/Performing the Book: Multi-Media Histories of Early Modern Britain/

Call for Graduate Student Papers, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, February 11, 2011

Sponsored by the Rutgers British Studies Center, the Rutgers Program in
Early Modern Studies, the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis, and the
Rutgers Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium.

Recent scholarship in media theory, digital culture, and the history of
the material text has opened up new ways of thinking about intersections
of pen, print, sound, and performance in the early modern period. The
categories of “new” and “multi” media, in particular, gather special
relevance in the multifarious literary and performative terrain of
sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Britain. This
conference offers an opportunity for graduate students in disciplines
including English, Music, History, and Performance Studies, to address
the following questions:

How can scholarship on acoustic and performative multi-media in early
modern Britain contribute to or intervene in methodologies associated
with the history of the book? How can we theorize the categories of
“book” and “text” in relation to the circulation and performance of
sound? How can studies of the early modern acoustic world nuance the
received wisdom about bibliographic and literary cultures and
traditions? What media technologies and protocols were understood as new
during this period, and how were they associated with literary, musical,
or theatrical collectives? What does early modern aural performance tell
us, or ask us to reconsider, about the hybridity of media from Gutenberg
to Google?

Visitors will include Bruce Smith (University of Southern California,
English), Christopher Marsh (Queen’s University, Belfast, History),
Leslie Dunn (Vassar College, English), Juliet Fleming (New York
University, English), R. Malcolm Smuts (University of Massachusetts,
Boston, History), and Gary Tomlinson (University of Pennsylvania, Music).

Graduate students are invited to submit 250-word abstracts for 20-minute
papers by September 30 to Scott Trudell (trudell@eden.rutgers.edu).