This seminar considers the numerous conditions governing the production, circulation, and reception of texts. The seminar focuses principally, but not exclusively, on print culture in Europe and America. Major themes include publishing and distribution, censorship, authorship, copyright, and reading. For more information, visit the History of the Book website.

Upcoming Events

There are no upcoming seminars.

Past Events 2012 - 13

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Christina Lupton, University of Warwick
"Contingency and the Eighteenth-Century Page"
Susan Whyman, Princeton University
"Becoming a Bookseller: William Hutton of Birmingham (1723-1815)"
On Islamic books
Benjamin Braude, Boston College
"A Book and a Chapel: Giovanni Nanni's Anthology of Ancient Frauds and Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling Frescoes"
Eric Méchoulan, Université de Montréal and Harvard University
"Amicus lector"
"The Invention of Peer Review"
Ellen Garvey, New Jersey City University and Robert Gross, University of Connecticut
“Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance”
Harvard-Yale Graduate Student Conference in Book History

Past Events 2011 - 12

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William Johnson, Duke University
"Publishing without Publishers: Books, Publication, and Community in Rome and Today"
Tom Cummins, Harvard University and Juan Ossio, Universidad Catolica de Peru
“'Created by my Hand:'The Complicated Creation of the Earliest Illustrated Manuscript (1590) from Peru”
David Stern, University of Pennsylvania and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
"The Monk's Haggadah: The Story of a Remarkable Manuscript and the Story of its Discovery"
Marie-Claude Felton, Harvard University
"The Writer, the Press, and the Market: The Rise of Self-Publication in Paris before the Revolution"
Dror Wahrman, Indiana University
"The Media Revolution in Early Modern England: An Artist's Perspective"
Book Historical Approaches to Legal History in the Early American Republic
Matthew Rubery
“Canned Literature: The Book after Edison’s Phonograph”
Harvard-Yale Graduate Student Conference in Book History

Past Events 2010 - 11

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Nicholas Daly, University College Dublin
"Bill Stickers Beware: The Frenzy of the Legible in the Victorian City"
Stuart Shieber, Harvard University
"Reading Interfaces and the Future of the Book"
Lewis Hyde, Kenyon College
Book talk: Lewis Hyde, Common as air. Respondent: Robert Darnton
Angela Nuovo, Universita de Udine
“Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535-1601) and his Library: book collecting and the Republic of Letters in Late Renaissance Italy”
Ann Blair, Harvard University
Ann Blair discusses her new book, Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age
Barbara Sicherman, Trinity College
"Reading Their Way into History: How Books Inspired the Progressive Generation of Women"