Seminars

In his brief letter to his supervisor (MMA 27.3.560), a 15th-century BCE Egyptian official vaguely alluded to an offense, sparking an epistolary storm. While scholars have primarily examined this letter through grammatical, lexicographical, and historical lenses, much can be gained by closely analyzing the material traces of the writing process. This paper explores what fading signs and irregular spacing reveal about the writer’s engagement with the text. By situating this letter within the broader epistolary corpus of its time, it will argue that writing practices reflected the writer’s negotiation of social and interpersonal standing—especially crucial when delivering a sensitive message to his supervisor.

"Unbound" considers the impact on book history of the new collection, American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History (UPenn Press, 2024). In forty-eight short chapters, American Contact explores the dynamics of intercultural encounters through the medium of material texts. Each essay focuses on one object to demonstrate how particular ways of reading can render the complex meanings of the objects legible―or explains why and how the meanings remain illegible. In its diversity and breadth, this volume shows how the field of book history can be more inclusive and expansive. The symposium features scholars from multiple disciplines and career stages. Together, across three panels, they will address questions about the role of collaboration in research, the pedagogical uses of American Contact, and the future of book history. Participants include Ahmed Alami, Rhae Lynn Barnes, Glenda Goodman, David Hall, Joseph Howley, Abimbola Cole Kai-Lewis, Isadora Mota, Shari Rabin, Martin Tsang, and Adrian Weimer. The symposium will be followed by a reception beginning at 4pm in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library on the 6th floor.

The expression “artist’s book” indicates an object other than an illustrated book insofar as the materials and techniques in the construction of the book are made to intervene in the writing and reading process. In other words, it engages and invents, even as it cross-examines or otherwise tests the physical matter of the book by constructing a work other than yet contributing to its written content. What happens when authorship includes more than one person? For the solitary vocations of artists or writers or composers, the made object is an interlocutor which tests creativity, and gives articulate definition to imagination. And yet the artists’ collaboration induces an object where negotiation complicates the creative enterprise. On the way to realizing the object is a process issuing from more than one person, with the realm of possibilities calling for more choices to be arrived at intellectually and technically, and an invitation for unforeseen consequences all along the way: the way of possibility rather than necessity. Even so, the constraints of design induce limits.