Histories and Futures of the Book

Histories and Futures of the Book is an interdisciplinary lecture series in manuscript, print, and digital culture organized by the Textual Studies Program in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Society for Textual Scholarship, taking place March 20-22, 2014 on UW’s main campus in Seattle. The lecture series and conference welcomes fifteen distinguished scholars from across the country whose work on the materiality of books and media intersects with big-picture debates about the place of the humanities, innovation in graduate education, and public scholarship.

Lectures and workshops will be offered on topics as varied as print modernity in colonial India, ‘latent adjacencies’ in medieval manuscripts, editing and reading in a digital environment, publishing and race in the twentieth century, the future of philology, the ideology of The Cloud, poetry and print in nineteenth-century America, collaboration and intellectual work in early modern Europe, network analysis and literary history, and reading in women’s prisons. At the center of these discussions is the changing nature of the book in light of all that depends on it: libraries and access to knowledge, archives and cultural memory, conceptions of literacy, and the university itself—credentialing, the dissertation, tenure.

Conference information

Society for Textual Scholarship Annual Meeting
March 20-22, 2014

Keynote lectures by Johanna Drucker (University of California, Los Angeles), David Scott Kastan (Yale University), and Sheldon Pollock (Columbia University)
Plenary panel with George Bornstein (University of Michigan) and George Hutchinson (Cornell University)
Workshop with H. Wayne Storey (Indiana University) and John Walsh (Indiana University)

Various locations around campus. Directions, transit, and parking information here.