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Will Slauter (Univ. Paris Diderot – Institut universitaire de France), “Who Owns the News? Journalism and Intellectual Property in Historical Perspective”

Victoria College: Alumni Hall (VC112) 91 Charles Street W., Toronto, Ontario

In Association with the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy (Faculty of Law) and the Friends of the Victoria University Library Concerns about the piracy of news go back at least to the seventeenth century, when complaints involved counterfeit ballads hawked on the streets rather than articles reposted on the Internet. But with respect to […]

Alan Galey (UofT), “Bibliography for a Used Future — Finding the Human Presence in E-Books and Other Digital Artifacts”

Faculty of Information (Room 728) 140 St. George Street, Toronto

This presentation argues the case for bibliography and book history as disciplines uniquely equipped to recover the signs of human presence in digital artifacts—those humanizing dings, paint scratches, and coffee rings, as it were, that ground new technologies within human timescales and experiential worlds. The past several years have seen remarkable growth in textual scholarship […]

The Fifth Annual J. R. de J. Jackson Lecture: James Raven (University of Essex / Magdalene College, Cambridge), “How Can There Be a History of the Book? A History of Book History”

Victoria College Chapel (VC213) 91 Charles Street W., Toronto, Ontario

In association with the Friends of the Victoria University Library For some contributors to the history of the book, the subject appears bounded and specific, for others it is more indefinite, more a label than a discipline. This lecture explores how these differences relate to parent disciplines and the training of respective contributors from literary, […]

Robert Spoo (University of Tulsa College of Law), “International Authors’ Rights and the Uncoordinated Public Domain”

Faculty of Law (Room J140) 78 Queen's Park, Toronto, Ontario

In association with the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy (Faculty of Law) When nations amend their copyright laws in response to calls for international harmonization, they usually do so by expanding authors' rights without also seeking to harmonize national public domains.  Divergent laws have resulted in an uncoordinated global public domain that renders authors' […]

Leslie Howsam (University of Windsor), “Inverting Interdisciplinarity: Who will take book history to the next level?”

Faculty of Information (Room 728) 140 St. George Street, Toronto

In association with the Faculty of Information Robert Darnton famously worried that book history might lead to “interdisciplinarity run riot.” Perhaps instead the time has come to turn it inside out. In my 2006 Old Books & New Histories I called for mutual respect among the three core disciplines. Each scholar asks questions grounded in […]

Natalie Davis (University of Toronto), “Experiencing Exclusion: Book History after Inquisition”

Upper Library, Massey College 4 Devonshire Place, Toronto, Ontario

In this informal talk, Natalie Davis will describe the impact of the Red Hunt in the United States in the 1950s on her own scholarship as a graduate student and beginning historian, especially its effect on her work on book history in early modern France.  She will also look at some other historians similarly affected […]

The Sixth Annual J. R. de J. Jackson Lecture: Lisa Gitelman (New York University), “On Not Reading”

Faculty of Information (Room 728) 140 St. George Street, Toronto

In association with the Faculty of Information and the Department of English Reading is said to be “at risk” in the 21st Century, presumably because of the digitally mediated environment amid which we browse, multitask, and, well, read. Predictions of doom follow from the decline of reading, although there’s very little consensus about what reading […]

Jessica Brantley (Yale University), “The Late Medieval Book of Hours and the Idea of the Literary”

Victoria College Chapel (VC213) 91 Charles Street W., Toronto, Ontario

In association with the Friends of the Victoria University Library More books of hours remain in modern libraries than any other kind of book from late medieval England:  almost eight hundred manuscript volumes, and many thousands of printed ones.  From Europe at large the number of manuscripts alone has been estimated at around ten thousand.  […]

Alexandra Gillespie (University of Toronto), “What Was the Cost of Books in Chaucer’s Time?”

Upper Library, Massey College 4 Devonshire Place, Toronto, Ontario

This paper argues that historical analysis of the cost or price of medieval books is confounded by the quantity and quality of the available evidence. Medieval scholars depend on very small data sets to address this question, and even the data that are available have been stripped by time of key contextual information. In the […]

Jonathan Senchyne (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Slavery and the History of the Book in America”

Jackman Humanities Building (Room 100a) 170 St George Street, Toronto, Ontario

In association with the Department of English and the Faculty of Information In The History of Printing In America (1812), Isaiah Thomas briefly records the life of Primus Fowle, an African American who was enslaved by Daniel Fowle in Boston and Portsmouth.  Thomas writes, "This negro was named Primus. He was an African. I well remember him; he […]