I was honored to deliver the Wing Foundation Lecture on the History of the Book at the Newberry Library on March 3, 2022. The event took place in person after two years of virtual events. I’m grateful to Jill Gage, Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing, for the invitation to speak about some new ideas around my next book project, “Accidental Shakespeare,” and to the staff at the Newberry for supporting this program.
Read moreOUT NOW! Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England
My first monograph Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.
It is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography and tells a new history of drama from the period by considering the page designs of plays by Shakespeare and others printed between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It argues that typography, broadly conceived as the disposition of type on the page, was used creatively by printers, publishers, playwrights, and other agents of the book trade to make the effects of theatricality—from the most basic (textually articulating a change in speaker) to the more complex (registering the kinesis of bodies on stage—intelligible on the page.
Read more¶ * ☞ ‽ ♡ ! ≫ #glyphsinthewild
As soon as I started researching the presence and function of symbolic type in early print, I started noticing the very same symbols in the world around me. Non-alphabetic and non-numeric characters are everywhere...
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