2004 Summer Seminar
"Enriching American Studies Scholarship
through the History of the
Book"
Sunday, June 20, through Friday, June 25, 2004
Semianar Leader:
Philip F. Gura,
Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture,
Department of English,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Faculty:
James N. Green, Associate
Librarian, Library Company of Philadelphia
Eliza Richards, Assistant
Professor of English, Boston University
members of the AAS staff.
View the syllabus
Since its emergence as a separate discipline more than a half century
ago, American studies has contributed significantly to
innovative and revisionist scholarship. In this weeklong seminar,
participants considered how the equally interdisciplinary field
of the history of the book broadens and enriches topics that traditionally
have comprised American studies and its constituent disciplines, including
history and literature.
Intended as a practicum, the seminar centered both on projects and
problems
that participants bring to the table as well as presentations from
the core faculty, making participants aware of how
knowledge of the materiality of print culture might fertilize their
teaching and scholarship.
A historian of childhood, for example, might understand his
subject differently if he did not just read contemporary printed
sources for documentation of his work but actually analyzed how
the process of the publishing circuit might have affected
Americans understanding of childhood. Someone interested in
the history of domesticity could come to new conclusions about
the significance of home spaces by studying the production and
transmission of early, engraved building guides. A scholar interested
in the rise of antebellum celebrity culture might profit from
knowledge of early photography and its uses in book illustration.
Early in the seminar, faculty will introduce the issues, techniques,
and tools of history of the book research through presentations
on their own work in American studies. In particular, the
seminar leader will present sessions on the impact of history of
the book scholarship on work in early American religious history
and American literature and the impact of photography on the
book arts. Guest faculty will take up, among other subjects, the
various tools now available to those who embark on scholarship
in the history of print culture and lead a workshop in which
seminar participants have the opportunity for hands-on research
in AAS collections. The seminar also included discussion of
student presentations on their own areas of interest and work
in progress.
The deadline for applications has passed.
The fee for the seminar was $725, which includes tuition, selected course
materials, two dinners, and five lunches. A limited amount of financial
aid was made available. Preference for assistance will be given to
first-time AAS summer seminar attendees.
About the Faculty:
Philip F. Gura is the author or editor of nine books, including
The
Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the
New England Renaissance (1981), A Glimpse of Sion's Glory:
Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660 (1984), the
prize-winning America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth
Century (1999), and Buried from the World: Inside the
Massachusetts State Prison, 1829-1831, The Memorandum
Books of the Rev. Jared Curtis (2001). Gura's study, C. F. Martin
and His Guitars, 1796-1873, was published in 2003 by the
University of North Carolina Press. He has just completed an
interpretive biography, Jonathan Edwards, America's Evangelical,
forthcoming from Hill & Wang. Additional information on his research
interests is available on his website at
http://www.unc.edu/~gura/.
James N. Green is the Associate Librarian at the Library Company of
Philadelphia. A member of the staff of the LCP for twenty-one years, he
has been a member of the Council of the Bibliographical Society of America
and of the Editorial Board of the American Antiquarian Society's
multivolume work A History
of
the Book in America, as well as a contributor to its first and second
volumes. Currently, he is working on a major exhibition on "Franklin and
the Book" for the Library Company's 275th anniversary and the tercentenary
of Franklin's birth. Jim Green has rich and varied experience in the
areas of bibliography and rare books.
Eliza
Richards is Assistant Professor of English at Boston University; her
area of specialization is nineteenth-century U.S. literature. Her first
book, entitled Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe's Circle,
is
forthcoming from Cambridge University Press (August 2004). She spent last
year as an American Antiquarian Society-National Endowment for the
Humanities Fellow to do research on a project about the relationship
between poetry and democracy, entitled Hearing Voices: Lyric
Representation in Nineteenth-Century America.
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