Symposium on the Book Events

Join three experts in pre-modern book and textual history -- Drs. Sargan, Mattison, and Jacobson -- as they share scholarship on new ways to read medieval and Renaissance book bindings through Queer and Trans theory, attention to fragments, and historical fantasies about binding. Free and welcome to the public! About Symposium on the Book: This two-day event unites talks from book historians and practicing book artists,…

Masked Purpose: The Aesthetics of Negative Space Suzanne Coley writes: "Can thoughts, emotions, and experiences be preserved and contributed for the collective benefit of humanity? Well known literary tools have been used to pass human experience through the ages. Livre d’Artiste, or book arts, is one of the counterpart art forms that can be used for this purpose. One of my ongoing book art series, Love Sonnets from Shakespeare to Baltimore,…

Kim Coles is Professor of English, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Classics at the University of Maryland. Her current book, Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, just appeared from the University of Pennsylvania Press.The book uncovers how belief itself — the excess, defect, or lack of religion — was largely apprehended and understood in terms of temperament in the early modern period. Race in this period…

Professor Kim Coles (Professor of English, Maryland), along with our colleague David Diamond (Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies, Georgia) will run a rare books centered workshop open to the public in the University of Georgia’s Special Collections Libraries building centered on the history of enslavement in conjunction with the 250th anniversary of the publication of Phyllis Wheatley Peters's book of poetry, the first…

   "‘We had not thus trespassed against your consent’: The Blackamoor Poems by Henry Rainold and Henry King (1630s-1650s)." In this talk, Dr. Adams explores a companion set of seventeenth-century poems that appear in both manuscript and print: Henry Rainolds’s 'A Black-moor Maid wooing a fair Boy,' and Henry King’s response 'The Boy’s Answer to the Blackmoor.' After considering some of the ways that English poets interpolate and…

The Symposium on the Book presents a talk by Dr. Asheesh Kapur Siddique titled "Documenting the Body of State: Paper and the Archive of Early American Constitutionalism." Who invented the written consitution? If you answered, "the United States," you're half right. In this talk, Dr. Siddique argues that the mode of constitution-making inaugurated in the aftermath of the American Revolution represented not an invention of written…

The Symposium on the Book presents a talk by Julie Park titled "Making Paper Windows to the Past: Eighteenth-Century Extra-Illustration and the Art of Writing" taken from her third book project, Writing's Maker. Julie Park is a material and visual culture scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England who works at the intersections of literary studies, information studies and textual materiality. Her research examines the…

"Discerning the Devil Among Us: The Spiritual Instruction of Murder on the Early Modern Stage and Page," Mary Floyd-Wilson, Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor and Chair of the Department of English and comparative literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mary Floyd-Wilson works in the field of early modern English literature, primarily drama placed in cultural, social, and intellectual contexts. Past projects…

Dr. Barbara Fuchs's lecture is hosted by the Early Modern Studies Research Group, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant-funded research project in the Global Georgia Initiative of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. Matching funds are provided by Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and the departments of English, History, Romance Languages, and Film Studies; as well as the Bulletin of the Comediantes, a journal devoted to the study of…

The Symposium on the Book presents a pop-up rare books exhibit and workshop on race and Georgia theatre history. It will be followed at 2:30 by a talk on Shakespeare and African American Performance by Dr. Patricia Cahill (Associate Professor, Emory University). A reception follows Dr. Cahill's talk. All events are free and open to the public.