New Directions in Indigenous Book History | ONLINE via Zoom | Conference website & program
Thursday March 23, 8:30am – 3:45pm ET
Friday, March 24, 8:30am – 3:45pm ET

Co-sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America & the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography | Organized by Dr. Amy Gore & Dr. Daniel Radus | Conference website & program

After the ten-year anniversary of Phillip Round’s Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (2010) and at the twentieth anniversary of Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003), we invite the general public to join us in a free, two-day, virtual symposium in which national and international scholars will offer analyses, reflections, and provocations on the material book’s historical and continuing relation to Indigenous peoples and communities. We will also take the occasion to mark the flourishing—though still nascent—field of scholarship on the materialities of the Indigenous book and the productive interventions such scholarship has made into the traditionally settler-oriented fields of bibliography, scholarly editing, and book history.

Though critical attention to Indigenous print culture has done well to document and examine a wide range of media and genres used by Indigenous writers across the centuries, here we narrow the focus to books specifically. How might we define the Indigenous book? Where does Indigenous book history engage with and depart from other histories of the book? How has the book moved within and across Indigenous communities, both local and global? In what sense can the book be claimed as Indigenous? Topics will include community-engaged partnerships and collaborations; book arts; materiality and form; making Indigenous books; reclaiming genres; and relations with archives, audiences, and libraries.

Registration is free and open to the public. Seven panels of scholars and Indigenous community members, and one keynote panel, will be held on Thursday, March 23rd and Friday, March 24th, 2023. Visit the conference website for a full program.

Machine-generated captions will be provided during the live event. Recordings will be posted to YouTube with human-reviewed captions in English.