Description: Performance, paratext, and digital archives
On April 26 I was delighted to give the 19th Frederic Alden Warren Lecture for the John W. Graham Library at Trinity College, University of Toronto, titled “A Bibliographical Disturbance: Teaching and Learning in Book History After 2020.” For a list of references and links to some of the materials I discuss in the talk, scroll down below the poster.
When something disrupts the normal process of making a book, the disruption often leaves a material trace which textual scholars call a “bibliographical disturbance.” The year 2020 will long be remembered as a similar kind of disruption writ large, leaving its own material traces in our scholarship, careers, and lives. For the Book History & Print Culture (BHPC) program at the University of Toronto, 2020 also happened to be its twentieth anniversary as a graduate program. What should have been a year of cel
In that spirit, this talk will reflect on lessons learned about book history education during the pandemic. From the representation of physical books on digital screens, to the status of born-digital literature, to the social value of the book arts, to questions about diversity and equity in the field of book history—2020 brought a reckoning with all these topics and more. Yet book history education has never been more necessary than today, and textual scholarship has important work to do in the post-2020 w