History of the Book | Mahindra Humanities Center

Upcoming Events

Daniel Blank, Harvard Society of Fellows

CANCELLED: Tense Futures: Shakespeare's Macbeth and Gwinne's Tres Sibyllae

Thursday, April 23, 2020 - 5:15pm

We are sorry to announce that, in response to the updated University guidance on COVID-19, all events and seminars at the Mahindra Humanities Center have been cancelled starting Wednesday, March 11 until further notice. Please check our website and social media for updates as we work to reschedule as much of our events as possible for the fall.
We look forward to seeing you again at Mahindra Center events as soon as possible.

Daniel Blank studies the literature and drama of the early modern period. His book project focuses on theatrical performances at Oxford and Cambridge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with an emphasis on the understudied relationship between university drama and the Shakespearean stage. He received my PhD in English from Princeton in 2018.

Harvard-Yale Graduate Conference in Book History

CANCELLED: The Stakes of Book History

Thursday, April 30, 2020 - 9:00am

We are sorry to announce that, in response to the updated University guidance on COVID-19, all events and seminars at the Mahindra Humanities Center have been cancelled starting Wednesday, March 11 until further notice. Please check our website and social media for updates as we work to reschedule as much of our events as possible for the fall.
We look forward to seeing you again at Mahindra Center events as soon as possible.

Past Events 2019 - 20

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Idan Dershowitz, Harvard University

Shiva Mihan, Harvard University

Ann Blair, Harvard University

Craig Robertson, Northeastern University

Opening Panel and Reception in Book History

Jennifer Chuong, Harvard University

Peter Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania

The Fluid Surface: Marbling and Overmarbling in Early America

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg, Harvard University

Charles Donahue, Harvard University

Halakhists, Humanists and Legal Codification. Systematizing Jewish Religious Legal Knowledge in the Early Modern Period

Caroline Wigginton, University of Mississippi

Hymncraft: Making Musicbooks and Community from the Native Northeast to Brotherton and Beyond

Erika Boeckeler, Northeastern University

The Image of O in Othello and English Printers' Devices.

Past Events 2018 - 19

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David Alworth, Harvard University

David Atherton, Harvard University

Jeffrey Ravel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dana Sajdi, Boston College

New Directions in Book History

Meredith McGill, Rutgers University

Beyond the Anthology: Poetry and Popular Print in the Antebellum US

Mary Carpenter, Queen's University (Emerita)

From Treasures to Trash, or, the Real History of "Family Bibles"

Kinohi Nishikawa, Princeton University

Novel Design: Fran Ross’s Oreo and the Signs of the City

Will Slauter, Université Paris Diderot – Institut universitaire de France

News, Newspapers, and the Limits of Copyright in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Mara Mills, New York University

Ben Reiss, Emory University

Matthew Rubery, Queen Mary University of London

“Histories of Access” panel in “Touch This Page” symposium

Harvard-Yale Graduate Conference in Book History

Past Events 2017 - 18

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Jean-Christophe Cloutier, University of Pennsylvania

Stephanie Frampton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Hannah Marcus, Harvard University

Si Nae Park, Harvard University

New Directions in Book History

Rachel Buurma, Swarthmore College

Petra McGillen, Dartmouth College

Simon Reader, City University of New York - Staten Island

The Novel and its Working Methods: A Workshop

Jeffrey Miller, Montclair State University

What is a Draft (and Why does it Matter)? The Case of the King James Bible

Earle Havens, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University

Laura Larkin, Houghton Library

John Overholt, Houghton Library

David Weimer, Harvard Map Collections

Roundtable on Careers in Special Collections

Earle Havens, Johns Hopkins University

Note to Self: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Renaissance Library

Ahmed El Shamsy, University of Chicago, Harvard University

Arabic Book Culture from Manuscript to Print

Harvard-Yale Conference in Book History: The Book and Beyond

Past Events 2016 - 17

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New Directions in Book History

Russell Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles

Grow(ing) Up: The UCLA Library Baby Record Books Collection

Juliet Fleming, New York University

Gleaning

Robert Darnton, Harvard University

The Book Trade and the Demand for Literature in France, 1769-1789

Christopher Canon, New York University

Books without Writing

Jennifer Roberts, Harvard University

The Metamorphic Press: Jasper Johns and the Monotype

Charles Rosenberg, Harvard University

The Body in the Classroom: Anglo-American Textbooks of Physiology and Hygiene, 1800-1920

Roger Chartier, Paris, University of Pennsylvania

Global Cervantes

Lisa Fagin Davis, The Medieval Academy

Broken Books: Digital Methods for Reconstructing Dismembered Manuscripts

Graduate Student Conference

Revisions

Nana Ariel, Harvard University

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, The King’s University

John Lurz, Tufts University

Mine Özyurt Kılıç, Harvard University

Michelle Alexis Taylor, Harvard University

A Press of One’s Own: Celebrating 100 Years of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press

Past Events 2015 - 16

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Alan Galey, University of Toronto

Ripples on the Surface: Reading Digital Books as Artifacts

Jean-Paul Montagnier, Université de Lorraine, France, and McGill University

The Choirbook Tradition in France from the Early 17th Century to the Eve of the Revolution (ca. 1780)

Peter Mendelsund, Knopf Publishing Group

The Art of the Book Cover

Michael Kelly, Amherst College

Bibliography and Native American Bodies in the Revolutionary Era

Heather Wolfe, Folger Library

Writing Paper and Filing Systems in Early Modern English Households

Scott Mandelbrote, Cambridge University

The Newton Project and the Development of a Digital Edition

András Németh, Vatican Library

Byzantine Appropriation of the Past: The Heritage of Constantine VII Revisited

David Stern, Harvard University

Books as Jews: The Burning of the Talmud, Paris 1241 and Rome 1553

Fifth Annual Harvard-Yale Graduate Conference in Book History

Past Events 2014 - 15

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David Henkin, University of California, Berkeley

Hebdomadal Form, Hebdomadal Forms: Diaries, News, and Weekly Rhythms in Nineteenth-Century America

Hannah Marcus, Stanford University

From a Medical Republic of Letters to the Index of Prohibited Books

Dan Cohen, Digital Public Library of America

Considerations for Virtual Bookshelves: Mechanisms for Discovery, Reading, and Serendipity

Daniel Shore, Georgetown University

Cyberformalism and the Philology of Things, 1557-1798

Joseph Rezek, Boston University

What are the Standard Novels? Thoughts on Richard Bentley’s Transatlantic Editions

Paula McDowell, New York University

Revisiting the NYPL Berg Collection Dunciad[s]: "Vociferation" in Manuscript, Print, Typescript, and Digital Media

Giora Sternberg, University of Oxford

Manipulating Information in the Ancien Régime: The View from the Provinces

Past Events 2013 - 14

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John Brewer, California Institute of Technology

What's in a Visitors' Book? Social Media and Volcania Tourism in the Nineteenth Century

Eric Slauter, University of Chicago

Walden's Carbon Footprint: People, Plants, Animals, and Machines in the Making of an Environmental Classic

Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland

Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing

Dan Donoghue, Harvard University

Reading Ambrose's Silence

Jason Peacey, University College London

"Fixed Like a Ballad on the Wall": Printed Lobbying and Public Persuasion in the Seventeenth Century

Himmet Taskomur, Harvard University

Meredith Quinn, Harvard University

The Art of Commentary Writing: Legal Commentaries in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Ottoman Empire / Books and Their Readers in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul

Albertus Horsting, Harvard University

How to Read Augustine According to Prosper of Aquitaine

Paul Duguid, University of California at Berkeley

Getting Information from Books: A View of the 18th Century

Lianbin Dai, Harvard University

Textual Collation and Its Guiding Principles in Eighteenth-Century Evidential Scholarship: Illustrated with Lu Wenchao's (1717-1796) Work

Surekha Davies, Western Connecticut State University

What is a Werewolf? Genres, Practices, and Cataloguing Monsters from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution

Robert Fraser, Open University

Reception, Quantity, and Meaning

Harvard-Yale Conference in Book History

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"