bibliography and history of the book

On_Culture Issue 16 (Spring 2024): Ways of Reading

With the sixteenth issue of On_Culture, we want to explore various approaches to reading cultural artifacts and events in an attempt to answer the question: What are the affordances of particular forms of reading and what do they bring forth? While the ability to decipher words and distinguish individual characters is perceived as a key skill and taught from an early age, philosophical traditions introduce us to critical approaches to interpreting broader cultural phenomena. 

While we sometimes feel like life is moving around us rather than with us, it is essential to take a moment and consider how we got where we are. Over time, attitudes, opinions, and feelings have shifted along with what we choose to carry with us. To avoid leaving important things behind or risk forgetting them altogether, it is time to ask ourselves why we leave certain things behind and what it means when we do.

How can we leverage material texts and archival encounters to reinvigorate the humanities classroom? We invite proposals for a roundtable on such pedagogies and their impact in the classroom and beyond.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and brief bio to the session organizers via email (see below) by March 17, 2023.

Contact the session organizers via email with any questions: Jennifer Rabedeau (jbr263@cornell.edu) and Grace Catherine Greiner (gcg49@cornell.edu).

RSVP Field Development Grant

The RSVP Field Development Grant was created with funds from a generous bequest to RSVP by the late Eileen Curran, pioneering researcher and Emerita Professor of English at Colby College. The grant is intended to support one or a team of researchers in creating resources that will facilitate the work of other scholars in their studies of 19th-century British newspapers and periodicals.

INTERNATIONAL SIDNEY SOCIETY at the SIXTEENTH-CENTURY-SOCIETY CONFERENCE

26-29 October 2023

Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. (Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel)

The International Sidney Society will sponsor three panels at the 2023 Sixteenth-Century-Society Conference and invites paper proposals related to Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney Herbert (Countess of Pembroke), Lady Mary Wroth, other members of the Sidney-Herbert-Dudley family, or associates of the broader Sidney circle.  

Resources for American Literary Study (RALS), a journal of archival and bibliographical scholarship in American literature, invites submissions for our upcoming 2023 issues. Covering all periods of American literature, RALS welcomes both traditional and digital approaches to archival and bibliographical analysis. 

On 29 -30 May 2023, Canada’s bibliographical and book studies community will gather for the Annual Conference of the Bibliographical Society of Canada at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences for our first in-person conference since 2019.

Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries welcomes articles exploring any area relating to Defoe and/or his contemporaries (broadly conceived). In addition to traditional scholarly papers (roughly 4000-7000 words), we welcome essays on fresh pedagogical approaches to the works of Defoe and other writers of his era.

We also encourage the submission of innovative digital and multimedia projects, as well as experimental non-peer reviewed essays.

Scholarly essays may be eligible for essay prizes awarded by the Defoe Society.

https://www.defoesociety.org/awards/

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the journal Shakespeare (the organ of the British Shakespeare Association, published by Routledge) on the Topic of "The Shakespeare First Folio: 1623 to 2023"

The guest editors of the journal Shakespeare, Miranda Fay Thomas (Trinity College Dublin) and Gabriel Egan (De Montfort University), invite papers for a special issue on the topic of the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio. The special issue will appear in late 2023 to coincide with the book's 400 anniversary. The special issue is open to any study that focusses on the significance, understanding, and reception of this important book in its own time and/or at any time between 1623 and now.

The Curran Fellowships are travel and research grants intended to aid scholars studying 19th-century British magazines and newspapers in making use of primary print and archival sources. Generally, multiple awards are given each year. The fellowship is made possible through the generosity of the late Eileen Curran, Professor Emerita of English, Colby College, and inspired by her pioneering research on Victorian periodicals.

See https://rs4vp.org/awards/curran-fellowship/ for more details.

One-day conference, in-person, June 9 2023.

Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW.

Deadline Extended: Reception: Texts. Readers, Audiences, History, the peer-reviewed journal of the Reception Study Society, is inviting applications for one of its two general editor positions. Published annually by Penn State University Press, Reception presents a forum for scholarly and critical research-based articles in audience and reception studies in literary criticism, cultural and media studies, and the history of reading and book history. Our new editor will be expected to work with the journal’s continuing co-editor and its book-review editor to continue to develop Reception’s role as a leader in presenting new research in the various fields of audience study.

The 18th biennial conference of the Early Book Society will be hosted by Carrie Griffin and Eleanor Giraud at the University of Limerick from 11th to 14th July, 2023, with an excursion on 15th July. Confirmed keynote speakers include John Thompson, Emeritus Professor, Queen’s University Belfast, and Lisa Fagin Davis, Executive Director, Medieval Academy of America. Planned activities include an early music concert and hands-on use of the university’s printing press. Please mark your calendars.

2023 marks the 400th anniversary of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known as the First Folio, published in 1623. It included 36 plays, some of which had not been published before. On the website of The Folger Shakespeare Library readers are invited to “learn more about Shakespeare’s language, life, and the world he knew,” suggesting that we might be able to unlock, or at least better understand, Shakespeare’s works by studying what he and his contemporaries not only read but also saw or heard.