The Bibliographical Society of America is pleased to announce its 2018 Fellowship Program.

The BSA Fellowship Committee wishes to remind our broad community that BSA awards are open to any member of the scholarly community engaged in bibliographical scholarship, including: academics, faculty, graduate students, booksellers, collectors, and scholars studying the materiality of books, manuscripts, and other cultural documents and artifacts. 

Recent scholarship in literary studies has witnessed a return to an otherwise perennially unfashionable topic: genre. Also the subject of the 2009 English Institute and subsequent volume The Work of Genre (2011), this proliferation of novel theoretical and historical approaches to genre has taken several forms. Whereas scholars like Wai Chee Dimock have worked to disentangle theories of genre from a rigidly synchronic historicism, other critics—for example, Virginia Jackson with lyric and Elaine Freedgood with the realist novel—have sought to foreground genre as fundamentally historical.

The ancient Greek word topos is commonly translated as “place” and referred to a region, site, or geographical position. While the ancient Greek language is long gone, the term topos has survived and passed into the modern vernacular. Today, the word topos is used in literary theory and refers to any common literary theme or motif. This passage of the term for “place” into literary analysis is the natural extension of how the Classics viewed space, as they defined their world through fictions and mythology. The flora and fauna found in the pastoral realm had their origins in various myths, while the city gave the temple a central location and tie its central civic and religious festival to theatre.

Themes of waste and waste management circulate in contemporary literature as demonstrated in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the scatological poetry of A.R. Ammons, the collages of James Schuyler and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and the language middens of Caroline Bergvall’s Drift. Collections like Jennifer Scappettone’s The Republic of Exit 43 also highlight the shared architecture of landfills and human bodies connected by waste, built environments, and literary corpuses. The purpose of the seminar is then twofold. First, this seminar invites participants to explore art, film, and literature through the lens of waste, waste management, and toxic materialism.

How does SF represent and reflect on economic life?

How do finance, value, exchange, production, and the everyday economic reality of people’s lives appear in SF? How might SF contribute to the ongoing evolution of economics? And what might creators of science fiction, as custodians of radical visions of social organisation, learn from economics at this critical moment?