BHPC Program Events

Around 1900, Ho-Chunk artist and book illustrator Angel de Cora created a portrait for Mary Catherine Judd’s collection Wigwam Stories. That portrait, “The Indian of To-Day,” serves as the frontispiece for the book’s final section, which is about what was then contemporary Indigenous American life in the US. The image depicts a Native adult, wearing a bandanna, pants, shirt, and moccasins. Their hair is in two plaits, and they are leaning into a log cabin doorway. It is a portrait that is both unremarkable in its suggestion of an informal, every-day existence, and unlike other common images of ca. 1900 Indigenous persons. By tracing the circulation of turn-of-the-century Indigenous portraits alongside Angel de Cora’s journeys as an artist, this talk establishes a thick textual context for this picture. What can this unremarkable yet unusual image tell us about Native book illustration and the formation of new ideas of Indigenous modernity, labor, and gender identity? How are Indigenous artisans, pressmen, and other laborers involved in book production using their roles to negotiate and shape responses to settler colonialism? In short, who was the “Indian of To-Day”?

In addition, Professor Wigginton will lead a special seminar for students the day after the lecture (Friday, October 13, 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.

Caroline Wigginton (she/they) is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Studies. She teaches courses in early American literatures and race, gender, and sexuality studies. Currently, she is at work on a second monograph, Indigenuity: Native Craftwork and the Material of Early American Books, which examines the aesthetic, material, and imaginative influence of Native craftwork on American literatures.

This student-focused workshop will introduce participants to Twine, an easy-to-learn web-based platform for creating electronic literature and simple videogames. Participants will learn the basics of Twine, and we will also look at some of its advanced capabilities. The workshop will also consider Twine in a book-historical context, as one of the most popular authoring and publishing platforms of its kind, and as an important development in the emerging history of born-digital literature. The workshop will take place in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, enabling us to draw on their collections of experimental books and related objects as context.

Please note that this is an in-person event. No coding experience is required, though some familiarity with HTML and CSS is an asset for participants who wish to go beyond the basics. No software installations are required, though we advise participants to update their web browser in advance, and to install the latest version of the free Twine desktop app (https://twinery.org/).

This workshop is open to BHPC students and non-BHPC graduate students in our participating units, as well as undergraduate students in the Book & Media Studies, Digital Humanities, and Bachelor of Information programs. Spaces are limited to 22 students and registration is required. Contact BHPC’s Program Coordinator to register: bookhistory@masseycollege.ca.

Come explore the recipes in a seventeenth-century manuscript cookbook! 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.

Following Professor Lynch’s W. J. Alexander Lecture at University College (March 11), graduate students are warmly invited to join Professor Lynch for a hands-on workshop at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library on handwriting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the help of materials from the Thomas Fisher Library and the Ruari McLean Collection at Massey College, together with some secondary sources and work in progress by Professor Lynch, we’ll be considering penmanship in relation to authorship, labour, and gender. We’ll also consider the conceptual challenges manuscript books pose for scholars of the modern printed book.

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 Acting Director of the program, Thomas Keymer, will answer any questions you might have and present some highlights of the BHPC program.