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/

The UCLA Center for 17^th– and 18^th-Century Studies announces two two-year visiting positions in History of the Material Text, to be housed in the Departments of History and English, respectively. These positions are designed to enable participation in the life of the Center and the appropriate Department, as well as fuller use of the riches of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the Special Collections of the UCLA Libraries. We seek scholars of early modern studies (16th-18th centuries), broadly defined, whose expertise includes but is not limited to book history, history of the material text, and print cultures, in Europe and beyond. Applicants should have received their doctorates in the last six years (no earlier than July 1, 2007 and no later than September 30, 2013).

Visiting fellows will teach two courses per year in their respective Department, one of which would be at the Clark Library. Fellows are also expected to make a substantive contribution to the Center’s working groups and other research initiatives.

Fellows will receive a stipend of $50,000 per year, plus benefits for the fellow and dependents and a $3000 research fund.

Candidates should submit a letter of application, curriculum vitae, 20-page writing sample, and three letters of recommendation to:

Barbara Fuchs, Director

Center for 17^th– and 18^th-Century Studies, 310 Royce Hall Box 951404, UCLA, Los Angeles CA 90095-1404

Conveners: Giles Mandelbrote (Lambeth Palace Library), Dr Keith A. Manley (The National Trust), Professor Simon Eliot (Institute of English Studies), Professor Isabel Rivers (Queen Mary)

The seminars are jointly sponsored by the Institute of English Studies, the Institute of Historical Research, and the Library & Information History Group of CILIP.

Venue: Jessel Room, first floor of Senate House, unless stated otherwise below. Changes to room allocations will be displayed on the web-site of the Institute of English Studies.

Time: Tuesdays, 5.30 p.m.

Podcasts: Available online

Autumn Term 2012

4 December
Daniel Starza Smith (University College, London)
‘How Hard a Task you Lay vpon Mee you doe not Knowe’: Editing the Libraries of the First and Second Viscounts Conway, 1610-1645
Between 1610 and his death in 1631 Sir Edward Conway (later first Viscount Conway), enjoyed a spectacular rise in professional fortune, transforming from a Netherlands-based soldier to a Secretary of State who served both James I and Charles I. Conway acquired most of his education and courtly polish by seeking out literature in manuscript and by collecting around 500 printed books. Two catalogues exist of his libraries – dated, fortuitously, 1610 and 1631. I am in the process of editing these catalogues for Private Libraries in Renaissance England, and this paper presents my findings about this important statesman and patron’s intellectual profile at the beginning and end of this period. It also expands previous work on Conway’s son, Edward, second Viscount Conway (d.1655), one of the greatest private book collectors of the seventeenth century, whose collections totalled some 13,000 printed volumes.
Please note: this session takes place in the Dr Seng T Lee Centre for Manuscript and Book Studies in Senate House Library (fourth floor).

Spring Term 2013

5 February
Dr William Poole (New College, Oxford)
Seventeenth-Century Library Benefactors Books in Oxford Colleges: Some Examples and Some Uses
This talk will concern the rise of the genre following the opening of the Bodleian Library, and how we can exploit college examples of the form for different historical purpose; in other words not just to track the growth of specific collections per se but to ask if and how far such resources can be used to discuss intellectual change more generally.

5 March
Dr Paddy Bullard (University of Kent)
Title TBC – to be on either Jonathan Swift’s library or Edmund Burke’s library.

Summer Term 2013

7 May
TBC

4 June
Dunstan Roberts (Trinity Hall, Cambridge)
Title TBC
Please note: this session takes place in the Guard Room at Lambeth Palace.
Intending visitors are asked to contact in advance mary.comer@churchofengland.org.
Please note that the Great Hall will be closed during this term.

2 July
Alice Ford-Smith (Dr. Williams’s Library)
A Library Walk is being organized
Fuller details will be available at a later date. A charge of £10 will be made for this event.

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

The Bibliographical Society invites applications for awards from scholars engaged in bibliographical research (on, for example, book history, textual transmission, publishing, printing, bookbinding, book-ownership and book-collecting). The Society hopes to make awards both for immediate research needs, such as for microfilms or travelling expenses, and for longer-term support, for example to assist with prolonged visits to libraries and archives.

KATHARINE F. PANTZER JR RESEARCH AWARDS IN THE HISTORY OF THE PRINTED BOOK

The Society has received a generous bequest from the estate of the distinguished bibliographer Katharine F. Pantzer Jr and has established two research awards in her memory: a Fellowship of up to £4,000, and a Scholarship of up to £1,500, to be awarded annually.

Applicants’ research for either of the Pantzer awards must be within the field of the bibliographical or book-historical study of the printed book in the hand-press period, that is up to c.1830. Applicants should be established scholars in the field but may be university-based or independent researchers. The Pantzer Fellowship, worth up to £4,000, is intended to assist with both immediate research needs, such as microfilms or travelling expenses, and longer-term support, for example prolonged visits to libraries and archives. Applicants may use a part of the Fellowship money to pay for teaching cover.

MAJOR GRANTS

A number of major awards, up to a maximum of £2,000 each, are offered. Several of these take the form of named awards. One will be associated with the name of the late Barry Bloomfield, sometime president of the Society, and one or more will be associated with the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association, which has generously contributed to the fund. The Society also offers the Katharine F. Pantzer Jr Research Scholarship of up to £1,500, the Fredson Bowers award of $1,500 funded by the Bibliographical Society of America, the Falconer Madan award of £500 in conjunction with the Oxford Bibliographical Society for research undertaken in Oxford libraries or, under certain circumstances, conducted elsewhere upon topics connected with Oxford; the holder of the Madan award may be eligible to apply for association with Wolfson College, Oxford. The named awards may be supplemented from the Society’s research funds to a maximum total of £2,000 each.

MINOR GRANTS

In addition, the Society offers a limited number of minor grants, of £50 to £200, for specific purposes such as the costs of travel or of microfilming for research purposes (but not for attendance at, or travel to, conferences). Applications for these minor grants may be submitted at any time and should be supported by one reference.

CONFERENCE SUBVENTIONS

The Society offers a number of subventions of up to £250 each to organizers of conferences so that they can help defray the cost of conference fees for at least two students. The subject of the conference must fall within one or more of the areas of interest specified in the first paragraph. Conference organizers granted a subvention must agree to mention the Society’s support in their conference literature, for which purpose a logo is provided.

Full guidelines and application forms for all grants and awards can be found at http://www.bibsoc.org.uk/grants.htm

Applications for the Pantzer Fellowship and Major Grants (including the Pantzer Scholarship ) must be submitted, on the appropriate form (http://www.bibsoc.org.uk/grants.htm); two referees familiar with the applicant’s work should be provided. Applications and references must arrive by 11 January 2013. All applications must be supplied electronically. References are preferred via email, but may also be posted, to arrive by the same date.

Applications for Minor Grants may be submitted at any time, on the form provided by the Society (http://www.bibsoc.org.uk/grants.htm). Applications must be supplied electronically. References are preferred via email, but may also be posted.

Applications for Conference Subventions may be submitted at any time, on the form provided by the Society (http://www.bibsoc.org.uk/grants.htm). Applications must be supplied electronically. Brief supporting documentation (e.g. Call for Papers, Draft Programme) should be appended.

Informal enquiries welcome to:

Ed Potten
Secretary to the Fellowships and Bursaries Sub-committee
Care of: Cambridge University Library
Rare Books Department
West Road
Cambridge
CB3 9DR

Michaelmas Term 2012

Alternate Tuesdays, 12.30-14.30 during term time,
CRASSH, Seminar room SG1, Ground Floor

Thinking Things
Tuesday, 9 Oct 2012
Jonathan Lamb (Vanderbilt University) and Elizabeth Eger (King’s College London)

Worshipping Things
Tuesday, 23 Oct 2012
Mary Laven (University of Cambridge) and Maia Nuku (University of Cambridge)

Stilling Things
Tuesday, 6 Nov 2012
Hanneke Grootenboer (Oxford) and Joserra Marcaida Lopez (Cambridge)

Curing Things
Tuesday, 20 Nov 2012
Simon Chaplin (Wellcome Library) and Christelle Rabier (London School of Economics)

Open to all. No registration required

INTERDISCIPLINARY EARLY MODERN SEMINAR
Seminars are held in St. Catharine’s College OCR,
1.30 – 3pm (unless otherwise indicated).
Tea, coffee and biscuits are served.
All welcome!

MICHAELMAS TERM
10th October: Roundtable discussion on Diaries: What are the
implications of using diaries as sources? How are they useful
and how are they problematic?
Brief presentations from Simon Healy (History of Parliament), Cassie Gorman (English) and John Galagher (History).

24th October: 17th Century London: Public Spaces, Public Presence
Michelle Wallis (History and Philosophy of Science), ‘“A Favourable Construction Upon this Public Way of Practice”: Handbill Advertisements and the Medical Marketplace of Early Modern England’ and Kristen Klebba
(History), ‘For the Recreation of Our People’: Civic Culture, Merchant Elites and the Emergence of London’s Moorfields’.

7th November: Dr Adam Smyth (Birkbeck, London), ‘Scissors and Bibles at
Little Gidding’.

21st November: Dr Eoin Devlin (Selwyn College), ‘Restoring Catholic
England: Lord Castlemaine’s Mission to Papal Rome’.

For further details, or for the full 2012-13 programme, please contact:
Liesbeth Corens (lc495) Phoebe Dickerson (pd291)
Charles Drummond (cd432)

The annual competition for fellowships tenable in the academic year 2013-14 is about to take place, with a closing date for applications of 30 November 2012.

The Research Division welcomes applications both for long-term awards of between 9 and 12 months and for short-term awards of 3 months or less. Among the long-term awards, the division is particularly keen to receive applications for the two Barbara Thom fellowships designed for non-tenured early-career faculty who will use the award to revise their doctoral dissertations into their first monographs. While the Thom fellowships essentially offer successful candidates the time to write, virtually all our other fellowships are aimed at those who wish to make extensive use of our collections. Our peer review committees, which make judgments about the quality and viability of applications, pay particular attention to the Huntington materials on which the applicant intends to work. There is also a separate competition for the Dibner Program in the History of Science and Technology.

More Info

The British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme is now accepting applications for the next round of funding – find out here how to apply. The deadline for the submission of preliminary application forms is 2 November 2012.

Unless action is taken now, much of mankind’s documentary heritage may vanish – discarded as no longer of relevance or left to deteriorate beyond recovery. This website explains what the Endangered Archives Programme is, and how it can help.

Learn about the threat to archives.
Find out more about the scope of the Programme.
Search the Endangered Archives Programme’s Projects.
Browse the Programme’s digital collections.

Grants may be awarded to individual researchers to identify collections that can be preserved for fruitful use. The original archives and the master digital copies will be transferred to a safe archival home in their country of origin, while copies will be deposited at the British Library for use by scholars worldwide.

The Endangered Archives Programme is generously sponsored by Arcadia.

If you know of any collections or cultures that are worthy of investigation, please contact us.

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.