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’.

Some of our most material interactions with texts are grounded in the very food that we eat. Comestibles are eloquent objects; they come stamped with words, festooned with decorative designs, and wrapped in packaging that is at once visually and verbally loquacious. The kitchen has long been a textual domain, regulated by cookery books and recipe collections and noisy with inscriptions on pots, pans, plates and pastry-moulds. This one-day colloquium will explore numerous aspects of the relationship between writing, eating and domestic life across a broad swathe of history, in order to illuminate the unsuspected power of words and pictures in a paradigmatically practical locale and to shed light on the textual condition more broadly.

Questions to be addressed include:

What is the relationship between the visual and the verbal in the history of food?

What archival and physical evidence survives for the textual realms of the kitchen, and what methodological challenges does it present?

Who produces the texts that circulate during the preparation and consumption of food, and for whom?

How do the textual economies of the kitchen relate to those of other household spaces-the study, the library, the gallery-and of the wider world?

How are public historical or cultural events refracted in the domestic locale and its object-worlds?

What permutations has the metaphor of reading-as-eating undergone in its long history?

Speakers include: Deborah Krohn (Bard Graduate Centre), Sara Pennell (Roehampton University)

This one-day workshop will take place under the auspices of the Centre for Material Texts, University of Cambridge, on 13 September 2011. Please submit 250 word proposals for 20 minute papers by 1 May to Melissa Calaresu (mtc12@cam.ac.uk) and Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk).

download a flyer here: eating words cfp

From this week until the end of term, the Centre will be offering tea and biscuits every Wednesday between 4 and 5 pm, in the Solarium, Queens’ College.

The weekly CMTea will give people for members and those who would like to join to meet informally, discuss
current projects, and perhaps to dream up new ones. Please bring along any information about forthcoming events, funding opportunities, etc that might be of interest to other members. And if you’ve just come across some
brilliant book or article in the field, bring it too and spread the news.

We know that not everyone will be able to come every week, but please do put the date in your diaries and drop by at some point during the term.

Thursday 27 January, 5:30pm, SR-24, Faculty of English
Harriet Phillips: ‘Waste Paper: Early Modern Broadsides as Popular Print’; and Marie Léger-St-Jean: ‘“long for the penny number and the weekly woodcut”: Early Victorian Popular Authors and their Readers’

Thursday 24 February, 5:30pm
Managing curious collections: Stuart Stone (Radzinowicz Library): a visit to the collection of ‘banned books’ from the Home Office; Katie Birkwood (St John’s College Library), on managing the Fred Hoyle Collection of papers, books and other material texts.

(Please note that the seminar on 24 February will begin at 5.30pm in the Radzinowicz Library at the front of the Institute of Criminology on the Sidgwick Site, for a ‘show and tell’ of banned books, and will move for the second presentation and discussion to the Faculty of English.)

All welcome. For information, this term contact Sarah Cain (stc22@cam.ac.uk)

Postponed from 2010, this seminar will consider the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice of customizing books with images and texts cut from other sources, with two of the leading experts in the field:

Dr Luisa Cale (Birkbeck): ‘Reading and Cutting through the Page: William Blake and the extra-illustrated book’

Dr Lucy Peltz (National Portrait Gallery): ‘Facing the Text: the origins and rise of extra-illustration c.1770-1840’

Extra-illustrated materials from the UL’s collections will be on display.

Friday 28 January 5 pm – Morison Room – University Library

All welcome. To register for the seminar, please email Mina Gorji (mg473@cam.ac.uk).

Download a poster here.

Early Modern European History Seminar, this week:

Karen Bowen: ‘Images as records of social history: the case of representations of Dutch pedlars with paper wares’

Leslie Stephen Room, Trinity Hall, 1pm (participants are welcome to bring lunch)

Karen Bowen is co-author with Dirk Imhof of Christopher Plantin and Engraved Book Illustrations in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

The CMT is planning to offer occasional bespoke training seminars for graduate students confronting bibliographical, palaeographical, editorial or otherwise textual challenges in the course of their research.

These seminars will be held in the Wren Library in Trinity College, and will be hosted by the Wren Librarian, Professor David McKitterick.

If you think that you might benefit from such a seminar, you are invited to come to a preliminary meeting at 11am on Wednesday 3 November in SR-25 (second floor), Faculty of English, 9 West Rd.

Please email Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk) if you are able to come on the 3rd.

‘Therein lies a tale’: literary manuscripts at St John’s College

As part of the University Festival of Ideas St John’s College Library will be holding an exhibition of literary manuscripts and rare books on Tuesday 26 October, with a free evening talk examining some of the items in more detail. The exhibition spans seven hundred years of English literature, including medieval manuscripts of Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost, first editions of Dickens and T.S. Eliot, a Philip Larkin holograph, and the science fiction of Douglas Adams and Fred Hoyle.

The exhibition will be held in the beautiful seventeenth-century Old Library of the College. In the evening Dr James Harmer (St John’s) will speak about a sixteenth-century manuscript of Sackvilles ‘Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham’, and Dr Ian Patterson (Queens’) will discuss ‘T.S. Eliot, the Hogarth Press, and Poetry Publishing’.

Exhibition open 10am-1pm, 2pm-4pm and 7pm-8pm in the Old Library, St John’s College

Free public talk at 6pm in the Fisher Building, St John’s College

All welcome.

to all CMT members, old, new & would-be:

You are warmly invited for C  M  TEA

in the ground-floor Social Space of the English Faculty

9 West Road, Cambridge

on Tuesday 26 October 2010, 4.30 – 6 pm

This term’s seminars in the History of Material Texts are as follows.

Thursday 14 Oct, 5.30, room SR-24 in the Faculty of English Prof. Anne Coldiron (Florida State University) Printers Without Borders: Translation and Literary Transnationalism in the Long Sixteenth Century

Thursday 11 Nov, 5.30, room SR-24 in the Faculty of English Prof. Jim Secord (HPS, University of Cambridge) Nebular Visions: Image and Text in John Pringle Nichol’s Architecture of the Heavens

All are welcome. The seminar is a forum for research across disciplines and across periods, for all those interested in the history of the book, bibliography, histories and theories of reading, and the intersections between intellectual history and material culture, including the creation, production, publication, distribution, reception, transmission, editing and subsequent history of texts as material objects in manuscript, print, digital media or other forms.

For information, contact this term Daniel Wakelin (dlw22@cam.ac.uk).