Events

What does the oceanic turn mean for our understanding of book and print cultures?  There is of course a long tradition of work on print cultures, port cities and transoceanic networks.  Yet, much of this work takes the ocean as a backdrop, more surface than volumetric depth.  Oceanic scholars have been urging us to go below the water line, to think in more ecological and material terms about the seaness of the sea and how this might be factored into our particular disciplinary concerns.

This paper takes up this challenge by thinking about the literary consequences of the colonial Custom House which assumed responsibility for copyright policy and censorship.  The paper places the Custom House in the context of the ecology of the littoral and the port city, showing how these helped shaped the protocols and procedures of Customs officials and hence the way in which they read and dealt with printed matter.  The work is framed within a larger theoretical rubric, hydrocolonialism.

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She has worked extensively on the Indian Ocean world and oceanic themes more generally. Recent publications include Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (2013) and a special issue of Comparative Literature (2016) on ‘Oceanic Routes’ co-edited with Kerry Bystrom.  She heads a project called Oceanic Humanities for the Global South with partners from Mozambique, Mauritius, India, Jamaica and Barbados.

This roundtable will help students and junior scholars navigate the world of publishing in archival studies, book history, and other connected fields. There will be plenty of time for discussion, so bring your questions!

Roundtable speakers:

Claire Battershill, co-editor of Virginia Woolf and the World of Books (Liverpool UP, 2018), co-curator of the travelling exhibition Make Believe: The Secret Library of M. Prud’homme—A Rare Collection of Fakes

Yuri Cowan, co-editor of Book History, founding editor of the open-access journal Authorship, guest editor of Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture

Fiorella Foscarini, general editor of Archivaria, co-editor of Engaging with Records and Archives (Facet, 2016)

Leslie Howsam, editor of the Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (Cambridge, 2014) and co-editor of Books between Europe and the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Heather MacNeil, past general editor of Archivaria, co-editor of Currents of Archival Thinking (ABC-CLIO, 2017)

Sarah Werner is the author of Studying Early Printed Books 1450‑1800: A Practical Guide (Wiley 2019) and the companion site EarlyPrintedBooks.com. She has also written numerous articles on book history, digital tools, and library outreach, including “Book History and Digital Scholarship” (with Matthew Kirschenbaum) in Book History and “Working Towards a Feminist Printing History” (forthcoming from Print History). Dr Werner’s earlier scholarship focused on Shakespeare and modern performance, and her book Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage (Routledge 2001) is still taught and cited by scholars. She worked at the Folger Shakespeare Library for nearly a decade as Undergraduate Program Director and as Digital Media Strategist, and is now a consultant working with special collections libraries to encourage teaching and collaboration with students and faculty using rare materials.