cfp: SHARP @ RSA 2014

In an exciting turn of events, Adam Hooks and I are organizing the slate of SHARP panels at RSA for the 2014 meeting in New York. If you’ve been following Adam’s “breaking things apart” series on his blog and if you’ve seen my twitter musings recently, you won’t be surprised to learn that the theme we’re working with is fragmentation and gathering. Read our call for papers below, share it with anyone you think might be interested, and consider sending us your submissions!

Call for Papers: SHARP @ RSA 2014

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) will sponsor a series of panels at the Renaissance Society of America’s annual meeting in New York City, 27-29 March 2014. SHARP @ RSA brings together scholars working on any aspect of the creation, dissemination, and reception of manuscript and print and their digital mediation.

For the 2014 conference, we are soliciting papers that address the issues of fragmentation and gathering, broadly conceived, in early modern English and/or Continental books and manuscripts. We invite submissions that consider one or more of the following topics:

1. Fragments: How does the production and survival of texts as discrete material objects shape our understanding and use of them? We might think of fragments in terms of how texts were made (pieces of type, leaves of paper) or in terms of how they are experienced today (surviving fragments).
2. Gatherings: How does the grouping of discrete objects into collections of more or less coherence shape our understanding and use of textual objects? Gathering might take the form of the minute to large scale (quires of paper, sammelband, libraries).
3. Fragments and Gatherings: How do fragments turn into gatherings? When do gatherings break down into fragments? What sort of study of book history and material textuality is engendered by these moves?

Please send a 150-word abstract and a one-page CV to Adam Hooks (adam-hooks@uiowa.edu) and Sarah Werner (swerner@folger.edu) by June 7th (note that this is earlier than the RSA’s own deadline).

All participants must be current members of both RSA and SHARP.

For details of RSA 2014, see http://www.rsa.org/?page=2014NewYork. For more information on SHARP, see http://www.sharpweb.org/