Tag Archives: BHPC

Seminar on the Personal Library of a European Polymath

Seminar on the Personal Library of a European Polymath: The Gros Collection and the University of Toronto

Professor François Gros, who retired as the Director of the Ecole Francaise d’Extreme Orient, Pondicherry, India is one of the leading doyens of Tamil Studies worldwide. In the course of what might be described as a 19th century scholarly career which moved from anthropology to the study of Southeast Asia and then South Asia he amassed an extraordinary collection of rare works on South India and its reception in France. The core of his library, housed originally at the Rue François Gros in Lyon, France is an irreplaceable collection of rare and priceless works in Tamil, consisting of dictionaries, religious works, fiction, ethnographic accounts, the catalogues of private collections etc. In 2017 he generously donated this core collection of about 9000 works to the University of Toronto, where it is currently being catalogued and digitized in a project jointly headed by Lana Soglasnova and Srilata Raman. In this seminar we hope to share some of the treasures of this collection with you.
The presenters of this collection will include:
Srilata Raman, Associate Professor of Hinduism, Department of Religion, University of Toronto. Srilata works on Tamil religion, and particularly its intellectual history between the 11-14th and 17th-19th centuries, respectively.
Prakash Venkatesan, Senior Research Fellow, French Institute, Pondicherry. Prakash specializes in Classical Tamil literature. He did the preliminary cataloguing of the Gros Collection for the University of Toronto.
Muthukrishnan Kannan, Director of the Contemporary Tamil Studies Programme at the French Institute, Pondicherry. He is a close associate of Professor Gros and an expert on the collection.

Roundtable on Publishing in Book History and Archival Studies

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! Open to all; no registration required.

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 Authorshipguest 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)

Isabel Hofmeyr, “Hydrocolonial Print Cultures: Coast, Custom House and Dockside Reading”

The Eighth Annual J. R. de J. Jackson Lecture
Isabel Hofmeyr (University of the Witwatersrand and New York University)
“Hydrocolonial Print Cultures: Coast, Custom House and Dockside Reading”

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.