BHPC Program Events

Bookworms have always been with us. Belonging to some of the most ancient lineages of insects, which existed hundreds of millions of years before the first dinosaurs, their persistent and often alarming presence invites us to reconsider the materiality of books in terms of multipspece negotiations. Drawing on practical manuals, dictionaries and encyclopedias, literary texts, and medical writings from East Asian traditions, this talk explores how bookworms reveal not simply an opposition between book and insect, or human and nonhuman, but a fundamentally relational ecology in which humans, books, and bookworms are interconnected, continually shaping and being shaped by one another.

In addition, Professor Son will lead a special seminar for students the day after the lecture (Friday, 13 November, 10:00 am) in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. This seminar will draw on materials from the Fisher collection and will develop themes from her talk. This seminar is open to all graduate students in BHPC’s participating units, including students not enrolled in the BHPC program, and to upper-year undergraduates in the BMS program. Advance registration for the seminar is required. To register, contact our Program Coordinator. Space is limited, so please sign up only if you know you can attend.

Suyoung Son is Associate Professor in Asian Studies at Cornell University. She is a book historian, specializing in early modern China and Korea (16th to the early 20th century). Her primary research interests lie in the relationships between books and the cultural, material, and ecological practices of reading and writing. She is the author of Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) and co-editor of Materialities of the Book in Korea: Technologies, Inscriptions, and Reading Ecologies (Harvard University Asia Center, forthcoming) and The Sensorium of the Early Modern Chinese Text (Cornell University Press, forthcoming). She is currently writing a book on cookbooks and how they mediated textual knowledge and material practices in early modern Korea