Sarah Werner (aka Wynken de Worde) and I will be organizing the SHARP panels at next year's RSA conference. The theme we've chosen -- which is unsurprising if you've, say, visited the main page of my blog, or seen Sarah's recent online musings -- is fragmentation and collection. Share this CFP with anyone and everyone -- and come join us in NYC next year!
"Fragments and Gatherings"
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:
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
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 here.