“Inscriptions: The Material Contours of Knowledge”

(March 10-11 2011, University of California, Riverside)

http://ideasandsociety.ucr.edu/disorder_of_things/incriptions.html

Plenary Speakers: Adrian Johns (University of Chicago), Jerome J. McGann (University of Virginia)

This conference will explore the material dimensions of inscribed knowledge across modern disciplinary lines, featuring talks by scholars in History, Literature, Digital Humanities, Geography, Music and Art History. The speakers will collectively address the role of material inscription in the formation, or deformation, of knowledge from roughly 1660-1850. Kinds of inscription that we will consider include manuscripts, drawings, maps, graffiti, archives, books and other objects. We will also consider the physical circuits and practices (i.e., manual, technological, social, institutional) through which such inscriptions traveled. Free registration is now open on the conference website.

Faculty Organizer: Professor Adriana Craciun (adrianac@ucr.edu)

“Inscriptions” is part of the international series of six events, “The Disorder of Things: Predisciplinarity and the Divisions of Knowledge,” a collaborative network jointly organized by faculty in the University of California, Riverside and Birkbeck, University of London.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Out of Bounds: Mobility, Movement and Use of Manuscripts and Printed Books, 1350-1550 Twelfth Biennial Conference of the Early Book Society
in collaboration with the Twelfth York Manuscripts Conference in honour of Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya
3-7 July 2011
Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York

The Early Book Society will hold its twelfth biennial conference in collaboration with the York Manuscripts Conference, at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, from the 3rd to the 7th of July 2011.  The theme of this year’s conference will be Out of Bounds: Mobility, Movement and Use of Manuscripts and Printed Books, 1350-1550. This theme may be interpreted literally or figuratively: papers might consider unbound or rebound MSS and books, or MSS and books without bindings (rolls), or marginalia beyond the boundaries of the text, or the ways in which such boundaries might be created, or even MSS and books that travel from their place of origin. Secondary threads running through the conference will be related to Prof. Takamiya’s manuscripts or Nicholas Love (the conference includes a visit to Mount Grace Priory).  Please submit proposals for 20-minute papers relating to the conference themes either to Martha Driver or Linne Mooney by 1 December 2010.  Proposals sent via email should be copied to both (LRM3@york.ac.uk and MDriver@pace.edu) or by post to Martha:

Prof Martha Driver
English Department
Pace University
41 Park Row, 15th floor
New York, NY  10038
USA

Please include your name, title and affiliation, the proposed title of your paper, a brief abstract of your paper, and indication of any electronic aids requested (data projector, overhead, and/or slide projector).

Linne R. Mooney
Professor in Medieval English Palaeography
University of York
King’s Manor
York  YO1 7EP
U.K.

telephone (UK)  01904 433909
telephone (from USA)  011 44 1904 433909
lrm3@york.ac.uk

Medieval Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age (MMSDA): 2-6 May 2011

The Institute of English Studies (London) is pleased to announce the third year of this AHRC-funded course in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, the Warburg Institute, and King’s College London.

The course is open to arts and humanities doctoral students registered at UK institutions. It involves five days of intensive training on the analysis, description and editing of medieval manuscripts in the digital age to be held jointly in Cambridge and London. Participants will receive a solid theoretical foundation and hands-on experience in cataloguing and editing manuscripts for both print and digital formats.

The first part of the course involves morning classes and then visits to libraries in Cambridge and London in the afternoons. Participants will view original manuscripts and gain practical experience in applying the morning’s themes to concrete examples. In the second part we will address the cataloguing and description of manuscripts in a digital format with particular emphasis on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). These sessions will also combine theoretical principles and practical experience and include supervised work on computers.

The course is aimed principally at those writing dissertations which relate to medieval manuscripts, especially those on literature, art and history. There are no fees, but priority will be given to PhD students funded by the AHRC. Class sizes are limited to twenty and places are ‘first-come-first-served’ so early registration is strongly recommended.

For further details see <http://ies.sas.ac.uk/study/mmsda/> or contact Dr Peter Stokes at mmsda@sas.ac.uk.

Book Destruction: Call for Papers for a Conference at Senate House, University of London, 16 April 2011

Much attention has been given in recent years to the book as a material, historical object and its possible technological obsolescence in the era of digitization. Such reflections have tended to concentrate on the production and cultural circulation of books, their significance and their power to shape knowledge and subjectivities. But there is another aspect to our interactions with the book which remains relatively unexplored: the history of book destruction. In certain circumstances books are treated not with reverence but instead with violence or disregard. This conference invites reflections on this alternative history of the book, and we welcome papers from a range of historical periods and disciplinary backgrounds. We welcome proposals from postgraduate students, as well as from more established academics.

Why do people destroy books? What are the mechanics of book destruction: the burning, pulping, defacing, tearing, drowning, cutting, burying, eating? What are the cultural meanings that have been attached to book destruction, and what do they reveal about our investments in this over-familiar object? Why should the burning of books have such symbolic potency? Book destruction is often invoked as a symbol of oppressive, despotic regimes; what is our ethical position, now, in relation to such acts? What is the relationship between book destruction and other forms of cutting up (quotation; collage)? When do acts of destruction become moments of creativity? How does destruction relate to recycling and reuse? Do transitions in media (manuscript to print; print to digital) threaten those older forms? How might the current phase of digitization and the gradual disappearance of library stock relate to prior moments of destruction? In the internet age, is it still possible to destroy (that is, completely erase) a text? What does materiality mean in a digital age?

Please send 300-word proposals (for a 20 minute paper) and a brief CV, to Dr Gill Partington (g.partington@bbk.ac.uk) and Dr Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@bbk.ac.uk), by 10 January 2011.

Enlightenment Correspondence: letter-writing and reading in the 18th century

Presented by the Electronic Enlightenment Project and the Bodleian Library Centre for the Study of the Book

St Anne’s College, Oxford
Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre
Saturday, 13 November, 2010
9:30 am – 5 pm

A colloquium on the sociology of the letter, exploring the links between correspondence and publishing in the Enlightenment.

See further http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/csb/enlightenment.htm

PALAEOGRAPHY AND POST-PALAEOGRAPHY: Manuscripts from the First to the Twenty-First Century:
Friday 3 December 2010

Organised by the Institute of English Studies and the Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections (AMARC). Hosted by the Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies (Institute of English Studies), Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU.

This one-day conference organized by Michelle Brown and Wim Van Mierlo at the Institute of English Studies, with support from AMARC, will look at aspects of manuscript culture before and after the advent of print.  The aim is to discuss practices, problems, theories and methods of analysis irrespective of place or period to see where methodologies overlap or complement each other.  Topics will include: medieval manuscript studies in the digital age; integrating and migrating methodologies – quantitative  and qualitative, early and modern; what is a modern manuscript?; the codicology of modern paper; handwriting in the twentieth century.

See further http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2010/AMARC/index.htm>

The Magazine Modernisms blog (http://magmods.wordpress.com <http://magmods.wordpress.com/> ) is dedicated to modern periodical studies (1880-present). As the title indicates, MagMods is committed to examining modernism in all its diversity, including early, middle, late and post-modernism; high, middle-brow, and mass culture; magazines, newspapers, zines, and digital media. This diversity reflects the broad range of interests of the creators of Magazine Modernisms, who devised the plan to create a blog for the burgeoning field of modern periodical studies during the Summer Seminar on Magazine Modernism at the University of Tulsa, led by Sean Latham, Robert Scholes, and Cliff Wulfman, and generously funded by the NEH.

In addition to alerting readers about conferences, calls-for-papers, new publications, and other periodical studies news, Magazine Modernisms provides a forum for opinion, commentary, collaboration, query, and debate. One of our main aims is to inform readers about new and little-known digital resources for the study of periodicals.

A new series from Ashgate Publishing Company:

Material Readings in Early Modern Culture

Series Editors:  James Daybell, University of Plymouth; and Adam Smyth, Birkbeck College, University of London

This series provides a forum for studies that consider the material forms of texts as part of an investigation into early modern culture. The editors invite proposals of a multi- or inter-disciplinary nature, and particularly welcome proposals that combine archival research with an attention to the theoretical models that might illuminate the reading, writing, and making of texts, as well as projects that take innovative approaches to the study of material texts, both in terms the kinds of primary materials under investigation, and in terms of methodologies. What are the questions that have yet be to asked about writing in its various possible embodied forms? Are there varieties of materiality that are critically neglected? How does form mediate and negotiate content? In what ways do the physical features of texts inform how they are read, interpreted and situated?

Consideration will be given to both monographs and collections of essays. The range of topics covered in this series includes, but is not limited to:

• History of the book, publishing, the book trade, printing, typography (layout, type, typeface, blank/white space, paratextual apparatus)
• Technologies of the written word: ink, paper, watermarks, pens, presses
• Surprising or neglected material forms of writing
• Print culture
• Manuscript studies
• Social space, context, location of writing
• Social signs, cues, codes imbued within the material forms of texts
• Ownership and the social practices of reading: marginalia, libraries, environments of reading and reception
• Codicology, palaeography and critical bibliography
• Production, transmission, distribution and circulation
• Archiving and the archaeology of knowledge
• Orality and oral culture
• The material text as object or thing

Proposals should take the form of either 1) a preliminary letter of inquiry, briefly describing the project; or

2) a formal prospectus including:  abstract, brief statement of your critical methodology, table of contents, sample chapter, estimate of length, estimate of the number and type of illustrations to be included, and a c.v.

Please send a copy of either type of proposal to each of the two series editors and to the publisher:

Dr James Daybell, james.daybell@plymouth.ac.uk; Dr Adam Smyth, adam.smyth@bbk.ac.uk

Erika Gaffney, Publisher, egaffney@ashgate.com

Coming up on Friday and Saturday of this week: Open Cambridge, which allows Cambridge residents and visitors to see parts of the University and the Colleges which are normally closed. A key part of the event is ‘Open Libraries’, which this year will see 16 College and Departmental Libraries opened to all comers. Participating libraries include the old and beautiful (St John’s, the Wren at Trinity, the Parker at Corpus Christi), the comedic (Lucy Cavendish College will display material from their Joyce Grenfell archive) and the criminal (the Radzinowicz Library at the Institute of Criminology will display some of the letters of John George Haigh, the Acid Bath murderer).

The Open Cambridge website is at http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/opencambridge/ and the Open Libraries are listed at http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/opencambridge/libraries.shtml. The Open Cambridge weekend has been organized by the Community Affairs team in the University of Cambridge Office of External Affairs and Communications.

Open Libraries, which is happening this coming weekend
(10 and 11 September?). Open Libraries is a strand of the Open
Cambridge weekend organised by the Community Affairs team in the
University of Cambridge Office of External Affairs and Communications.
The purpose of Open Cambridge is to allow Cambridge residents to see
bits of the Colleges and University that are normally closed. Open
Libraries sees several (this year it's 16) College and Departmental
libraries opening to all comers during 10 and 11 September, and while
the focus of the event is on the general Cambridge public, I thought
that the libraries might be of interest to CMT members?

The Open Cambridge website is at
http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/opencambridge/, and the Open Libraries are
listed at http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/opencambridge/libraries.shtml
Participating libraries include the old and beautiful (St John's, the
Wren Library, the Parker Library), the comedic (Lucy Cavendish College
Library will display material from their Joyce Grenfell archive) and
the criminal (Radzinowicz Library, Institute of Criminology will
display some of the letters of John George Haigh, the Acid Bath
Murderer).

JOURNAL OF THE NORTHERN RENAISSANCE 3.1 – CALL FOR PAPERS

The Journal of the Northern Renaissance is currently inviting submissions for its third issue, on any aspect of the cultural practice of Northern Europe in the period 1450-1650, including literature, visual culture, philosophy, theology, politics and scientific technologies.

We are particularly interested in studies exploring alternative cultural geographies, challenging existing conceptualizations and periodizations of the Renaissance in the North, and/or continuities and ruptures with earlier and later epochs. Part of our intention, however, in having an open, unthemed issue, is to gauge where the most interesting work is being done and what questions are being asked by scholars working on Northern Renaissance culture across a wide range of disciplines. We are very keen on submissions in the field of material culture, or material texts.

Submissions should be sent to the journal by 31st August 2010. Potential contributors are advised to consult the submissions page of our website for details of the submissions procedure and style guidelines. Enquiries regarding submissions can also be sent to us
here.

–
Journal of the Northern Renaissance (ISSN: 1759-3085)
http://northernrenaissance.org
Editors: Patrick Hart and Sebastiaan Verweij
Reviews Editor: Gillian Sargent
c/o
University of Strathclyde
Dept. of English Studies, Livingstone Tower
26 Richmond Street, Glasgow G1 1XH