Rare Book School at the University of Virginia

2021 Sol. M. and Mary Ann O’Brian Malkin Lecture: “What is ‘Black’ about Black Bibliography?” by Jacqueline Goldsby & Meredith McGill

Tuesday, 3 August, 5:30–6:30 p.m. ET, via Zoom

Owing to Zoom’s restrictions, this lecture is limited to the first 300 people who register. The lecture will be recorded and made available for later viewing on YouTube and Soundcloud.

In this talk, Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill will sketch the history of twentieth-century African American efforts to organize Black writing, describing a series of ambitious bibliographical projects that are shaped by the particular struggles of African Americans to gain access to print and to preserve evidence of Black achievement. The aim of this lecture is to frame and distill some of the principles that Goldsby and McGill have gleaned from these works and that guide their development of The Black Bibliography Project (BBP)–their attempt to revive descriptive bibliography as a critical practice in African American literary studies. Goldsby and McGill will discuss how the BBP and the tradition on which it rests offer new payoffs for African American literary studies and present challenges for bibliographical studies and book history at large.

Everyone is welcome to attend. To ensure the security of the event, advance registration is required; to register, click here.

Registration closes at 8 a.m. ET the day of the lecture. Your registration will be automatically accepted. You will receive an email reminder the day before the lecture. The day of the lecture, we will send you the Zoom URL and password. Please direct any questions to rbs-events@virginia.edu.

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