Guest Speaker Jonathan Senchyne

           On Friday April 4^th, a special guest speaker will be on campus as a part of Professor Neuman’s American Print Culture : 1700-1900 seminar.  These talks are open to the Clark community and sponsored by Higgins through the faculty collaborative EMU (Early Modernist United).

           In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson famously remarked on the ability of print periodicals to create a sense of communal affiliation among readers. But book historians and periodical printers know that a number of processes have to take place before a newspaper can be circulated, including papermaking. This talk explores how paper emerged as an important material and symbol for figuring community during both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, with emphasis on the role of women and domestic labor in print production.

           Jonathan Senchyne is an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Studies and Associate Director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently researching his first book, a study of the resonant materiality of paper in early and nineteenth-century America, with the generous support of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. Part of this project was published in Early African American Print Culture (Penn 2012).

 

 

-Edward Peluso