bibliography and history of the book

Resources for American Literary Study, a peer-reviewed journal of archival and bibliographical scholarship published by Penn State UP, invites submissions for upcoming volumes. Covering all periods of American literature, Resources for American Literary Study welcomes both traditional and digital humanities approaches to archival discovery. The journal also publishes scholarly bibliographies and other bibliographical overviews. Typical contributions include newly discovered letters and documents, checklists of primary and/or secondary writings about American authors, and biographical and compositional studies drawn from archival materials.

The art of calligraphy, with its elegance, precision and expressive power holds a celebrated place among the arts of China, Japan and the Middle East, and is much studied as a result. Western calligraphy using the Roman-script, by contrast, is relatively neglected within academia.

However, given current interest in both drawing research and grapho-linguistics – the study of writing systems – the time is ripe to explore the fascinating intersection of visual art and written language with a scholarly volume on Western calligraphy studies, broadly defined.

“Invisible Secrets in Pre-1865 American Literature” (SAMLA) Recent scholarly approaches in antebellum American literature emphasizes the role of secrets and secrecy, as in Dominick Mastroianni’s Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature (2022); essays on secrecy in Emily Dickinson’s poetry (Jeffrey Simons, Paul Scott Derrick, 2011); and the secret lives of nineteenth-century literature (Harper, Dickinson, Melville, 2022) in digital media, as Kayla Shipp has argued. This panel explores the way that unstated ideas, points, or secrets are exchanged in antebellum American literature.

STAGING SILENCE FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE RENAISSANCE

3–4 July 2025 / St John’s College, Cambridge

This two-day, in-person conference will explore developing traditions of silence in dramatic texts from antiquity to the Renaissance. Papers are sought from scholars across a range of fields, including classical reception, comparative literature, and medieval and/or early modern English literature. Topics may include:

-       mute characters and/or characters who never appear on stage;

-       characters who gain or lose the power of speech (welcoming perspectives e.g. from disability studies);

Novels and Book History, an area of the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association, is currently accepting proposals for the 2024 Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association (MAPACA) conference in Atlantic City, NJ to be held November 7-9, 2024. 

This area welcomes all explorations of the novel and/or the history of the book as they interact with American and/or popular culture. Subjects include genre fiction, authors and authorship, literary time periods, cultures, settings, reading, publishing, media studies, bookishness, and representations of books/reading in other media. 

The Rosemary VanArsdel Prize

The VanArsdel Prize is awarded annually to the best graduate student essay investigating Victorian periodicals and newspapers. The prize was established in 1990 to honor Rosemary VanArsdel, a founding member of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, whose groundbreaking research continues to shape the field of nineteenth-century periodical studies.

The winner of the VanArsdel Prize receives $500 and publication of their submission in Victorian Periodicals Review. 

Applications open May 1 and are due June 15.

Surveying the absence on her shelf where Elizabethan women’s writing ought to be, Virginia Woolf (in)famously dismissed the possibility of Shakespeare’s sister ever finding “a room of her own” to develop her voice. Recent decades of literary scholarship have shown the invention with which early modern women built out their own textual “rooms,” finding voice in surprising places and forms (even in silence, as Christina Luckyj heard [2002]), in visions of new political subjectivities (in a radically equal imaginary, as seen by Mihiko Suzuki [2003]), and through networks of overlooked community (in coteries and in letters, as traced by James Daybell [2006]).

Proposals are invited for Some Circumstance of the Text, a planned collection of essays to memorialize and celebrate William Proctor Williams (1939–2023), whose more than half-century of scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and reviewing has made a profound and lasting contribution to the fields of early modern English literature and drama, Shakespeare studies, textual criticism, bibliography, and book history.

Proposed essays should draw upon, build upon, or engage with William’s ideas across any of the subjects in which he worked, including but not limited to:

The Society for Textual Scholarship invites proposals for our 2024 conference hosted by the University of Tulsa, June 6-8, on the theme Text Under Pressure. The deadline for proposals is Monday, March 18.

Texts manifest many varieties of creative, social, and political pressure in their expressive content and form. But text is also often a matter of technological pressure: printing techniques rely on the pressure of a platen, roller, or squeegee; other recording and playback processes require the pressure of a stylus, a chisel, a nib, or the gentle pulse of a wifi wave. Such pressurized circumstances, symbolic and material, reveal core issues of textual production, circulation, reception, and contestation. 

MLA 2025, New Orleans (9-12 January)

The Forum on Seventeenth-Century English Studies (LLC 17th-Century English) invites submissions for a guaranteed session on “Early Modern Social Media.” We are particularly interested in research that addresses the power of both established and emerging media—ballads, pamphlets, newsletters, pasquinades, and so forth—to amplify the gravity of historical circumstances, harness public affect, and precipitate ideological shifts. Please send 250-word abstracts by 3/15/2024 to Carmen Nocentelli (nocent@unm.edu).

Linda H. Peterson Fellowship Deadline: 15 March 2024

Dear friends and colleagues, This summer, the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) is offering week-long seminars on the history of the book and visual culture. AAS seminars are open to academics, library and museum professionals, independent researchers, and members of the antiquarian book trade. Hands-on sessions with AAS's exceptional collection of rare books, periodicals, manuscripts, and the graphic arts are a hallmark of the seminar experience.  Please follow the links provided below for more information and instructions on how to apply: "Disability Histories in the Visual Archive: Redress, Protest, and Justice" June 9-14, 2024.

Call for Well-Qualified Guest Reviewers

The international peer-reviewed Creative Industries Journal [CIJ] (Routledge/ Taylor and Francis), now in its 13th volume and approaching its 14th year, seeks to create a pool of guest reviewers, who possess the requisite expertise, to complement our Peer Review Board and Editorial team.

This conference will provide an opportunity for medievalists working across a range of disciplines and geographic areas to join in conversation about premodern cultures of the book, boundary- crossing, and the law and other normative cultural expressions. Given this year’s conference location at a Jesuit, Catholic university, and our keynote speakers, we particularly (but not exclusively) invite submissions focused on regions other than England, including the Middle East; language traditions other than English; and religious cultures.