---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erik L. Johnson <erikj09(a)stanford.edu> Date: Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 12:43 PM The Seminar on Enlightenment and Revolution, 1660–1830, a Stanford University Humanities Center Research Workshop in Honor of John Bender, is pleased to announce that its 2013–14 programming will focus on a theme of special interest to EXLIBRIS members, "The Book in the Age of Digital Humanities." Colleagues involved in archival research and other aspects of the book world or are very welcome to join us at the following fall 2013 events: 1. Wednesday, October 9, 5 pm Denise Gigante, Professor of English, Stanford University "The Other Ozymandias: Romanticism and Bibliomania" Stanford Humanities Center, Board Room Ozymandias founded an empire in remote antiquity but only his ruins have come down to us. In Percy Shelley’s poem named after him, they stand for an unbounded hunger for power that never can be quenched but in death, a fit monument for what Keats once called “egotistical sublimity.” For the purpose of this talk, Professor Gigante prefers the phrase “Sublime Ozymandianism,” a sufficiently greedy aesthetic that it requires some irony. While we do not normally think of sublimity and irony as going together—typically, one cancels out the other—she considers “Ozymandias” as a reworking of the Romantic sublime in the context of something quite anachronistic to ancient Egypt, namely, consumerism. And specifically, a form of consumerism tied to a fascination with the past: antiquarianism. The phenomenon of Romantic bibliomania was a literary form of antiquarianism, and the Other Ozymandias in the title of this talk was the bibliomaniac. 2. Thursday, October 24, 5 pm Claude Willan, Ph.D. Candidate, English, Stanford University "The Return of the King: The Faces of Jacobite Poetry in Manuscript" Stanford Humanities Center, Watt Room In this talk, English Ph.D. candidate Claude Willan explores the extent and the character of Jacobite poetry in manuscript between 1689 and 1745. More than half of these poems, which agitated for the return of the house of Stuart to the throne of England or Britain, were circulated in manuscript and have never been printed. The poetic remnants of this vibrant culture are now scattered across the archives of libraries in the US and the UK. Willan’s research shows how Jacobite poetry circulated, among whom, how Jacobite poets tailored their work specifically to manuscript, and how the forms of these covertly circulated poems reflect the emotional and political experiences of daily Jacobite life. 3. Thursday, November 14, 5:15 pm Andrew Piper Associate Professor, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (German Studies), McGill University "The Instrumentality of the Book" Stanford Humanities Center, Watt Room Co-sponsored by Stanford's German Studies Colloquium What kind of knowledge instrument is a book? This talk will revisit the instrumental nature of books – the way they shape readers’ knowledge of their world – by focusing on the changing nature of instrumental environments during the Romantic period. Whether through a reader’s personalized relationship with a book or the book’s passage through a broader circuit of communication, books are most often understood as singular, bound objects, ones that delineate material, subjective, and epistemic closures. These closures arguably came to be constitutive of the moment we call Romanticism. Piper explores what it would mean instead to understand the book’s place within a larger material ecology of instrumentation. How does an understanding of the book within a broader horizon of epistemic things and our gestural interactions with those things give us new insights not only into the history of the book’s meaning as an instrument of knowledge, but the knowledge environments in which it participates? How can we imagine the book as part of, or as opposed to, the history of scientific instrumentation? Refreshments provided at all events; most events run 90 minutes including time for discussion. The Stanford Humanities Center is at 424 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford, CA, on the main campus near Tresidder Student Union and the Faculty Club. Directions can be found at http://shc.stanford.edu/about/contact-us/ Feel free to write me at erikj09(a)stanford.edu to join our mailing list, or with questions about any events. I hope to see some of you there! Best regards, Erik Johnson ----------------- Seminar on Enlightenment and Revolution, 1660–1830 A Stanford Humanities Center Research Workshop, Stanford University Graduate Student Coordinator: Erik Johnson, erikj09(a)stanford.edu Faculty Coordinators: Denise Gigante and Blair Hoxby, English, Stanford University --