BHPC Program Events

Are you a graduate student at the University of Toronto? Got an interest in book history and print culture that overlaps with your studies? BHPC is hosting an informal Q&A session via Zoom to discuss the program with prospective students. The Director of the program, Yulia Ryzhik, will answer any questions you might have and present some highlights of the BHPC program. There will also be in-person tours held at the same time in the Robertson Davies Library at Massey College for the Bibliography Room.

Come explore the recipes in a seventeenth-century manuscript cookbook at Massey College! In this event, participants will learn about early modern handwriting, paleography, and digital scholarship, while collaborating together on a digital transcription of an early modern English cookbook preserved at U of T’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. 

This will be a relaxed event, and no prior experience working with manuscripts is required.  (A certain number of spaces will be reserved for students in ENG2226H and the Book History and Print Culture program)

As decades turn to centuries to millennia, our relationship with the past is increasingly medieval. How might the perspective of extreme long-term thinking prompt new conceptions of “the book”? We know that some books are more durable than others, but what happens at the millennial scale? Inspired by the twelfth-century historian, Henry of Huntingdon (d. 1157), this talk connects the Long Now Foundation, its 10,000-Year Library, the poet T. S. Eliot, and the near-future called the “digital Dark Ages.” Henry provides a recent antecedent for imagining the “10,000-Year Book” in relation to the colonizing deployment of time itself.

In addition, Professor Warren will lead a special seminar for students the day after the lecture (Friday, November 18, 1:00 – 3:00 pm) in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. This seminar will draw on materials from the Fisher collection and will develop themes from Prof. Warren’s talk. This seminar is open to all students in BHPC’s participating units, including students not enrolled in the BHPC program. Advance registration is required, but at no cost. To register, contact our Program Coordinator by Friday, November 11. Space is limited, so please sign up only if you know you can attend.

Michelle R. Warren (she/they) is Professor of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. Their most recent book is Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (2022). They also lead the collaborative digital research project Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of Digital Experiments (https://sites.dartmouth.edu/RemixBrut). Their motto is: “The Middle Ages Aren’t Old.”

This workshop will introduce the invention, history, and development of the Korean alphabet, Hangul. Through lectures and hands-on exercises we will understand how Hangul is written, pronounced and used as a form of communication. In line with that, emphasis will be given on the introducing a new writing system to an already existing culture as well as the subsequent changes and development in establishing Hangul as an official letter.