The Toronto Centre for the Book was established at the University of Toronto in 1994 by Michael and Jane Millgate (Department of English), Patricia Fleming (Faculty of Information), and others in order to bring together faculty, librarians, students, and members of the general public who are interested in the past, present, and future of the book and in all aspects of the creation, diffusion, and reception of the written word. Since then the TCB’s main focus was running a successful lecture series, but the Centre also fostered interdisciplinary work in book history throughout the University and the wider Toronto community. From 2009 to 2019 the TCB was the lecture series of the graduate Book History and Print Culture Program, and by 2019 it was safe to say that the TCB succeeded in its original mission to establish book history as part of the intellectual life of the University of Toronto. Beginning in 2019, the renamed BHPC Events Series will continue to serve as a leading international forum for the multidisciplinary investigation of manuscript, print, and digital text and cultures.
Previous Toronto Centre for the Book lectures:
2018-2019
The Seventh Annual J. R. de J. Jackson Lecture
Paula McDowell (New York University)
“Marshall McLuhan’s Eighteenth Century”
Thursday, 14 March 2019, 4:15 pm
Victoria College Chapel, 91 Charles St. W, Room VC213
In Association with the Friends of the Victoria University Library, the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, and the Toronto Eighteenth Century Group.
Abstract and Biography
Marshall McLuhan is remembered today as a media theorist, but he was a literary scholar by training and an English professor by occupation. Attention has been paid to McLuhan’s contributions as a literary critic of modernism, and his doctoral thesis on Renaissance author Thomas Nashe has recently been published. But his lifelong relationship with eighteenth-century authors such as John Locke, Isaac Newton, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Laurence Sterne, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and William Blake has gone virtually unremarked.
Drawing on archival research at such venues as the Library and Archives Canada and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, this lecture will address McLuhan’s reading and writing about eighteenth-century literature, from his college years in Canada and Great Britain, to his decades as a professor and literary critic in North America, and finally, to his explosion onto the international stage after the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media.
The lecture argues that McLuhan’s reading of eighteenth-century texts shaped his (and by extension, our) views on media shift and social and cultural change, and it addresses compelling questions that this largely unacknowledged history raises. Given McLuhan’s emphasis that “the medium is the message,” how did the material form, as well as content of works such as Pope’s “epic of the printed word,” the Dunciad, influence his (McLuhan’s) thinking about the psychic and social effects of print? More broadly, if this media theorist’s understanding of the “consequences” of media shift was fundamentally shaped by his literary reading, what are the consequences for us as critics, theorists, and teachers today?
Paula McDowell specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and media and in the History of the Book. With the support of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she has published The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730 (Oxford, 1998), Elinor James: Printed Writings (Ashgate, 2005), and articles on models of the Enlightenment, the epistemology of ephemera, the eighteenth-century novel, and many other topics. Her latest book, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2017), was awarded the John Ben Snow Prize by the North American Conference on British Studies for the best book by a North American scholar on any aspect of British studies from the middle ages to the eighteenth century. It examines the oral/literate binary as a heuristic — a tool for understanding that itself has a history — and argues that the concept of “oral culture” was in fact a back formation of the explosion of print commerce. She is currently writing a book on the scholarly life and reading of professor and media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) and on the literary and humanistic origins of media studies.
Susan Brown (University of Guelph)
“Books in Bits”
Thursday, 24 January 2019, 4:15 pm
Massey College, 4 Devonshire Place, Upper Library
In Association with Massey College, the Department of English, and the University of Toronto Digital Humanities Network
Abstract and Biography
Susan Brown is Professor of English at the University of Guelph, where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship, and Visiting Professor in English and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta. Her research in digital humanities, Victorian literature, and women’s writing informs Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (www.ualberta.ca/orlando), an ongoing experiment in digital literary history, published online by Cambridge University Press since 2006, which she directs and co-edits. She also leads the development of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (www.cwrc.ca), a CFI-funded online repository and research environment for literary studies in Canada. CWRC is developing tools for collaborative knowledge production, interoperability, and sustainability of digital scholarly resources.
Agnieszka Helman-Ważny (University of Hamburg, University of Warsaw)
“Tibetan Manuscripts of Mustang in Light of New Discoveries”
Thursday, 29 November 2018, 4:15 pm
Faculty of Information, 140 St. George Street, Room 728
In Association with the Faculty of Information and the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies
Abstract and Biography
Considering these perspectives, this lecture will present the preliminary results from surveying the Bön and Buddhist manuscript collections in Mustang, Nepal, such as for example the collection of Mardzong manuscripts found in the Caves of Upper Mustang near Lo Mönthang, the Lama Tsulthrim collection in Lubrak, the Bönpo Gompa collection in Jharkot, and the Drang srong collection in Lo Mönthang. This study will show the recent progress that comprises the description, identification and dating of newly discovered books using integrated multi-disciplinary methodologies. These are based on both codicology and scientific techniques such as fibre analysis, digital microscopy, and C14 dating. Features particular to these manuscripts will be discussed in the overall context of paper- and book-making traditions in Tibet and Nepal.
Dr. Agnieszka Helman-Ważny (Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg, Germany and the Department of Books and Media History, Faculty of Journalism, Information and Book Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland) is a paper scientist and the author or co-author of four books and more than forty scholarly articles, including The Archaeology of Tibetan Books (Brill 2014) and Codicology, Paleography, and Orthography of Early Tibetan Documents: Methods and a Case Study (Universität Wien 2017, co-authored with Brandon Dotson). Her main research focuses on the history of the regional production and usage of paper and books in Tibet and Central Asia. Using interdisciplinary methods in collaboration with private collectors, museum curators, Tibetan artisans, as well as personal experience in “experimental manuscriptology,” Dr. Helman-Ważny’s work is concerned with establishing paper typologies, and applying modern technologies in the identification and dating of premodern non-western manuscripts, including the Dunhuang manuscripts.
2017-2018
The Sixth Annual J. R. de J. Jackson Lecture
Lisa Gitelman (New York University)
“On Not Reading”
Thursday, 28 September 2017, 4:15 pm
In Association with the Faculty of Information and the Department of English
Faculty of Information, 140 St. George Street, Room 728
Abstract and Biography
Lisa Gitelman, Professor of English and of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, is a media historian whose research concerns American print culture, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. She is particularly concerned with tracing the patterns according to which new media become meaningful within and against the contexts of older media. Her most recent book is entitled Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents and was published by Duke in 2014. Before that, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture was published by the MIT Press in 2006. She holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. She has taught at the Catholic University of American and at Harvard University, and has held fellowships and awards from the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, the Leslie Center Humanities Institute, Dartmouth College, and the University of Iowa Obermann Center for Advanced Study.
Jessica Brantley (Yale University)
“The Late Medieval Book of Hours and the Idea of the Literary”
Thursday, 2 November 2017, 4:15 pm
In Association with the Friends of the Victoria University Library
Victoria College Chapel, 91 Charles St. W, Room VC213
Abstract and Biography
In this talk, I explore the importance of the material and textual genre of the hours for English literary history. Rather than offering a history of art or a history of prayer—the more common rubrics for approaching these volumes—the talk excavates the histories of literature that are manifest in this uniquely important textual archive. My study therefore explores the evidence for connections both broad and specific between books of hours and vernacular literary culture in late medieval England. As compendia of multiple texts and systems of images, books of hours reveal a rich hybridity of representation to be a central feature of late-medieval reading: reading absent texts alongside present ones, vernacular captions alongside Latin prayers, static images alongside developing narrative and—not least—pictures alongside words. Because these prayerbooks were so wildly popular, their construction of a both paratactic and simultaneous relation among multiple systems of signification informed the most common reading experience of the late Middle Ages. Their complex understanding of what it meant to read—of how a person should engage with a book—can have enormous consequences for our sense of how medieval literary culture worked.
Jessica Brantley is Professor of English at Yale University, where she has taught since 2000. Before that, she studied at Harvard University (A.B.), Cambridge University (M. Phil.), and UCLA (Ph.D.). Her interests include Old and Middle English literatures, manuscript studies, text/image relations, and the history of the book. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in all of these subjects, and she is currently the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the English Department at Yale. Professor Brantley’s research examines the cultures of medieval reading as they are preserved in manuscripts. Her first book, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago, 2007), shows that the format of a late-medieval miscellany reveals surprising connections between the private reading of a meditative lyric and the public performance of civic drama. Other projects in process include a handbook on Medieval Manuscripts and Literary Forms, an edited volume of essays entitled Late Medieval English Alabaster: A Reassessment, and a monograph provisionally entitled The Medieval Imagetext: A Literary History of the Book of Hours.
Alexandra Gillespie (University of Toronto)
“What was the Cost of Books in Chaucer’s Time?”
Thursday, 11 January 2018, 4:15 pm
In Association with Massey College
Upper Library, 4 Devonshire Place
Abstract and Biography
Alexandra Gillespie is a Professor at the University of Toronto in English and Medieval Studies, where she teaches medieval literature, bibliography, and manuscript studies. Her research is concerned with medieval and early modern texts and books; she is especially interested in the shift from manuscript to print, the relationship between book history, literary criticism, and literary theory, and the digitization of medieval books. Her publications include Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473-1557 (Oxford, 2006) and The Production of Books in England, 1350-1500, edited with Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge, 2011). Professor Gillespie currently serves as Chair of the Department of English and Drama, University of Toronto at Mississauga; she also directs the Old Books New Science (OBNS) Lab, which brings together undergraduate research assistants, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and technologists with interests in digital scholarship, digital text editing, computational approaches to humanities research, and medieval book history (manuscript and print).
Jonathan Senchyne (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“Slavery and the History of the Book in America”
Thursday, 1 March 2018, 4:15 pm
In association with the Department of English and the Faculty of Information
Jackman Humanities Institute, 170 St. George Street, Room 100a.
Abstract and Biography
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 worked at press with or without an assistant; he continued to do press work until prevented by age. He went to Portsmouth with his master, and there died, being more than ninety years of age; about fifty of which he was a pressman.” Though he “did press work,” the broadsides, newspapers, and other sheets that came off his press were marked “Daniel Fowle, Printer” or “Printed by Daniel Fowle,” never formally crediting Primus Fowle. What are the logics of both print and slavery that occlude a figure like Primus Fowle? What would it mean to account for enslaved printers within our vast archives of early American print? Senchyne argues for the importance of reading typography, accidents, breakages, and other non-alphabetic marks in recovering the presence of enslaved printers like Primus Fowle.
Jonathan Senchyne is an assistant professor of book history and print culture in the Information School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also the director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture. He has a Ph.D. in English from Cornell. He is currently completing a book on the meaning-making dimensions of paper in early and nineteenth-century American literature entitled Intimate Paper and the Materiality of American Literature, under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press’s series on Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. With Brigitte Fielder, he is coeditor of Infrastructures of African American Print (University of Wisconsin Press). Senchyne’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Book History, Technology and Culture, Studies in Romanticism, Early African American Print Culture, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, and elsewhere. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the New York Public Library. With Martin Foys, Senchyne is co-PI on grants from CLIR and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation to develop and implement DM: Digital Maxima, an open source platform for creating architectures of linked, annotated, and searchable data among digital surrogates of archival texts and media.
2016-2017
James Raven (University of Essex/Magdalene College, Cambridge)
“How Can There Be A History of the Book? A History of Book History”
Thursday, 29 September 2016, 4:15 pm
In Association with the Friends of Victoria University Library
Victoria College Chapel, 91 Charles Street W., Room VC213
Abstract and Biography
James Raven is Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge; he was previously Reader in Social and Cultural History at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries, and a member of the American Antiquarian Society, he has also held visiting appointments in the United States, France, Italy and Britain. His scholarship in social and cultural history and cultural studies was recognized with the award of LittD from the University of Cambridge in 2012. His recent publications include Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 (Chicago, 2014), based on his British Library Panizzi Lectures for 2010; Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England (Boydell, 2014); and Lost Mansions: Essays on the Destruction of the Country House (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Numerous earlier books and articles examine social, economic and communications history, historical mapping, approaches to media and literary history, the spatial organisation of knowledge, historical bibliography, and colonial cultural history. He has also published on specific aspects of urban, business and popular and intellectual history, and is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. As part of a major long-term project re-examining the spatial history of Enlightenment global networks, he is completing a book on reading and commercialisation, and he is also currently completing research for an OUP history of chancing, gambling and state lotteries. He directs the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust and the Mapping the Print Culture of Eighteenth-Century London project, and is now launching a major European network project on the historical geographies of communications and social media (building on an earlier European Science Foundation workshop, ‘Knowing About Mediation’, involving participants from 14 EU countries).
Robert Spoo (University of Tulsa College of Law)
“International Authors’ Rights and the Uncoordinated Public Domain”
Thursday, 3 November 2016, 4:15 pm
In Association with the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy (Faculty of Law)
Faculty of Law, 78 Queen’s Park, Room J140
Abstract and Biography
Robert Spoo holds the Chapman Distinguished Chair in Law at the University of Tulsa, and was recently named a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. He earned his JD from Yale, where he was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal. After graduating, he served as law clerk for the Hon. Sonia Sotomayor of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and practised for several years in New York, Oklahoma, and San Francisco, providing litigation services and advice in the areas of copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual property. As an attorney, Professor Spoo has represented authors, scholars, documentary filmmakers, record companies, and other creators and users of intellectual property. His litigation work has included serving as co-counsel, with the Stanford Center for Internet & Society and other attorneys, for Professor Carol Shloss of Stanford against the Estate of James Joyce. Prior to his legal career, Professor Spoo received his PhD in English from Princeton and taught for more than ten years in the University of Tulsa English Department, where he was also editor of the James Joyce Quarterly. He has published numerous books and articles on Joyce, Ezra Pound, and other modern literary figures. His teaching interests include copyrights and intellectual property, media and entertainment law, law and literature, and the copyright-related needs of scholars. His book Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (OUP, 2013) offers a legal and cultural history of the impact on non-US authors of protectionist and isolationist features of US copyright laws since 1790. Professor Spoo is a member of the Modernist Studies Association Task Force on Fair Use, serves as copyright advisor to many academic journals and projects, and acts as general counsel for the International James Joyce Foundation. He also serves on the National Library of Ireland advisory board, and has assisted with proposed copyright legislation for the Republic of Ireland and other copyright issues affecting Irish cultural institutions.
Leslie Howsam (University of Windsor)
“Inverting Interdisciplinarity: Who will take Book History to the Next Level?”
Thursday, 19 January 2017, 4:15 pm
In Association with the Faculty of Information
Faculty of Information, 140 St. George Street, Room 728
Abstract and Biography
Leslie Howsam is Distinguished University Professor Emerita at the University of Windsor, Senior Research Fellow at Ryerson University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She earned a PhD in modern British history from York University in 1989 and joined the faculty at Windsor in 1993. She was later founding president of the Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture / Association Canadienne pour l’étude de l’histoire du livre (2004 -9) and president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (2009-13). She now serves as General Editor for the series Studies in Book and Print Culture published by the University of Toronto Press. She is a Trustee of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust and a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Her major publications include, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and in 2009 the British Library and the University of Toronto Press jointly published Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain 1850-1950. This was based on lectures delivered as part of her James P. R. Lyell Readership in Bibliography (2005-6) at the University of Oxford. Her first book was Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge University Press, 1991); perhaps her best-known is Old Books & New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book & Print Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2006).
Natalie Zemon Davis (University of Toronto)
“Experiencing Exclusion: Book History After the Inquisition”
Thursday, 23 March 2017, 4:15 pm
Massey College, 4 Devonshire Place, Upper Library.
Abstract and Biography
Natalie Zemon Davis specializes in the social and cultural history of France, as well as other parts of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. She has taught at Brown University, the University of Toronto, the University of California, Berkeley, and at Princeton University, where she was Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. On retiring from Princeton in 1996 she returned to Toronto, where she continues to live, as Adjunct Professor of History and Anthropology and Professor of Medieval Studies. In 2010, she was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize as “one of the most creative historians writing today” whose work, in the wording of the award citation, “shows how particular events can be narrated and analyzed so as to reveal deeper historical tendencies and underlying patterns of thought and action.” In 2012, she was named Companion of the Order of Canada, the highest class within the order. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama for “her insights into the study of history and her exacting eloquence in bringing the past into focus.” Davis’s books have all been translated into other languages: twenty-two in the case of The Return of Martin Guerre.
Johanna Drucker (UCLA)
“Analogue and Digital Histories of the Alphabet”
In Association with the Faculty of Information
Thursday, 8 October 2015, 4:15 pm
Abstract and Biography
Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies at UCLA. She has published and lectured widely on topics related to digital humanities and aesthetics, visual forms of knowledge production, book history and future designs, graphic design, historiography of the alphabet and writing, and contemporary art. Her recent titles include SpecLab: Projects in Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009) and the jointly authored Digital_Humanities (MIT, 2012) with Anne Burdick, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp. A collection of her essays, What Is? was published by Cuneiform Press in 2013, and Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (2014) appeared in the Harvard University Press MetaLab series. In addition to her academic work, Drucker has produced artist’s books and projects that were the subject of a retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, initiated at Columbia College in Chicago. Her artist’s books are represented in museum and library collections throughout the United States and Europe. In 2014 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Jennifer Graber (UT Austin)
“‘Zotom Is Busy Drawing a Book’: Reading Religion in Plains Indian Ledger Notebooks”
Thursday, 4 February 2016, 4:15 pm
In Association with the Master of Museum Studies Program (Faculty of Information) and the Department for the Study of Religion
Abstract and Biography
This lecture explores Kiowa Indian drawings and calendars kept in ledger notebooks. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Kiowas created hundreds, if not thousands, of drawings and paintings in notebooks that circulated between Indian communities, American missionaries, military officials, and anthropologists. Through an examination of several Kiowa artists, this lecture asks how Kiowa forms of personal expression, history keeping, and reflection on encounters with the supernatural changed as a result of the move from visual production on natural materials to ledger books.
Jennifer Graber is a historian of religion in the United States specializing in inter-religious encounter and violence. Her first book, The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America, explores the intersection of church and state during the founding of the nation’s first prisons. Her current project focuses on religious transformations in Indian and settler communities in Indian Territory over the course of the nineteenth century. Professor Graber teaches undergraduate classes on the history of religion in the United States, Native American religions, and the American West. She teaches graduate seminars on religion and violence, religion and empire, and approaches to the study of religion in the U.S.
Will Slauter (Univ. Paris Diderot – Institut universitaire de France)
“Who Owns the News? Journalism and Intellectual Property in Historical Perspective”
Thursday, 3 March 2016, 4:15 pm
In Association with the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy (Faculty of Law) and the Friends of the Victoria University Library
Abstract and Biography
Will Slauter is an associate professor of English studies at Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7 and a member of the Institut universitaire de France (IUF). He received a PhD in history from Princeton University and has taught at Columbia University, Florida State University, and Université Paris 8 (2010-2015). He studies the history of authorship and publishing, with a particular interest in newspapers, and is currently working on a book about the history of copyright in journalism. This research has been supported by residential fellowships at the New York Public Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society (NEH Fellow 2015), and the Library of Congress (Kluge Fellow 2015-2016).
Alan Galey (University of Toronto)
“Bibliography for a Used Future: Finding the Human Presence in E-Books and Other Digital Artifacts”
Thursday, 24 March 2016, 4:00 pm
In Association with the Faculty of Information
Abstract and Biography
That extension of bibliographical thinking to born-digital materials may be natural, but it is by no means straightforward. Fredson Bowers’s metaphorical description of bibliography’s goal—to “strip the veil of print from a text” to understand its history and transmission—may resonate even more with twenty-first century bibliographers faced with a veil of code, yet lacking methods to investigate beneath the surfaces of our screens. What might an artifact like an e-book reveal about the history and social contexts of its making, or the collaborative nature of its construction? How do we locate the significant differences between the surviving versions of a digital text, and what is at stake in their preservation and representation? In a born-digital context, how do form and meaning shape each other? This talk will explore these questions and related examples within the context of my current book project, The Veil of Code, which offers a series of case studies in born-digital bibliography.
Alan Galey is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, where he also teaches in the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture. His research focuses on intersections between textual scholarship and digital technologies, especially in the context of theories of the archive and the history of new media prototyping and experimentation (print, digital, and otherwise). He has published on these topics in journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Literary and Linguistic Computing, College English and Archival Science, and has co-edited the book collection Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures (with Travis DeCook; Routledge, 2011). His article “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination,” published in Book History in 2012, was awarded the Fredson Bowers Prize by the Society for Textual Scholarship. He was also given the Outstanding Instructor Award by the Master of Information Student Council for 2013-2014. His first monograph book, The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity, was published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press.
2014-2015
Leah Price (Harvard University)
“How To Lose Your Place in a Book”
In Association with Victoria College and the Friends of the Victoria University Library
Thursday, 23 October 2014, 4:15 pm
Abstract and Biography
Leah Price teaches English at Harvard University. Her books include How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton UP, 2012) and The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge UP, 2000). She edited Unpacking my Library: Writers and their Books (2011); Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (with Pamela Thurschwell); and (with Seth Lerer) a special issue of PMLA on The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature. She writes on old and new media for the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, San Francisco Chronicle, and Boston Globe. She is at work on a new book, Out of Print: Reading after Paper.
John Haines (Faculty of Music / Centre for Medieval Studies, U of T)
Title: Music as Commodity in the New World
Thursday, 27 November 2014, 4:15 pm
Abstract and Biography
John Haines is professor of music and medieval studies at the University of Toronto. He has published on the music of the Middle Ages and its modern reception in a variety of journals, both musicological – from Early Music History to Popular Music – and non-musicological – from Romania to Scriptorium. His books include Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (2004) and Medieval Song in Romance Languages (2010). He is a contributor, among others, to The Cambridge Companion to French Music and The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, both forthcoming. This year (2014), appeared two of his books, Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy (Routledge) and The Notory Art of Shorthand (Ars notoria notarie): A Curious Chapter in the History of Writing in the West (Louvain), as well as his edited collection of essays, Musique et littérature au Moyen Âge, for the Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes (Garnier). Most recently, he has been studying music of the Americas in the sixteenth century.
Matthew Hedstrom (University of Virginia)
“Sola Scriptura?: Book History and Religious Authority in the United States”
Thursday, 29 January 2015, 4:15 pm
In Association with the Centre for the Study of the United States
Abstract and Biography
This lecture will attend to this dynamic of authority, to the role of print in the interplay of establishment and dissent in American religious life. Three themes structure the analysis: the relationship between scriptural and non-scriptural forms of print; the gendered dimensions of reading, literacy, and authorship; and the nature of print as commodity, and therefore as a site where market dynamics shape religion with particular potency. Through an examination of key examples across four centuries, this talk aims to consider a basic historiographical question: how do the frameworks of book history sharpen our understanding of authority in American religious history
Matthew Hedstrom is a historian of the United States specializing in religion and culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His overarching research interests are the social history of religious sensibilities and the cultural mechanisms of their production and propagation. His particular areas of teaching and research thus far have been religious liberalism, spirituality, the cultures and politics of pluralism, religion and race, and print culture. His first book, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century, employs novel sources in book history to tell the surprising story of religious liberalism’s cultural ascendancy in the twentieth century. The religious middlebrow culture of mid-century, Professor Hedstrom argues, brought psychological, mystical, and cosmopolitan forms of spirituality to broad swaths of the American middle class. He has also authored various articles, reviews, and reference works in American studies and American religious history. He is beginning work on a new book project on race and the search for religious authenticity from the Civil War through the 1960s.
Ian Williams (University College London)
“Becoming Normal? Law Printing in the 1630s”
Monday, 2 March 2015, 4:15 pm
In Association with the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the Faculty of Law and the Friends of the Victoria University Library
Abstract and Biography
Ian Williams is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Laws at University College London and has been a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and at the Huntington Library. Ian’s research interests are in early-modern legal history, in particular legal scholarship, including law books and the Inns of Court, and legal theory. These interests come together in work on legal reasoning, where legal theory and legal scholarship are applied in individual cases, mixing the history of ideas with histories of the book and reading.
2013-14
Adrian Johns (University of Chicago)
“The Cultural Origins of the Printing Revolution”
In Association with the iSchool
Thursday, 3 October, 4:15 p.m. (J. R. de J. Jackson Lecture).
Podcast
Matt Cohen (University of Texas at Austin)
“A Brief History of Books in Indigenous North America”
In Association with the Centre for the Study of the United States
Thursday, 7 November, 4:15 p.m
Podcast
Michael Gamer (University of Pennsylvania)
“Recollection’s Intranquility”
In Association with the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the Faculty of Law
Thursday, 30 January, 4:15 p.m.
Francis Cody (University of Toronto)
“Publics and Crowds Revisited: On the Role of Print Capitalism in South Indian Politics”
Thursday, 5 March, 4:15 p.m.
Catherine Brown (University of Michigan)
“A Manuscript Present: Translation and Remediation in the Early Middle Ages”
In association with the Art Department, the Jackman Humanities Institute, the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Centre for Medieval Studies
Monday, March 17, 4:00 p.m.
2012-13
William St. Clair (School of Advanced Study University of London)
“Image and Word: towards a political economy of book illustration”
Wednesday, 3 October, 4:15 p.m. (J. R. de J. Jackson Inaugural Lecture).
Podcast
James Danky (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“Protest on the Page and the Future of Print, Lecture in Two Parts”
Thursday, 15 November, 4:15 p.m
Podcast
John Bonnett (Brock University)
“Harold Innis, Information Management and the Topographic Revolution in Communication”
Thursday, 24 January, 4:15 p.m.
Podcast
Simon Stern (University of Toronto)
“Margins of Authority: Precedent and Citation in Early Legal Treatises”
Thursday, 7 March, 4:15 p.m.
2011-12
Bill Sherman (University of York)
“The Reader’s Eye: Between Annotation and Illustration”
Friday, 23 September
Podcast
Hester Blum (Penn State University)
“Polar Imprints”
Thursday, 17 November
Podcast
Yvan Lamonde (McGill University)
“Book History, Cultural History and Beyond”
Thursday, 19 January
Matthew Kirschenbaum (Maryland University)
“Track Changes: The Literary History of Word Processing”
Thursday, 1 March
Podcast
Deidre Lynch(University of Toronto)
“Recycled Paper: Readers’ Scrap-books in Late Georgian Literary Culture”
Thursday, 22 March
Podcast
2010-11
Arnold Lehman (Brooklyn Museum)
“A Perspective on Artists’ Books at the Brooklyn Museum”
Thursday, 23 September
Josiah Blackmore (University of Toronto)
“The Iberian Travels of The Book of Marco Polo”
Thursday, 25 November
Ann Komaromi (University of Toronto)
“Samizdat: Material Texts and Extra-Gutenberg Publics”
Thursday, 20 January
Podcast
David Lurie (Columbia University)
“Titles of the Current Realm: Script, Language, and the Earliest Japanese Bibliographies”
Friday, 18 March
Podcast
2009-10
Michael F. Suarez, S.J. (University of Virginia)
“High Culture and Dodgy Commerce in Subscription Folios for the Aristocracy and Illuminati”
Friday 25 September
Amir Hassanpour (University of Toronto)
“Violence Against Books: Theoretical Questions and Empirical Evidence from the Middle East”
Thursday 19 November
François Furstenberg (Université de Montréal)
“Atlantic Slavery, Atlantic Freedom: George Washington, Slavery, and Abolitionism”
Friday 29 January
M. Michèle Mulchahey (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, University of Toronto)
“The Pope, the Friar, and the Book: The Pontifical Institute’s MS. Bergendal 1 and the World of Bernard Gui”
Thursday 25 March
2008-09
Robert Gross (University of Connecticut)
“Was there a Reading Revolution in the New American Republic?”
Friday 3 October
Podcast
Richard Landon (University of Toronto)
“From Capell to Tanselle: Bibliography and Humanities Scholarship”
Wednesday 29 October
Podcast
Jeannine DeLombard (University of Toronto)
“The Virtues of Vice; Or, Resuscitating Early Black Atlantic Gallows Literature”
Tuesday 18 November
Podcast
Paul Nelles (Carleton University)
“Books, Communication and Exchange: The Frankfurt Book Fair and Early Modern Print Culture”
Friday 27 February
Podcast
Martha Driver (Pace University)
“Letter Perfect: A Brief History of Letter Forms and Their Uses in the Period of Transition from Manuscript to Print”
Thursday 19 March
Podcast
2007-08
Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania)
“Printing and the Invention of Manuscript”
Thursday 4 October
Wendy Griswold (Northwestern University; University of Oslo)
“Reading Class in Nigeria: Imperialism, Independence, and the Internet”
Thursday 1 November
Philip Oldfield (University of Toronto)
“Urchins, ogresses, and lymphads: British armorial bookbindings past and present”
Tuesday 27 November
Nancy Vogan (Mount Allison University)
“Eighteenth-century Manuscript Tunebooks: the Quest for the Fasola”
Thursday 28 February, 2008
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University)
“Meta-books? Publishing in the Humanities—Revisited”
Thursday 20 March 20
Graduate Student Colloquium
Natalie Zemon Davis (Princeton University and the University of Toronto)
Margaret Carlyle (McGill University)
Ania Dymarz (University of Toronto)
Nadine Fladd (University of Western Ontario)
Bronwen Masemann (University of Toronto)
Vernon R. Totanes (University of Toronto)
Kyle Wyatt (University of Toronto)
Saturday, 3 February, 2008
2006-07
Kathryn Sutherland (University of Oxford)
“Reading Writing Surfaces: Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts”
Friday 29 September
David McGee (Co-Director of the Michael of Rhodes Project, Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Burndy Library, MIT)
“Michael of Rhodes Rediscovered: The Lost Book of a Medieval Mariner”
Friday 20 October
Marc-André Bernier (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières)
“The Bibliotheca Rhetorum of the First Canadian Literati”
Thursday 16 November
Daniel Heath Justice (University of Toronto)
“’Herodotus of the Cherokees’: Historiography, Textual Sovereignty, and Emmet Starr’s History of the Cherokee Indians”
Thursday 8 February 2007
Liliane Louvel (Université de Poitiers)
“Variations on the pictorial: The cartographic eye of the text”
Thursday 8 March
Graduate Student Colloquium
Peter W.M. Blayney (University of Toronto; Distinguished Fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library)
Heather Ann Ladd (University of Toronto)
Geoffrey Little (University of Toronto)
Scott McLaren (University of Toronto
Heather Ann Ladd (University of Toronto)
22 March 2007
2005-06
James Secord (Cambridge University)
“The Laboratory of Print in the Age of Industry”
Friday 16 September
Oz Frankel (New School)
“’Print Statism’: Governments as Publishers in the Nineteenth Century and Beyond”
Thursday 20 October
Michael Groden (Université de Sherbrooke)
“James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Biography”
Thursday 17 November
Graduate Student Colloquium
Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia)
Professor Laura J. Murray (Queen’s University)
C. Paul Spurgeon, LL.B., (Vice President of Legal Services & General Counsel, The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN))
Dale Barleben (University of Toronto)
Nicholas Bradley (University of Toronto)
Trevor Cook (University of Toronto)
Eli MacLaren (University of Toronto)
Matthew Rimmer (Australian National University)
David Roh (University of California, Santa Barbara)
21 January 2006
Trevor Levere (University of Toronto)
“Dr. Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808): Chemistry, Medicine, and Books in an age of revolutions”
Thursday 2 February
Leslie Howsam (University of Windsor)
“Discipline and Narrative: historians, publishers and history books in Britain 1850-1914s”
Friday 10 March
2004-05
David L. Vander Meulen (University of Virginia)
“How to Read Book History”
Friday 24 September
Daniel Cohen (Case Western Reserve University)
“Martha Buck’s Copybook: New England Tragedy Verse and the Scribal Lineage of the American Ballad Tradition, 1760-1830”
Friday 22 October
Pierre Hébert (Université de Sherbrooke)
“Histoire de la censure et histoire du livre : Un dialogue nécessaire?”
Friday 22 October
Laura Murray (Queen’s University)
“The World after WIPO: Continuities and Discontinuities in the “Text Trade””
Wednesday 18 February 2005
Nick Mount (University of Toronto)
“When Canadian Literature Came from New York: The Example of Palmer Cox and His Brownies”
Tuesday 1 March
2003-04
Paul Needham (Princeton University)
“The Discovery of Gutenberg”
Friday 19 September
Sian Echard (University of British Columbia)
“The Ghost in the Machine: Digital Avatars of Medieval Manuscripts”
Friday 17 October
Ann Shteir (York University)
“From Goddess to Genre: Flora and Botany Books”
Wednesday 19 November
Gillian Fenwick (University of Toronto)
“Labouring in the Wordmines: Some Men and Women of Letters Since Carlyle”
Wednesday 11 February 2004
Will Straw (McGill University)
“Trafficking in Sensation: Scandal Periodicals 1910-1940”
Friday 5 March
2002-03
James McConica (University of Toronto)
“The Lost Library of Erasmus of Rotterdam”
Wednesday September 18
Michael Winship (University of Texas)
“Producing American Literature in the Nineteenth Century”
Friday October 18
Ina Ferris (University of Ottawa)
“Bibliomania in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland: The Emergence of the Bannatyne Club”
Friday November 22
Paul Werstine (University of Western Ontario)
“Author-izing Shakespeare: Twentieth-Century Editing of the Bard”
Tuesday 14 January 2003
Carole Gerson (Simon Fraser University)
“Pauline Johnson in Print”
Friday 21 March
2001-02
Christopher Ricks (Boston University)
“L’histoire du livre and its weakness for des histoires”
Friday 28 September
Juliet McMaster (University of Alberta)
“The Book and the Child Writer”
Friday 26 October
Heather Murray (University of Toronto, Department of English)
“The Log Shanty Book-Shelves: Reverend Henry Scadding’s Book Displays at the Toronto Industrial Exhibition, 1886-1898”
Tuesday 27 November
Alina Payne (University of Toronto, Department of Fine Art)
“Text and Image in Architectural Books of the Renaissance”
Tuesday 26 February
Graduate Student Colloquium
Sarah Brouillette (English)
Greta Golick (FIS)
Shannon MacRae (English)
Wednesday 6 February
Bill Bell (Centre for the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh)
“On Prospero’s Island: Images of the Reader in Exile”
Wednesday 27 March
2000-01
Isabel Grundy (University of Alberta)
“‘Dancing Country Dances’: Pattern, Expectation and Freedom in Eighteenth-Century Women Readers”
Friday 29 September
George Elliott Clarke (University of Toronto)
“First Printings: Examining the Texts of the First African-Canadian Poets, Playwrights, and Novelists”
Wednesday 1 November
Paul Saenger (Newberry Library, Chicago)
“The Graphic Origins of the Genealogical Tree”
Wednesday 22 November
Tom Conley (Harvard University)
“The Cartographic Impulse in Early Modem Lyric”
Friday 19 January
Graduate Student Colloquium
David Pantalony (IHPST)
Janusz Prsychodzen (French)
Michael Ulyot (English)
Tuesday 13 February
Peter Blayney (University of Toronto)
“England’s First Widow Printer: The Life, Times, and Kin of Elizabeth Pickering Jackson Cholmeley Cholmeley”
Wednesday 28 March
1999-2000
Roger Chartier (École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)
“The Stage and the Page: Theatrical Performances. and Printed Texts in Early Modem Europe”
Friday 1 October
Lissa Paul (University of New Brunswick)
“Consuming Passions: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Picture Books”
Thursday 21 October
Visit to Sablé Collection, Centre for Nineteenth-century French Studies St Michael’s College Library, Introduction by Yannick Portebois (Department of French)
Tuesday 9 November
David Mason (David Mason Books),
“Serving the Book: A Bookseller’s Perspective”
Tuesday 30 November
Robin Jackson (Department of English)
“Revisiting The Deserted Village: the History of the Book and Literary Interpretation”
Thursday 3 February
Graduate Student Colloquium
Kirsten Schñlz (Music)
Maria Zytaruk (English)
Mark Crane (History)
Tuesday 29 February
Ramsay Cook (Dictionary of Canadian Biography)
“Making a Modem Biographical Dictionary”
Thursday 23 March
1998-99
T.H. Howard-Hill (University of South Carolina)
“The Cost of Cheap Literature”
Thursday 24 September
Katharine Lochnan and John O’Neill (Art Gallery of Ontario)
“Artists’ Papers: Connoisseurship Issues”
Thursday 15 October
Bert Hall (University of Toronto)
“Texts and Technology: 1300-1650”
Wednesday 18 November
Graduate Student Colloquium
Andrew Bethune (English)
Yannik Portebois (French)
Ian Singer (English)
Tuesday 26 January
James Carley (York University)
“The Books of Henry the Eighth’s Wives: Physical Evidence and Cultural Significance”
Wednesday 24 February
Jay Fliegelman (Stanford University)
“Reading the Writing in Books: Interrogating Antebellum American Inscriptions”
Friday 26 March
1997-98
Robert Darnton (Princeton University)
“From the History of Books to the History of Communication: The Case of Pre-Revolutionary Paris”
Thursday 25 September
Exhibition tour
A tour of the exhibition, “The Land of Enchantment: Fairy Tales from Perrault to Today”, with Leslie McGrath, Head of the Osborne Collection of Children’s Books
Thursday 23 October
Michael Millgate (University of Toronto)
“On Not Writing Literary Biography”
Wednesday 19 November
Graduate Student Colloquium
Jenny McKenney (Medieval Studies)
Susan Murley (English)
Sharon Ragaz (English)
Tuesday 27 January
James Raven (Mansfield College, Oxford)
“Mapping the London Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century”
Friday 27 February
G.E. Bentley, Jr. (University of Toronto)
“The Economics of Printing Blake’s Illustrated Books”
Monday 23 March
1996-97
Jerome I. McGann (University of Virginia)
“Electronic Text Editing: The Rossetti Edition”
Thursday 26 September
Robert Fulford (Columnist, Globe and Mail)
“Conducting an Education in Public”
Wednesday 30 October
Antonette Di Paolo Healey (University of Toronto and Dictionary of Old English)
“Words, Story, History: The Mapping of Meaning and Toronto’s Dictionary of Old English”
Monday 25 November
Graduate Student Colloquium
Jennifer Andrews (English)
Marija Dalbello-Loviri (FIS)
Brian Greenspan (English)
Wednesday 29 January
David Olson (OISE)
“Writing, Cognition, and Consciousness”
Thursday 27 February
Randy McLeod (University of Toronto)
“The Printing of the First Edition of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier at the Aldine Press, Venice, 1528”
Tuesday 25 March
1995-96
Natalie Zemon Davis (Princeton University)
“Censorship and Scholarship: Learned Periodicals During the German Occupation of France (1940-1944)”
Friday 29 September
Douglas M. Gibson (Publisher, McClelland & Stewart)
“The Book in Canada Now: A Publisher’s Perspective”
Tuesday 24 October
Heather Jackson (University of Toronto)
“‘People aren’t supposed to write in our books’: The vicious habit of marginalising”
Wednesday 22 November
Lee Patterson (Yale University)
“Establishing the Canterbury Tales”
Tuesday 30 January 1996
Graduate Student Event
Opportunities for Research in Book Studies
Joseph Black (English)
Jennifer Connor (IHPST)
Adrienne Hood (History)
Tuesday 13 February
Yvan Lamonde (McGill University)
“L’histoire de l’imprirné: Possibilities, Strategies, Limits”
Wednesday 20 March 1996
1994-95
G. Thomas Tanselle (Guggenheim Foundation and Columbia University)
“Printing History and Other History”
Wednesday, 28 September
Thomas F. Staley (Humanities Research Center, University of Texas)
“The History of the Text of Joyce’s Ulysses”
Monday, 3 October
François Roudaut (University of Rouen)
“L’influence de l’imprimé sur les habitudes de lecture au XVIe siècle”
Wednesday, 26 October
William Stoneman (Princeton University)
“The Scientific Analysis of the 36-line Bible”
Tuesday, 8 November
S.P. Rosenbaum (University of Toronto)
“Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press”
Wednesday, 18 January
Michael Treadwell (Trent University)
“1695-1995: Reflections on the Tercentenary of the Deregulation of the Press in England”
Wednesday 22 March