There’s a pleasing line in Yale University Press’s dustjacket blurb for Those Who Write for Immortality, a new book by retired BHPC Director Heather Jackson: “In 2000 she helped to found a graduate program in Book History and Print Culture [at U of T] that is now recognized as a world leader in the field.” The program continues to grow, and in 2014 we admitted a talented new cohort from Art, Comparative Literature, English, French, Information, Medieval Studies, Religion, and Spanish. All these students are drawn to BHPC from their different disciplinary backgrounds by a shared interest in text technologies (manuscript, print, digital) and associated practices (authorship, publishing, reading, collecting). They study book history from a variety of perspectives: material, cultural, and theoretical. It is one of the strengths of graduate education at U of T that multi-disciplinary programs such as ours can transcend conventional academic boundaries and bring researchers together in productive, often thrillingly serendipitous, ways. You can read more here (p. 15).
