Agents of Contact: Books and Print between Cultures in the Early Modern Period (RBS-Mellon Symposium)

Date: 25 September 2015
Time: 9 a.m. – 6:30 p.m.
Location: City College of New York
Presented by: The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, the Simon H. Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts at CCNY, the Division of Humanities and Arts of CCNY, and the CCNY English Department.

This one-day symposium will present research on the impact of books and print on intellectual contact (broadly construed) within Europe as well as between European and non-European cultures.

The symposium is intended to encourage cross-disciplinary conversation, and is therefore defined by a conceptual framework rather than a strict thematic focus. Its title is anhommage to Elizabeth Eisenstein’s seminal book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, which helped to establish the study of print culture as an area of study in its own right, one that has contributed to – and helped to transform – research in intellectual history, literary studies, the history of science and of visual culture, among others. While Eisenstein’s interest was in uncovering the “impact of print on western society and thought” (as she put it in the title of an early article), this symposium will explore the impact of forms of paper-based media on how western society and culture understood other cultures and societies, how western societies and cultures understood each other, and how non-western cultures and societies understood the west.

See the event website for more details.

Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, a PSC-CUNY Enhanced Award held by András Kiséry, the Simon H. Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts at CCNY, the Division of Humanities and Arts of CCNY, and the CCNY English Department.