Book Destruction programme

16 April 2011
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London

All welcome!

9.50 Registration & welcome

10.00-11.15 Burning/ obliterating
Katherine Inglis (Birkbeck), ‘From the Flames: Book Burning in Confessions of a
Justified Sinner and Romola’
Rebecca Knuth (Hawaii), ‘Book Destruction and Contemporary War’
Gill Partington (Birkbeck), ‘Burning books and Preserving Literature in
Fahrenheit 451’

Coffee

11.30-1.15 Cutting / tearing
Gabriel Egan (Loughborough) , ‘The Missing Page: Hancock’s Half Hour and the
Debasement of Literature’
Corinna Norrick (Mainz), ‘The Demystification of the German Children’s Book:
rororo rotfuchs in the 1970s’
Lucy Razzall (Cambridge), ‘“Wrapt up no doubt in many pieces”: Clothing and
Unclothing the Early Modern Book’
Adam Smyth (Birkbeck), ‘Cutting up Bibles at Little Gidding’.

1.15-2.15 lunch

2.15-3.30 Recycling / remaking
Ross Birrell (Glasgow), ‘Burning Kafka: The Work of Fire’
Nicola Dale (Manchester), ‘Destruction and Potential: The Book as Artist’s
Medium’
Harriet Phillips (Oxford), ‘Disposable Pleasures: Making Use of Broadsides’

Coffee

3.45-4.35 Digitising / archiving
Bonnie Mak (Illinois), ‘Palimpsests of the Present: A Critical Approach to
Digitised Books’
Brooke Palmieri (Oxford), ‘Dispatches from the Department of Acquisition and
Destruction: Robert Burton’s Books at the Bodliean’

4.45-5.45 Plenary

Kate Flint (Rutgers), ‘The Aesthetics of Book Destruction’