Beyond Educational: Book Arts as Research Method

Beyond Educational: Book Arts as Research Method, a program organized by The Bibliographical Society of America. A reception will follow the presentation and discussion.

Teaching bibliography and book history through making physical books is a current trend at all levels of the educational system. But what impact does making books or other book related objects have on the scholarly record? Or bibliographical practice more generally? This panel will explore how three scholars have used their book arts experience to enhance their scholarship as well as their bibliographical practice in different contexts, from publicly available makerspaces to artists’ books.

Inscribing Bodies & Ecologies through Bookmaking
Talk by Breanne Weber

In this talk, I consider how printmaking can enable more nuanced approaches to literary and book historical research. As a letterpress printer who researches early modern English literature and print culture, I use my printing practice to materially reframe bookmaking metaphors–particularly those reliant on the concepts of inscription and impression–that appear in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. Printing and setting type makes clear the crucial differences between these two practices (among other bookmaking processes), thereby illuminating subtle metaphorical distinctions that greatly influence how readers of works by William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, and others understand early modern approaches to difference, identity, ecology, and technology. Ultimately, I demonstrate how literary and book historical research can both inspire creative practice and be directly and dramatically altered by historical and contemporary print and book artistry.

Pressing Identities: Queering the University Makerspace
Talk by Dylan Lewis

This talk considers the university makerspace (especially makerspaces housed in humanities departments or libraries) as a site where students can explore their identities through the book arts while also entering the field of bibliography from an easy-access point. I take my role as an assistant at the University of Maryland’s English department makerspace BookLab to consider how the work we do with students informs new pedagogies of bibliographical work for the field more generally. I situate this method of bibliographical instruction within queer theory to think through the value that makerspaces bring to bibliographical instruction and the book arts, broadly conceived, especially when organized around concepts such as creativity, experimentation, and failure.

Embodied Knowledges in the Press Room
Talk by Kadin Henningsen

In this talk I consider how embodied engagements with printing–from composition to press work–enables us to understand the physical labor of book production. Informed by Diana Taylor’s work in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, I suggest that our contemporary engagement with printing provides a transhistorical embodied archive of printing practices. I highlight this work through a discussion of my current artist’s book project with Keely Keuster, Composing Whitman. In Composing Whitman, Keely and I document Whitman’s movements while composing, or typesetting, Leaves of Grass. The visualization of these movements provides a kind of dance score for recreating the text, thus bringing printers–now and in the future–into an intimate relationship and dance with Whitman through an embodied engagement with typesetting.