On May 14th and May 15th, Harvard  will be hosting the first of two symposia on the subject of “Books and/as New Media.”   The follow-up symposium will take place July 9-10 in Edinburgh, with our primary partner, the Centre for the History of the Book at Edinburgh University. The May event is sponsored by the Houghton Library and the Department of English, with support from Harvard’s Provostial Fund for the Humanities and the Harvard seminar for the History of the Book, as well as  from the Centre for the History of the Book,  the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, and the School for Literature, Languages, and Cultures, all at the University of Edinburgh.

These symposia bring together scholars from both sides of the Atlantic working on book history, media, literature, and the digital humanities, who will together be exploring the relationship between book history and the history of media.  Re-embedding the book in the changing media ecology, each event explores the long history of new media–from a time when the printed codex was the new medium, through the book’s encounters with the new media of photography, lithography and sound recording, to the digital revolution.

Speakers at the Harvard event include Mark Algee-Hewitt (Stanford), Luisa Calè (Birkbeck), Lindsey Eckert (Georgia State) , Andrew Piper (McGill), Jonathan Sachs (Concordia), and Andrew Stauffer (Virginia).

If you’re interested in attending the May event (which will begin at 11 a.m. on Thursday, May 14th, in the Thompson Room, and end the next day, which will be spent at the Houghton Library, at 5 p.m.), please register using this link: http://newmediasymposia2015harvard.eventbrite.co.uk

And here is a more detailed account of the papers (each name is followed by a link that takes you to an abstract for the paper): http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/literatures-languages-cultures/chb/events/symposium-books-and-new-media