Resurrecting the Book: 15-17 November 2013, Library of Birmingham, England

PLENARY SPEAKERS: Professor Sir David Cannadine, Princeton University; Professor Johanna Drucker, UCLA; Dr David Pearson, City of London Corporation; Professor Nicholas Pickwoad, University of the Arts, London.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS: Professor David Roberts, Birmingham City University; Dr Jason Scott-Warren, Cambridge University; Linda Carreiro, University of Calgary; Sarah Bodman, University of the West of England

To celebrate the re-opening of the largest public library in Europe and its outstanding special collections,The Library of Birmingham, Newman University College, the Typographic Hub at Birmingham City University and The Library of Lost Books have united to host a three-day conference on the theme of Resurrecting the Book.

With e-book downloads outstripping the purchase of hard copies, with libraries closing and discarding books and with the value of the book as physical object being increasingly questioned, this interdisciplinary conference will bring together academics, librarians, publishers, artists, creators, designers, and users of books to explore a wide variety of issues pertaining to the creation, design, construction, publication, use, reuse, preservation, loss, and recovery of the material book, electronic and digitized books, and of collections and libraries. Abstracts on the conference themes and their intersection and covering any historical period are invited. The conference themes include, but are not limited to:

BOOKS AS MATERIAL OBJECTS: the materiality of book creation, construction, production, use, reuse, and destruction; manuscripts and printed books; book-design, illustration, paratextuality and its manifestations; book-covers, bindings, clasps, vellum, parchment, paper, manuscript and printing and production processes;

COLLECTIONS AND LIBRARIES: book collectors, collections and their locations; missing, lost and found books; the creation, recreation, dispersal, sale and destruction of books and libraries; the movement of books and libraries; lost libraries; the impact of libraries on books; lost and revised editions;

THE ARTIST’S BOOK: altered books; book preservation and conserved books; books and material culture; books as art; books in art; illustration and illumination; woodcuts; engravings; marbled pages; book decoration; printmaking;

E-BOOKS: the creation, use and abuse of ebooks; neglected and lost ebooks; ebook readers; electronic libraries; books and collections and the impact of digital technologies;

PUBLISHING: publishers and publishing; the future of publishing; back-catalogues; print-runs; editions; archives; digitization and multi-media books;

Abstracts of no more than 400 words accompanied by a 50 word biographical profile should be sent to both: Dr Matthew Day – m.day@newman.ac.uk and Dr Caroline Archer – caroline.archer@bcu.ac.uk

DEADLINE for submission of abstracts: FRIDAY 1st FEBRUARY 2013.

The conference will run in conjunction with The Library of Lost Books Project. This is an exhibition of 50 de-accessioned books which have been given a new lease of life as objects redesigned into works of art. The conference is also part of the Library of Birmingham’s reopening festival.

A weblink to the CFP is at http://resurrectingthebook.org/86-2/

An international conference on collecting, editing, performing, producing, reading, and reviving Romanticism at the Fin de Siècle

Trinity College Oxford, 14-15 June 2013
Keynote Speaker: Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA)

Call For Papers
This conference places Romanticism at the core of the British Fin de Siècle. As an anti-Victorian movement, the British Fin de Siècle is often read forwards and absorbed into a ‘long twentieth century’, in which it takes the shape of a prehistory or an embryonic form of modernism. By contrast, Fin-de-Siècle authors and critics looked back to the past in order to invent their present and imagine their future. Just at the time when the concept of ‘Victorian’ crystallized a distinct set of literary and cultural practices, the radical break with the immediate past found in Romanticism an alternative poetics and politics of the present.

The Fin de Siècle played a distinctive and crucial role in the reception of Romanticism. Romanticism emerged as a category, a dialogue of forms, a movement, a style, and a body of cultural practices. The Fin de Siècle established the texts of major authors such as Blake and Shelley, invented a Romantic canon in a wider European and comparative context, but also engaged in subversive reading practices and other forms of underground reception.

The aim of this conference is to foster a dialogue between experts of the two periods. We welcome proposals for papers on all aspects of Fin-de-Siècle Romanticism, especially with a cross-disciplinary or comparative focus. Topics might include:

bibliophilia and bibliomania – collecting – cults – editing – objects – performance – poetics – politics – print culture – sociability – continuities and discontinuities – Romanticism and Decadence – Romantic Classicism – European Romanticism and the English Fin de Siècle

Deadline for abstracts: 15 January 2013
Please email 300-word abstracts to romanticfin@bbk.ac.uk

Conference organisers: Luisa Calè (Birkbeck) and Stefano Evangelista (Oxford)
This conference is co-organised by the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the English Faculty of Oxford University with the support of the MHRA

Spaces of the book : materials and agents of the text/image creation (XXth and XXIst Centuries)

Trinity College, Cambridge, 6 and 7 September 2013

The conference will consider the book as a space of creation in which text and image stand in dialogue (illustrated books, livres d’artistes, artists’ books), from the point of view of its medium (materials, format, folding, etc.) and the various agents (writers, artists, as well as typographers, printers, graphic artists, publishers, gallery owners/directors, booksellers) who play an essential role in its conception and distribution.

The main issues will be:
— To what extent do the material specificities of the chosen medium influence literary and artistic innovation?
— To what extent do the various agents involved in the conception, composition, publication and distribution of the book play a role in the creative process, in contexts which also include digital media, installation and performance?
— Are there privileged sites for the distribution and reception of these works? Is the creative book an object to be called up from a rare books collection or a work to be exhibited (museums, galleries), or activated?
— How are the current transformations of both object and process modifying its social and political impact?
— Does the virtual book abolish the distinction that was traditional in the context of industrial reproduction between creative book and mass-market product?
— Does the multiplication of collective and even impersonal creations imply a new conception of creator or author?

During the conference, an exhibition on the avant-garde publisher, bookseller and gallery-owner Jean Petithory will take place in the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.

The conference languages are English and French.

Please send your proposal (maximum 500 words) before 31 January 2013 to espacesdulivre@trin.cam.ac.uk

Organisers : Isabelle Chol (Université de Pau) and Jean Khalfa (Trinity College, Cambridge).
This conference is part of the ANR-LEC programme: http://lec.hypotheses.org/presentation

Writing Materials: Women of Letters from Enlightenment to Modernity

V&A Museum in partnership with King’s College London and the Elizabeth Montagu Letters Project (an AHRC-funded research network)
29-30 November 2012

This one and a half day conference will explore the tools and environments of women’s writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  It aims to create new connections between texts and material objects, connecting intellectual history with its material medium – paper, quills, desks, letter-cases and ink. It takes as its inspiration the figure of Elizabeth Montagu, ‘Queen of the Bluestockings’ (1718-1800), a voracious writer, Shakespeare critic, coal owner, cultural patron and bluestocking salonnière. She placed herself at the centre of several key intellectual, cultural and social networks of her day – frequently securing her position through the display of materials – for example, her famous ‘feathered room’ attracted eminent visitors from poets to princesses.  Hester Thrale described her as ‘brilliant in diamonds, solid in judgement and critical in talk.’  Her Portman Square mansion became an important metropolitan site for the discussion of books and viewing of paintings.

We would like to invite proposals for speakers at a graduate student workshop on material cultures of writing from the Enlightenment to Modernity. We ask you to send in ideas for 5-10-minute presentations inspired by any object in the Victoria and Albert Museum concerned with the material culture of writing. This might include paper, ink, furniture, tools, printers, typewriters and keyboards, spaces and times, the postal system, digital images, friendship, business, privacy and publication. Proposals should not exceed one sheet of A4 and an image of the object should be attached if possible. Your presentation could be in the form of critical and/or creative writing; it could take the form of a missive, letter, journal, blog, email or tweet and it should invite a response from the audience.

Please send your proposals to k.spiller@swansea.ac.uk by 1 September 2012.

Tuesday 31 July 2012, Cambridge University Library will be holding its
fifth masterclass as part of the Incunabula Project.

The masterclass, entitled ‘Integrating Images in the Fifteenth-Century
Book’, will be led by Roger Gaskell, of Roger Gaskell Rare Books
(http://www.rogergaskell.com/About.htm).

The invention of printing meant that identical copies of verbal texts
could be produced. However the provision of exactly reproduced images, the
same in each copy, lagged behind, and hand-drawn or pasted-in illustrations
continued to be used. Using examples from the UL collection, this class will
provide hands-on instruction in identifying and analysing the technologies
of picture printing by which standardised text-image relationships were
achieved.

The seminar will be held in the Sir Geoffrey Keynes Room at the Library.
It will start at 2.30pm and will last approximately 90 minutes, allowing time
for questions and discussion. Attendance will be limited in order to allow
all attendees a chance to see the books under discussion up close, and
to participate in the discussion.

To book your place, please contact William Hale at
.

For ten years, the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) has pioneered original archival research that illuminates the past for the benefit of the modern research community, and beyond. To celebrate this anniversary, in early November 2012 we will be holding a conference examining the future of the ‘Permissive Archive’.

The scope of archival history is broad, and this conference seeks presentations from a wide range of work which opens up archives – not only by bringing to light objects and texts that have lain hidden, but by demystifying and demonstrating the skills needed to make new histories. Too long associated with settled dust, archival research will be championed as engaged and engaging: a rigorous but permissive field.

We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of early modern archival work, manuscript or print, covering the period 1500 – 1800.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The shape of the archive – ideology and interpretation

• The permissive archive: its definition and its past, present and future

• Alternatives to the permissive archive

• Archival research as discovery or construction

• The archive which challenges or disrupts

• Uncatalogued material – how to find it, how to access it, how to use it

• New findings

• Success and failure

• Broken or dispersed collections

• The archive and the environment

• The archivist and the historian

• The ethics of the archive

• The comedy of the archive

• Order and anarchy

Please send 300-word proposals to hjgrahammatheson@gmail.com

Submissions are not limited to the 25-minute paper. CELL will be holding a work-shop on the use of archival materials, and we are keen to hear from scholars with ideas for alternative presentations such as group sessions, trips or guided walks.

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by Professor Lisa Jardine.

TEXTS AND TEXTILES

a conference organised by the Centre for Material Texts
to be held 11-12 September 2012 at Jesus College, Cambridge

The shared origin of text and textile in the Latin texere, to weave, is a critical commonplace. Many of the terms we use to describe our interactions with words are derived from this common linguistic root, and numerous other expressions associated with reading and writing are drawn from the rich vocabulary of cloth. Textiles are one of the most ubiquitous components of material culture, and they are also integral to the material history of texts. Paper was originally made from cotton rags, and in many different cultural and historical settings texts come covered, wrapped, bound, or decorated with textiles. And across the domestic, public, religious, and political spheres, textiles are often the material forms in which texts are produced, consumed, and circulated.

In the light of the CMT’s current research theme on ‘the material text in material culture’, we invite papers which consider any of the many dimensions of the relationship between texts and textiles. There are no historical, geographical, or disciplinary limitations. Areas to be addressed could include:

the shared language of texts and textiles

construction and deconstruction: to weave, spin, stitch, knit, stitch, suture, tie up or together, piece, tailor, gather, fashion, fabricate, mesh, trim, stretch, wrap, unfold, unpic
challenges and problem-solving: knots, tangles, holes; to lose the thread, iron out creases, unravel, cut, keep on tenterhooks
pieces and fragments: rags, patches, patchwork, scraps, strands, threads, rhapsodies, patterns, seams, loose ends, layers

the stuff of books

bookbindings and covers
incunabula – ‘swaddling clothes’
medieval girdle books, book chemises
paper and paper-making
cutting, sewing, and stitching in and on books
scrapbooks, albums, collages
book ribbons and bookmarks
carpet pages
textiles in illustrations, frontispieces, title pages

textile texts

needlework and words: tapestry, embroidery, samplers, quilts, hangings, carpets, banners
the needle and the pen
printed textiles
sacred/religious texts and textiles
love-tokens, keepsakes, charms, and relics
cushions, badges, handkerchiefs, flags, scarves, uniforms, livery and other textual/textile ephemera
professional and amateur work
relationships and networks of gifts, patronage, exchange
pattern books, sample books, costume books

Proposals of up to 250 words for 20-minute papers should be sent to Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk) and Lucy Razzall (lmfr2@cam.ac.uk) by 30 April 2012

CoDE: Cultures of the Digital Economy 2012

1st Annual Conference

Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, 27-28 March 2012

Call For Abstracts

The 1st Annual Conference of CoDE: Cultures of the Digital Economy will be held at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK on 27-28 March 2012. Participants from a range of scholarly disciplines are invited to present research related to digital culture and the digital economy.

Confirmed keynote speakers are Dr Jussi Parikka and Dr Astrid Ensslin, whose biographies are included below. Paper abstracts of up to 300 words can be submitted to code@anglia.ac.uk until 31st January 2012. In particular, abstracts related to the following conference themes are sought, though abstracts addressing other aspects of digital culture are also welcome:

Theme 1. Materiality and Materialism
It is straightforward enough to understand computation as a relationship between material objects (hard drives, screens, keyboards and other input devices, scanners, printers, modems and routers) and nominally immaterial ones (software, programming languages, code). This approach to the „stuff‟ of the digital risks ignoring a set of crucial questions around the relationships digital technologies construct with a range of material objects: from the „analogue‟ world modelled in weather systems and battlefield simulations to the body of the information worker interacting with spreadsheets and databases; from the range of artefacts that form the subject of the digital humanities to the materials, bodies, spaces and places of art practice and performance.

Theme 2. Performance, Production and Play
Innovative aspects of our interaction with performances and the production of artefacts for continuous engagement have evolved exponentially through the digital age, particularly with the development of ideas related to play and serious gaming, which brings novel opportunities for creative expression, not to mention innovative approaches related to parallel disciplines in science, education, healthcare and business. The collaboration between performance, production and play and adjacent academic fields is of particular interest given the cross-disciplinary requirements of the Digital Economy Act.

Theme 3. Digital Humanities – Archives, Interfaces and Tools

Digital Humanities works at the intersections of traditional research and technological innovation. Its techniques have helped to prove that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, for instance, and have even been used by the FBI to determine the authorship of sensitive documents. Today scholars in the digital humanities are primarily concerned to offer a gateway to previously hidden records of culture and heritage. A high-resolution digital photograph of a Chaucer manuscript, for instance, reveals its delicate pen strokes, and when placed on the internet, can pave the way for school children, university students, and those interested in culture generally, to learn about medieval literature from primary resources.
See www.anglia.ac.uk/code for more details–or click here.

Call for Papers

The 7th Annual Conference of The Association of Adaptation Studies

‘Visible and Invisible Authorships’

27th-28th September 2012

The University of York’s Film and Literature programme, in association with the Centre for Modern Studies and the Humanities Research Centre, is delighted to be hosting the 7th annual international conference of the AAS. The conference provides a lively forum for current thinking on adaptation issues and this year specifically invites reflection on the relationship of acts of authoring to the ongoing lives of adapted texts.

• How have different authorial voices and authorial inscriptions (screen writers, directors, designers, editors, studios, composers, writers, illustrators etc) of inherited tales been present in, and/or effaced by the processes of transmission?

• How might we reflect on these processes of authorial visibility and invisibility in the cultural circulation of adapted texts across media and moment?

• What is it to ‘author’ a contemporary telling of a tale that is already authored, or even that is received from history as, in effect, implicitly but eloquently authorless? And what happens in the process of visiting a revised or renewed authorial inscription upon a work?

• Why do some adapted works slough off almost all authorial designations (or cling to unlikely or peripheral ones) in their cultural reputations while others are emphatically branded in terms of an identifiable authorial voice? In line with the broad interests of the Association of Adaptation Studies, proposals on any aspect of adaptation will be considered.

Papers that speak to the conference theme will be particularly welcome. The deadline for receipt of proposals for papers and panels has been extended to 10 February 2012. Please send abstracts (within the body of your email) of not more than 250 words to film-and- literature@events.york.ac.uk and include a biog-sketch of not more than 100 words.

Perception, Reception: The History of the Media in Society

Call for Papers for a conference to be held between 4th and 6th July 2012 at Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK. Extended deadline to 17th October 2011

The 4th Media History conference will focus on the ways in which people have understood the social, cultural and political roles of the media from the 15th to the 20th century. The concept of ‘the media’ will be interpreted broadly, so as to include print culture (including the press and publishing), cinema, broadcasting, and other visual and electronic media.

A great deal of work has been done by scholars on the institutional, political and cultural history of various media. ‘Perception, Reception’ will build on this literature to explore the ways in which the media have historically been understood, conceptualised, and imaginatively represented. Thus the conference will not focus on the content of the media as such, so much as the depiction, perception and reception of the media in different contexts over time. How have readers, consumers, and the respective media industries themselves framed arguments about the media as a force for good (or evil) at different points in time? Have contemporaries always seen the media as agents of change, or is there a counter-history of the media to be written in terms of promoting conservatism, deference and order? How have people understood and represented the media in terms of concepts of personal and geographical space, time, or changing belief systems? Can we think ‘internationally’ about perceptions of the media in different states and nations over time, or is the media still best understood and examined in largely local or regional contexts?

We welcome proposals from a range of chronological, geographical and methodological backgrounds. Abstracts, of around 200 words for papers of between 20 to 25 minutes duration, should be sent by close of business on 17th October 2011 to mediahist2012@aber.ac.uk<mailto:mediahist2012@aber.ac.uk>