Traditions of East Asian Typography Conference

Date: 6 March 2026
Time: 9:30 am–4:30 pm PT
Location: Doheny Memorial Library, University of Southern California
Presented by: The Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia; and the Korean Heritage Library, Korean Studies Institute, and East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California

About the Conference:

Woodblock was the dominant and preferred method of printing in East Asia up until the nineteenth century. By contrast, East Asia’s home-grown typographic traditions often seem like an afterthought, an eccentricity, or an abandoned experiment that failed to match the Gutenberg revolution. Yet, typography was never entirely discontinued and diverse actors utilized movable type at specific times, in certain places, or for certain objectives in face of xylographic competition. This conference, to be held on 6 March 2026 at the University of Southern California, investigates the autochthonous traditions of movable type in East Asia before the arrival of Western letterpress and lithography in the late nineteenth century.

See the conference website for more information.

To register for this conference, click here.

 

Presenters:

Sarah Bramao-Ramos (Bates College)

Devin Fitzgerald (University of California, Los Angeles)

Martin Heijdra (Princeton University)

Xiaojun Huang (Bowling Green State University)

Lars Kim (Korean Type)

Nikita Kuzmin (Elling Eide Center)

Seung-cheol Lee (From Jikji to Gutenberg)

Shuo Liang (University of Chicago)

Young-jung Ok (The Academy of Korean Studies)

Graeme R. Reynolds (University of Southern California)

Xiaoyu Xia (Princeton University)

 

Discussants:

Virginia Moon (Korean American Muse [KAM])

Cynthia Brokaw (Brown University)

Yuming He (UC Davis)

 

Moderators:

Graeme R. Reynolds (University of Southern California)

Mengxiao Wang (University of Southern California)

Sunyoung Park (University of Southern California)