Speakers
Malcolm Baker, Distinguished Professor of History of Art at UC Riverside, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, is the author of numerous books and essays on eighteenth-century sculpture, decorative arts and the history of collecting, including Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument (awarded the 1996 Mitchell Prize for the History of Art) and Figured in Marble: the Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture.
Daniela Bleichmar is Assistant Professor of Art History and History at the University of Southern California. She received a Ph.D. from Princeton University and post-doctoral fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the Getty Foundation. Her research focuses on the history of visual culture and the natural sciences in Europe and the Spanish Americas in the period 1500-1800, the history of the Spanish Empire, the history of the book, and the history of collecting and display. She has coedited two books, Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800 and Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Her monograph, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World will be published by the University of Chicago Press later this year.
Heidi Brayman Hackel is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (2005) and co-editor of Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (2008). Her current book project is titled “Dumb Eloquence: Deafness, Muteness, and Gesture in Early Modern England.” She has been awarded a Huntington Library Long-Term Fellowship for 2011-12 in order to complete it.
Luisa Calè is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, and the co-organizer of the series The Disorder of Things: Predisciplinarity and the Divisions of Knowledge. She is the author of Henry Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ (Oxford, 2006) and the co-editor of Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts (Ashgate 2007) and Illustrations, Optics and Objects in 19C Literary and Visual Culture (Palgrave 2010).
Matt Crow is a PhD Candidate in History at UCLA. He is the author of an article “Jefferson, Pocock, and the Temporality of Law in a Republic,” as well as an entry in the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Thomas Jefferson, “History, Politics, and the Self: Jefferson’s ‘Anas’ and Autobiography.” He has been a research fellow at the Library of the American Philosophical Society and the Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, and the title of his dissertation is In the Course of Human Events: Jefferson, Text, and the Potentialities of Law.
Adriana Craciun (Professor of English, University of California, Riverside) is the author of Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge UP, 2003), British Women Writers and the French Revolution (Palgrave, 2005), and is completing a new book on print and manuscript culture and their influence on three centuries of Arctic exploration, titled “Northwest Passages: Authorship, Exploration, Disaster.” She is the co-organizer of the international research network The Disorder of Things: Predisciplinarity and the Divisions of Knowledge, 1600-1850, in which Inscriptions is the final of six events. The first event in the series, Romantic Disorder (London, 2009) will be the subject of a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies, co-edited by Adriana Craciun and Luisa Calè.
James Q. Davies (Assistant Professor of Music, UC Berkeley) will present material from his current book project, “Romantic Anatomies of Performance,” exploring the interrelations between music notation and the disciplinary history of keyboard-playing hands and vocal organs. He was Research Fellow in music at Gonville and Cauis College Cambridge, and has published on subjects ranging from colonial melodrama, genealogies of ‘the diva’, aging castrati, musical gift albums, histories of pianistic touch, and township opera in South Africa.
Sean Epstein-Corbin is a doctoral candidate in English at UC Riverside. His current research into the long nineteenth century examines the influence of sentimentalism and pragmatism on the transatlantic evolution of the liberal subject. He will be a visiting fellow at Chawton House Library-University of Southampton this spring.
Kirsten Silva Gruesz has published widely on the long history of Spanish-language print culture in the US, as well as on hemispheric circuits of translation. She is the author of Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton UP, 2002), which received an Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book in American Studies in 2002 from the ASA. A Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, Gruesz directs its Latino Literary Cultures Project. This talk is drawn from her in-progress book Bad Lengua: A Cultural History of Spanish in the US, a longitudinal study of attitudes toward Spanish-language teaching and learning in the US focusing on textbooks from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries.
Randolph C. Head is Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside, and holds degrees from Harvard University (AB in Anthropology) and the University of Virginia (MA and PhD in European History). He has published extensively on the history of Switzerland and on religious and institutional cultures in early modern Europe. He is currently working on a comparative study of archival organization that includes cases from Iberia, the German lands, and the Netherlands between 1400 and 1750. Publications from this project include articles in the Journal of Modern History (2003), Archival Science (2008) and several essay collections. Most recently, Professor Head edited a special issue of Archival Science (2010) on Archival Knowledge Cultures in Europe, 1400-1900.
Lynn Huang is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the founder and co-chair of the Townsend Center's History of the Book and Reading Working Group, and is currently planning, in conjunction with the Bancroft Library, a conference titled "Chapter and Verse: Structures of Reading" on October 8, 2011.
Adrian Johns is a professor of History at the University of Chicago, where he also chairs the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. He is the author of The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998), Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (2009), and Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (2010).
Melissa Lo has an SMArchS in History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT, and is currently a PhD candidate in the History of Science at Harvard. Her dissertation charts the visual dissemination of Descartes' natural philosophy in France and the Netherlands between 1637 and 1690.
Alan Lovegreen is a fourth year English Ph.D. student at the University of California, Riverside. He is studying nineteenth and twentieth century American literature and culture. The topic of his Inscriptions presentation forecasts a part of his intended dissertation project on air culture.
Jerome McGann is the John Stewart Bryan University Professor, University of Virginia. He is a co-founder of IATH (Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities) and of Speclab (Speculative Computing Laboratory), and was the founding director of NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship). His book Radiant Textuality: Literature after the Worldwide Web was awarded the MLA’s 2002 James Russell Lowell Prize for the year’s best book in criticism. His most recent books include: Are the Humanities Inconsequent? An Interpretation of Marx’s Riddle of the Dog (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009), Byron’s Manfred (Pasdeloup Press, 2009), and Steven Crane’s Black Riders and Other Lines (Rice UP, 2009). He is currently working on a literary and cultural history of nineteenth-century United States.
Miles Ogborn is Professor of Geography at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680-1780 (New York, 1998), Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago, 2007) and Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550-1800 (Cambridge, 2008). He is currently working on the spoken word in the early modern Caribbean and its Atlantic World.
Emily C. Pfiefer is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Between Bodies: Undergarments as Cultural Limina in 18th Century France” while working as a Teaching Assistant for the distinguished College of Humanities and Social Sciences First Year Experience Program.