championed enlistment as an opportunity for African American men to assert their right to full citizenship. Even as soldiers in the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments used the newspaper to challenge the War Department’s decision to pay them less than their white counterparts, the Anglo-African used ‘original’ and ‘selected’ poetry to further its campaign. Readers recognised the poetry column as a site for public debate and contributed their own verse, whilst Hamilton and his associates reprinted ‘selected’ texts from a host of antislavery titles. These poems raise crucial questions about the ways in which civilians and combatants sought to define black volunteers as representative men. This paper adapts Meredith McGill’s notion of a ‘culture of reprinting’ in order to explore the significance of poetry in the Anglo-African, and suggests that newspaper poetry can help us rethink ‘Civil War literature’.

Excellent knitting pattern for socks, reproducing the first page of Beowulf in MS Cotton Vitellius 15. The pattern can be bought here.