“B.C.-born Claire Battershill is both a highly accomplished academic and the author of fiction that has been nominated for multiple awards. Her debut collection, Circus, came out in April.”  You can read the interview here.

“Dr. Vernon “Von” Totanes (PhD ’12) is celebrating two major accomplishments back to back. On November 16th in Toronto, he graduated from the iSchool with a PhD in the Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture, under the supervision of Professor Emeritus, Patricia Fleming. His thesis is entitled ‘History of the Filipino history book’. On the same day, back in the Philippines, Von started as Assistant Director of the Rizal Library at Ateneo de Manila University. In April 2013, he will take over when the current Director retires. Dr. Totanes’ new credentials helped him land this prestigious appointment.”  You can read more here.

“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.