Call for Papers:
Harvard-Yale-Brown Graduate Conference in Book History:
Preservation, Absence, Erasure
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA | May 6, 2024
Sponsored by the Seminar in the History of the Book at the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard; Brown University; and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale.
We are pleased to announce the fifteenth annual Harvard-Yale-Brown Graduate Conference in Book History, hosted this year by Harvard University in Cambridge, MA on Monday, May 6, 2024 at the Barker Center. The programs for the previous conferences are available here.
Proposals are invited from graduate students (at any stage) and postdocs for papers on any aspect of the history of the book. Priority will be given to current students affiliated with Harvard, Yale, and Brown, though we will consider submissions from students at other institutions in New England. Topics might include manuscript, print, and digital cultures; new media; authorship, forgery, and anonymity; readers and reading practices; publication, circulation, and transmission; censorship, copyright, and piracy; spaces for producing and consuming media; and the history of library and information science. Papers relating to all time periods and geographical locations are welcome.
Our 2024 conference theme, Preservation, Absence, Erasure, encourages submissions that investigate the practices and ethics of collecting, consuming, and recovering material texts as objects using the methods of book history. What do we choose to collect and why? What is left out of the archive or left behind, either passively or intentionally? What stories do book objects themselves tell or elide? How can we as scholars recover voices lost in the archive? How do trends in digitization challenge ideas about materiality, and how might new developments in AI shape our understanding of authorship? How do texts and objects survive and adapt to varying circumstances of creation, consumption, and circulation? How do metaphors—e.g. book and archive as body, historical witness, container—amplify or obfuscate the material histories of the book? Speakers may engage with this theme to the extent they see fit.
Proposals are due Monday, January 29, 2024. These should include a title and a brief abstract (approximately 200 words), as well as your university and departmental affiliation. Speakers will have 15 minutes to present their work, followed by 15 minutes of discussion. Please submit proposals using this Google Form.
Please do not hesitate to contact the graduate coordinators with any questions: Ashley Gonik (ashleygonik@g.harvard.edu), Elinor Hitt (elinor_hitt@g.harvard.edu), Alicia Petersen (alicia.petersen@yale.edu), Dandan Xu (dandan_xu@brown.edu), and Dima Nasser (deema_nasser@brown.edu).
