Last weekend, quite literally half a world away, my grandmother died. She had survived a long illness many years ago—had come back stronger. But this was not that. This was her heart. And it happened very quickly.
Hours after I hear the news, I walk alone to campus to pack up my office. I'm changing jobs and moving states at the end of the month, more specifically, on the day I'm now scheduled to return from her memorial service. Everything has to be ready to go, so I switch into organizational overdrive, which is good because it's distracting. I want to be distracted because I'm too far from the rest of my family who are processing their grief together.
Then, among the books in my teaching collection, I find her high school copy of As You Like It.
Read moreThe creation of a list ... is a familiar academic exercise: it is a traditional task assigned to dissertation students or to ambitious undergraduates, and as teachers and scholars, we often find ourselves doing the same thing. List-making gives us the illusion that we are working, and implies that academic work or scholarly work in general is incremental; it is just a matter of, say, marshalling the evidence to suggest or support whatever thesis we come up with, or in most cases doing these two things in reverse order. But for many of us, this comforting task, having been performed a few times, no longer functions as it once did. The once satisfying illusion seems to have lost its power, and the resultant list deteriorates into something else: not a coherent body of information, but rather a bunch of titles.
{Joseph Dane, Blind Impressions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History, 131}
If there's one thing I've learned about my research and writing process in the three years since filing my dissertation—which was, for the record, finished under such pressure and with break-neck speed that it's hard to explain "how" I actually wrote it—it's that lists are necessary illusions.
Read moreTara L. Lyons and I are excited to finally share the news that the trustees of the Shakespeare Association of America have accepted our panel Shared Archives, New Methods: Book History and Theater History Across Media for the organization's next annual meeting in Atlanta. The panel brings together book historians and theater historiansto explore new approaches of attending to an overlapping archive of materials related to the performance and publication of early modern plays. We're especially pleased that SAA is willing to let us experiment with format and mount a panel of short talks (±8 minutes each). We hope that these lightning papers will yield a lively and provocative conversation about materiality, method, and media.
Read more![A diligent reader has marked off the playbooks on this bookseller list that they have bought/read (or perhaps have not bought/read).[Holk.d.29, Bodleian]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5207ed92e4b0f3bf53b55b13/1465664622995-ON4KT10SYLDMVFGTSPUV/bookseller-list.jpg)
