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

On Thursday 10 February, our first Lent Term seminar will take place from 1-2 (with
opportunity for informal discussion after 2) in the Ramsden room, St Catharine’s College.

Our speaker, Dr B. Zs. Szakacs, will talk about a digitalized manuscript, the lavishly illuminated Angevin Legendary. The original codex having been cut into separate pieces, it now exists as a unified work only thanks to
modern technology.

All welcome. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please email Dr Nora Berend (nb213@cam.ac.uk) Feel free to bring your own lunch!

CMT members may be interested in a new journal to be launched this year entitled EAST ASIAN PUBLISHING AND SOCIETY. The journal is dedicated to publishing in East Asia, from the earliest times up to the mid-twentieth century and will bring together multi-disciplinary research from scholars addressing publishing traditions in China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. East Asian Publishing and Society envisages to publish articles that cover the production, distribution and reception sides of publishing. It wants to provide a forum for studies directed at the whole spectrum of printed information, such as books, single sheet prints, journals and the like. The journal is however not limited to publishing in woodblock print format only; contributions on manuscript culture and new technologies developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will also be welcomed by the editorial board. Additionally, topics as readership, libraries, relation between government and publishing world and more are to addressed in the East Asia Publishing and Society journal. The members of the editorial board are Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University; Matthi Forrer, Leiden University; Chris Uhlenbeck, independent scholar; and Hilde De Weerdt, Oxford University.

The first issue will be published later this year and will include articles on Korea and China, as well as book reviews. Submissions are welcome! For more information, or to contribute, contact the managing editor, Peter Kornicki, Cambridge University (pk104@cam.ac.uk)

Professor Peter Kornicki
Deputy Warden
Robinson College
Cambridge
CB3 9AN

Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, & Publishing at the Modern Language Association Conference, 2012

Print has been feared as a transmission vector for dangerous ideas since the incunabula era, and the printing press (and its later equivalents) has been one of the most effective weapons of political and cultural radicals for centuries. For its Affiliate Organization panel at the 2012 MLA Conference, The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) seeks papers that will provide historical studies of and theoretical insights into the use of print and printing (or other reproduction technologies such as mimeographs or photocopies) by radical political or social movements.

Proposals (250 words) and short CV by 15 March to:
Greg Barnhisel
Dept of English, Duquesne University
Pittsburgh PA 15282
barnhiselg@duq.edu

All panelists must be members of MLA by 7 April and of SHARP by 1 July.
Membership information at http://www.mla.org/membership and http://www.sharpweb.org/membership.html

For a SHARP-affiliated paper panel session at the annual convention of the American Historical Association (AHA) meeting in Chicago January 5-8, 2012 (under approval from Jonathan Rose, longstanding SHARP-AHA liaison). The panel’s theme is “Communities of Print during the American Civil War,” in keeping with the AHA convention theme of “Communities and Networks.”

With the sesquicentennial of the Civil War at hand, the panel’s papers will discuss the role of print in community formation, re-formation, and maintenance during a time of the widespread dissociations and dislocations wrought by the conflict. “Communities of print” as a term can cover specific congeries of readers, printer/publishers, or authors, as well as more general conceptions of nationhood or other types of mass affiliation.

International perspectives are particularly welcome, as are those reflecting upon print communities among racial and ethnic groups, or across categories of social difference, including those of gender and sexuality.

Please send a 300-word (max.) paper abstract and 250-word cv or bio to zboray@pitt.edu by Monday, February 7. Address any questions to Ron Zboray at the same e-mail. Final panel proposal is due to AHA by Feb. 15.

If selected to present, panelists must be members of both AHA and SHARP.

Link to AHA CFP:
http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2010/1009/1009ann2.cfm

THURSDAY, March 31 | 11:00 AM-6:30 PM

School of Communication and Information (Rutgers)

This one-day symposium will explore the theory and practice generated around the concept of SOURCE. Across a series of events, we will reflect on
practices of collecting, politics and publics of the archive, critical thought initiated from and disciplinary discourses framing the primary source, as well as the materiality and form of the source, be it letter, daguerreotype or digital object. This discussion aims to transcend boundaries by bringing together academics and practitioners from a wide range of institutions of the cultural record. We want to attract an audience from equally varied backgrounds.

The events also aptly mark the ten-year anniversary of School of Communication and Information’s student organization known as SOURCE (Student Organization for Unique and Rare Collections Everywhere), which we will celebrate with a reception at the end of the day.

(Except as noted, all events are free and open to the public.)

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM

11:00 AM-12:00 PM | School of Communication and Information (Room 323)

“What’s in a Photograph?”: A Brief Introduction to Photo Identification and Preservation
A Workshop with KEVIN SCHLOTTMANN (Center for Jewish History)

Moderator: Jill Baron (Rutgers University)

Due to space limitation, this event is by registration only (RSVP
jebaron@eden.rutgers.edu).

1:00 PM-3:00 PM | Alexander Library (4th floor lecture hall)

Material Inscriptions, Collections, and Their Publics (Papers)

JARED ASH (Newark Public Library)
“Text, schmext!”: Collecting Books as Objects of Art and Design

KARLA NIELSEN (University of Illinois)
Reading Erasure in the Archive: The Making of Medieval Spanish Literature

LAURA HELTON (New York University)
On the Politics of Collecting: Archival Publics and African American
Documentary Practice, 1920-1960

IULIAN VAMANU (Rutgers University)
North American Indigenous Curators’ Discourses of Aboriginality and Material
Practices of Curation: A Case Study of the “Song for the Horse Nation”
exhibition at the National Museum of American Indian (NYC)

Moderator: Marija Dalbello (Rutgers University)

Break with refreshments (3:00 PM-3:15 PM)

3:15 PM-4:45 PM | Alexander Library (4th floor lecture hall)

From Fever to Folder: Applying Critical Theory in the Archives (Panel
Discussion)

Panelists:
JENNA FREEDMAN (Barnard College)
LAURA HELTON (New York University)
GRACE LILE (WITNESS)
JONATHAN LILL (Museum of Modern Art)
MARK MATIENZO (Yale University Library)

Respondent: to be announced

Moderator: Rachel Miller (Center for Jewish History)

5:00 PM-6:30 PM | Alexander Library (4th floor lecture hall)

Rutgers Seminar in the History of the Book event (Lecture)

SONIA CANCIAN (Université de Montréal/Concordia University)
The Poetics and Politics in the Intimate Worlds of Immigrant and Homeland
Epistolarity

These events are free and open to the public.

7:00 PM-10:00 PM | Location to be announced

Reception “SOURCE at 10” including “To the SOURCE on the Field” (Panel)

Moderators: Carolyn Dorsey (Rutgers University) and Ana Ramirez Luhrs
(Lafayette College)

This event is by registration only – RSVP to Carolyn Dorsey
carolynd@eden.rutgers.edu OR Ana Ramirez Luhrs luhrsa@lafayette.edu.

Abstracts and full information about each of these events and directions with parking information are forthcoming.

—————————————————
Symposium Program Chairs: Marija Dalbello and Rachel Miller
“SOURCE AT 10” Program Chairs: Carolyn Dorsey and Ana Ramirez Luhrs
Organizing Committee: Jill Baron, Marija Dalbello, Carolyn Dorsey, Rachel Miller, Ana Ramirez Luhrs
—————————————————
Sponsored by: School of Communication and Information
Keynote lecture sponsored by: Rutgers Seminar in the History of the Book, 2010-2011.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Submissions accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 4, 2011.

Conference dates: May 13-15, 2011 at MIT.

Conference website: web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/

Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? Does living in a digital age mean we may live and die in what the novelist Thomas Pynchon has called “a ceaseless spectacle of transition”? The nearly limitless range of design options and communication choices available now and in the future is both exhilarating and challenging, inciting innovation and creativity but also false starts, incompatible systems, planned obsolescence.

For this seventh Media in Transition conference we want to focus directly on our core topic – the experience of transition. Our first conference in 1999 considered this subject, of course. But that was before Facebook, iPhones, BitTorrent, IPTV and many other changes.

How are we coping with the instability of platforms? How are the classroom, the newsroom, the corporate office exploiting digital systems and responding to the imperative for constant upgrades. Our libraries and archives? Our public entertainments? Are new technologies changing the experience of reading? The experience of watching movies or television programs? How stable, how durable are current or emerging systems? How relevant are earlier periods of media change to our current experience of ongoing instability and transformation?

We welcome submissions from scholars and teachers in all fields as well as media-makers, producers, designers and industry professionals.

See the website for submission details.

Seminar on the History of Libraries, Institute of English Studies, University of London, UK

At the last meeting of this seminar, held on 30 November, Professor David McKitterick (Trinity College, Cambridge) spoke on `Libraries at risk’. He looked at a number of recent cases concerning historic collections in British libraries which have either been sold off, often without warning, or were/are at risk of dispersal. This talk is now available as a podcast on the website of the Institute of Historical Research at www.history.ac.uk/digital/podcasts.

Keith Manley, Giles Mandelbrote – Seminar convenors

Congratulations to Alison Sinclair, Professor of Modern Spanish Literature and Intellectual History at Cambridge, who has been awarded a major grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to support her current research on ‘Wrongdoing in Spain, 1800-1936: Realities, Representations and Reactions’. The project includes (but is not limited to) the digitization and cataloguing of some 4500 items held in the University Library and the British Library. This body of material offers a rich source of investigation for the project, and will be read in conjunction with other material (newspaper accounts of crime, judicial proceedings on the one hand, and fictional works on wrongdoing to be found in both popular culture and elite culture). The digitization of the ‘pliegos sueltos’ will be a significant contribution to the stewardship, conservation and enhanced accessibility of a body of cultural material which has its counterparts in English, and which allow the research to take place in a broader academic and cultural context.

News today that Prince William’s wedding certificate is going to be written on vellum, and that the happy couple are buying British. William Cowley of Newport Pagnall (est. 1860) are going to be soaking, stretching and scratching the skins until they are white and smooth. On this medium, the evidence of the match may last as long as the Magna Carta and the Domesday Book. The rest of us will have to make do with a mug or a mousemat.

Cowley is a company that regularly hits the news–as in 1999, when the Commons voted to carry on recording Parliamentary Acts on vellum, and in 2006, when the BBC’s royal charter, guaranteeing its funding for the next ten years, was approved. We are perpetuating some very timeworn techniques in our efforts to create what Horace called the monumentum aere perennius (a monument more lasting than bronze). Though he, of course, thought the really lasting medium was poetry–his own…