Extended Deadline for Living Well with Books

Living Well with Books is interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational conference organized by the Centre for Material Texts, University of Bristol on 5-7 September 2018. The conference aims to explore how books have affected and continue to affect our daily lives and well-being. How we have lived with books in the past, how do we live with them in the present, how we might live with them better in the future, and how might we help others do the same?

We’re extending the deadline for Living Well with Books for a little while longer. If you’re working on any aspect of the relationship between books and people in the present or in the past, consider submitting a proposal to arts-books@bristol.ac.uk by 10 June 2018.

Topics that papers might address include:

• Living alongside books
• Books in our hands
• Books, health, and wellbeing
• Books and communities
• Getting hold of books
• Living badly with books

You can see the full CFP here.

Our three keynote speakers are now confirmed:

• Elif Tinasztepe, Associate Partner and Senior Project Architect, Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects
• Professor Miha Kovač, Department of Library and Information Science and Book Studies at the University of Ljubljana
• Professor Abigail Williams, Faculty of English, University of Oxford

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Keynote speakers, Living well with books

We are delighted and excited to announce that our keynote speakers for ‘Living Well with Books’, 5-7 September 2018 will be:

Elif Tinasztepe, Associate Partner and Senior Project Architect, Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects

Professor Miha Kovač, Department of Library and Information Science and Book Studies at the University of Ljubljana

Professor Abigail Williams, Faculty of English, University of Oxford

If you would like to submit a proposal, there is still time! Further details are here.

 

Framing Texts programme

Join us for our first postgraduate workshop, Framing Texts, on 30 May 2018. Register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/framing-texts-tickets-44328358313

Editing and Reading Romantic Letters

Editing and Reading Romantic Letters

Monday 14th May 2018
12–5.30pm

University of Bristol
Queen’s Building, room 1.7

Confirmed Speakers: Tim Fulford, Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt, Oliver Clarkson, and Samantha Matthews

This colloquium will bring together experts from major projects including the Romantic Circles edition of The Collected Letters of Robert Southey and the Humphry Davy Letters Project to discuss the theory and practice of editing Romantic writers’ correspondence. It will also be an opportunity to explore some new critical directions opened up by these resources and to think about the letter as a literary genre.

Lunch will be provided.
Attendance is free but booking is required.
Please email jessica.fay@bristol.ac.uk before Tuesday 8th May to register.

Sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust.

Exploring Early Modern Books: A Workshop

25-26 June 2018

Special Collections, Arts and Social Sciences Library, University of Bristol

On 25-26 June 2018, the Centre for Material Texts at the University of Bristol is organizing a two-day intensive workshop for students from any discipline who want to know more about early modern print culture. By working closely with items from Special Collections at the University of Bristol’s Arts and Social Sciences Library, participants in the workshop will develop skills in handling and studying printed books of the early modern period (c. 1500-1800). The workshop is for anyone who wants to discover more about early modern printed books: about how they are made and how that making might impact upon their contents; about how they might be interpreted as objects; about how to find your way around rare book libraries and special collections departments; and about the importance of engaging with the material in our increasingly digital age.

The workshop will be taught by specialists in early modern book history, including Rhiannon Daniels, John McTague, and Jennifer Batt. The workshop is based in Special Collections in the University of Bristol’s Arts and Social Sciences Library, and will draw on the library’s holdings, which range from poetry to geology, children’s literature to international history (and much much more) and cover languages including English, French, German, Italian, and Latin.

The course will be of particular value to anyone who is thinking about pursuing research (at MA/PhD) in topics in the early modern period (c. 1500-1800), but we welcome anyone with an interest in the area.

Attendance at the workshop is free, but places are limited, so you’ll need to apply to attend on the registration form here by 24 May 2018. Successful applicants will be notified by 1 June 2018. Some bursaries are available to support travel and accommodation costs; please indicate if you’d like to be considered for a bursary on the registration form.

See here for FAQ and further information

Image and Text: Theory and Practice

Image and Text: Theory and Practice

Gui Mohallem (artist based in São Paulo, Brazil)

Thursday 26 April 2018, 3.00 PM Verdon-Smith Room

Tcharafna

Gui Mohallem is a Brazilian artist who explores questions of identity, migration and belonging across a number of media, from photography to installation. His artist’s book Tcharafna, part of ongoing multi-media project, is an account of his father’s migration from Lebanon to Brazil through a mediation on his family’s photographic archives. In his hands, the artist’s book becomes a tool for interrogating the role of images in the construction of collective diasporic memory and transnational identity.

All welcome.

Conference Call for Papers: Living Well With Books

Centre for Material Texts, Richmond Building, University of Bristol

Wednesday 5 – Friday 7 September 2018

Since the invention of the codex, the lives (and afterlives) of books have been intertwined with the lives of people. This interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational conference organized by the Centre for Material Texts, University of Bristol, aims to explore how books have affected and continue to affect our daily lives and well-being. How we have lived with books in the past, how do we live with them in the present, how we might live with them better in the future, and how might we help others do the same?

As readers, writers, creative practitioners, educators, researchers, curators, consumers and producers, how do books feature in our lives? How do they share our living and working spaces? How might books contribute to health and wellbeing? Do books keep us apart from each other, or can they enable us to connect with communities? What are the consequences of not living with books? How far do the answers to these questions depend on location, or income, class, gender and other variables? How might the answers to these questions have changed over time? What is the value of asking these questions in an increasingly digital age?

We welcome proposals from postgraduates, early career researchers, and established scholars  from all disciplines, embracing both qualitative and quantitative research paradigms.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

1. Living alongside books

How do books fit within our domestic spaces? What places do they occupy in our working lives? Where do we put books (and where shouldn’t we)? Which books live on shelves, in a pile, on the floor, by the bed? How has book storage, and book adjacency, changed over time? What is the relationship between changing book technologies, the places we put them, and how we use them? How do architecture and interior design structure our encounters with books?

2. Books in our hands

What kinds of sensory experience do books enable? What meanings do the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of books carry? How do these experiences relate to memory? How do technological developments (manuscript to print, print to digital, digital to ambient) change our relationship with books? What impact do we have on books, through preservation, defacement, neglect, or destruction?

3. Books, health, and wellbeing:

How do books contribute to our physical health and mental health? What role might books play in wellness, sickness, recovery, recuperation? What is the history and role of self help books? What are the therapeutic effects of writing books, reading books, or making books? What are the consequences of immersion, identification, and empathy?

4. Books and communities:

How might books bring us together? What is the difference between reading aloud and reading silently? How does collaborative reading differ from solitary reading? How and why do book groups come together? How do book fandoms shape the collective and individual experience of books? How might networked novels and living-books allow us to think differently about literary communities?

5. Getting hold of books

What are the obstacles to living with books? What are the consequences of not living with books? How do libraries (public, private, academic) shape our encounters with books? How are our encounters with books shaped and directed by the publishing and bookselling trades?

6. Living badly with books

What are the dangers of books? What are the risks in encountering books? What are the consequences of losing oneself in a book?

We welcome abstracts for:

• individual 20-minute presentations
• posters
• panels of 3 speakers
• workshops (up to 60 min work-in-progress discussions with at least 3 presenting participants)
• roundtables

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words (individual papers and posters) or 500 words (panels, workshops and roundtables), together with a short biography (max 150 words) to: arts-books@bristol.ac.uk by 1 June 2018.

Conference committee

• Rhiannon Daniels (Italian, University of Bristol)
• Jennifer Batt (English, University of Bristol)
• John McTague (English, University of Bristol)
• Richard Cole (Classics, University of Bristol)
• Ondrej Vimr (Russian, University of Bristol)
• Anezka Kuzmicova (Literature and History of Ideas, Stockholm University)