“Tim Harrison is having an incredible year. He recently accepted a job as a tenure-track assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, a position he chose over three postdoctoral fellowships also offered. The Milton Society of America honoured Harrison with the Albert C. Labriola Award for the best article published by a graduate student. And to top things off, he just handed in his thesis exploring how writers from Montaigne to Milton expressed the feeling of being alive.”  You can read the interview here.

“Scott Schofield, former postdoctoral fellow and instructor at the Faculty of Information and the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture, has accepted a tenure-track faculty position with the English Department at Huron University College in London, Ontario, part of Western University. Described as a deeply knowledgeable and generous colleague, Scott has taught a variety of courses for the Department of English at both UofT and Trent University, and he has also worked as a cataloguer for the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.”  You can read more here.

“In From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print and Modernity in Early British India 1795-1835 (The Johns Hopkins University Press), Daniel E. White, associate professor of British Romanticism at University of Toronto, examines the traffic in culture between Britain and India during the Romantic period. In the early part of the 19th century, part of Calcutta could be called ‘Little London’, while in London itself an Indianized community of returned expatriates was emerging as ‘Little Bengal’. Circling between the two, this study considers British and Indian literary, religious, and historical sources alongside newspapers, panoramas, religious festivals, idols, and museum exhibitions.” You can read more here.

“Second year iSchool student Joshua McEvilla is proud to have an article featured in the 107th volume of The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. His article, “A Catalogue of Book Advertisements from English Serials: Printed Drama, 1646–1668,” presents readers with an in-depth look at a series of advertisements of printed drama originally circulated in British news periodicals. For the article, he consulted special collections at more than a half dozen Rare Book libraries, including special collections at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.”  You can read more here.

“On a Wednesday afternoon in November, the audience at a lecture in the Beinecke received instructions they likely did not expect from an English professor: The guest speaker told them not to read the Dante excerpt before them. He asked them to look at it instead. The scholar, Randall McLeod, a professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, had come to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to give a lecture on the relationship between text and type. McLeod — the inventor of the McLeod Portable Collator, a device that allows scholars to compare copies of printed books by merging two texts into a single perceived image — was the second of six guest lecturers this year in the “Yale Program in the History of the Book” at the Beinecke.”  You can find out more here.

“Heather Jackson with an historical look at the practice of marginal notes in books, and how it compares to writing in the margins of the web.”  You can hear the interview here.

“This year has been a full and productive one for BHPC, the collaborative program housed in Massey College that brings together graduate students from a variety of disciplines based on their common research interest in the physical, cultural and theoretical aspects of the book.”  You can read more here.

“The year was 1952. I had spent six months in France doing the first research for my PhD thesis on ‘Protestantism and the Printing Workers of Lyon’. I was trying to explore the Reformation from the vantage point of artisans, rather than just that of the theologians like Luther and Calvin and the great princes. To find evidence about working people, many of whom are illiterate, you have to go to archives: to government lists, and church records, to criminal prosecutions and marriage contracts. I came back to Ann Arbor with packets of three-by-five cards filled with the names of Protestant pressmen and typesetters and other artisans—people who were finding ways to disguise Protestant tracts so they could get by the eyes of the Inquisitors and mocking the Catholic clergy in popular songs.” You can read her New York Review of Books blog post here.

“The forensic study of born-digital artifacts from bibliographic perspectives is a growing research focus for Prof. Alan Galey, whose research and teaching at the iSchool bridge the fields of book history, digital humanities, and analytical bibliography. What puts him at the forefront of this field is his innovative research on e-books. One of the results of his SSHRC Standard Research Grant funding has been his article “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination” (Book History 15 (2012): 210-47), which just won the prestigious 2013 Fredson Bowers Prize from the Society for Textual Scholarship for the best article in that field published in the past two years. Prof. Galey was awarded a certificate and a $500 cash prize, which he has donated to theChildren’s Book Bank, a charitable literacy organization in Toronto.”  You can find out more here.