Virtual Book Talks

Virtual Book Talks started in 2020 to showcase recent scholarship and creative works related to book history and print culture. Authors featured in the series discuss new publications that integrate the history of the book with fields of study such as race, indigeneity, gender, performance, literature, and popular culture. These publications are often based upon research at AAS and frequently showcase relevant materials from the Society’s collections.

Each installment includes an informal presentation from the author followed by a lively Q&A with the audience. The talks are livestreamed for registered participants and are archived for posterity on the AAS YouTube channel. Each Virtual Book Talk typically lasts 45 minutes to one hour.

Event Date Leaders / Presenters Title Video
Peter Jaros The Corporate Forms of Antebellum US Literature
Sonia Hazard Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media Yes
Matthew Pentland Brown The Novel and the Blank with Matthew P. Brown Yes
Ben Bascom Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States with Ben Bascom Yes
Bryan Sinche Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature with Bryan Sinche Yes
Sara E. Johnson Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World Yes
Amy Gore Book Anatomy: Body Politics and Materiality in Indigenous Book History Yes
Laura Cleaver , Kristen Doyle Highland , Danielle Magnusson , Kate Ozment Bookstores, Collectors, and the Rare Book Trade in Historical Perspective Yes
Lara Langer Cohen Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States Yes
Duncan Faherty The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters Yes
Martha J. Cutter The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown Yes
Michaël Roy Fugitive Texts: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture Yes
Caroline Wigginton Indigenuity: Native Craftwork and the Art of American Literatures Yes
Christen Mucher Removal in the Archive: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession Yes
Katie McGettigan The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature: Publishing US Writing in Britain, 1830–1860 Yes
Lloyd P. Pratt The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature Yes
Jeffrey Makala Publishing Plates: Stereotyping and Electrotyping in Nineteenth-Century US Print Culture Yes
Marcy J. Dinius The Textual Effects of David Walker's "Appeal" Print-Based Activism Against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829-1851 Yes
Michael D'Alessandro Staged Readings: Contesting Class in Popular American Theater and Literature, 1835-75 Yes
Daniel Diez Couch American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic Yes
Michael Lawrence Dickinson Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic Yes
Sarah Purcell Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era Yes
David K. Thomson Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on the Union Yes
Jennifer Putzi Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry Yes
Hannah Farber Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding Yes
Reed Gochberg Useful Objects: Museums, Science, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America Yes
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage Yes
Mark Rifkin Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form Yes
Elizabeth McHenry To Make Negro Literature: Writing Literary Practice and African American Authorship Yes
Corinna Zeltsman Ink Under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico Yes
Gordon Fraser Star Territory: Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America Yes
Elizabeth Kimball Translingual Inheritance: Language Diversity in Early National Philadelphia Yes
Billy Coleman Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788–1865 Yes
Melissa J. Homestead The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather & Edith Lewis Yes
Laura Heffernan , Rachel Sagner Buurma The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study Yes
Koritha Mitchell From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture Yes
Lucas Dietrich Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920 Yes
Megan Rosenbloom Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin Yes
Craig Dworkin Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality Yes
Brigitte Fielder Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America Yes
Rodrigo Lazo Letters from Filadelfia: Early Latino Literature and the Trans-American Elite Yes
Adam Gordon Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites: Antebellum Print Culture and the Rise of the Critic Yes
Jessica Pressman Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age Yes
Amy Hildreth Chen Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market Yes
Jonathan Senchyne The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature Yes
Glenda Goodman Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic Yes
Derrick R. Spires The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States Yes