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

February 11, 2011, 9AM to 6:30 PM

Alexander Library, 4th floor
169 College Avenue
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

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 scholars 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?

Speakers include Bruce R. Smith (University of Southern California,
English), Christopher Marsh (Queen's University, Belfast, History),
Leslie C. Dunn (Vassar College, English), Juliet Fleming (New York
University, English), R. Malcolm Smuts (University of Massachusetts,
Boston, History), Gary Tomlinson (University of Pennsylvania, Music),
Michael Plunkett (City University of New York, English), Tessie Prakas
(Yale University, English), Scott Trudell (Rutgers University, English)
and Thomas Ward (University of Pennsylvania, English).

This event is free and open to the public.To register, or if you are
interested in attending via live webcast, please email *Scott Trudell*
(trudell@eden.rutgers.edu) by February 7, 2011.