TBS: The Book in Hand 2022-2023
April 13–15, 2023
The focus for this year’s symposium will be the book as object. This symposium seeks to explore hand assembled "books" as reservoirs of knowledge, memory, and experience, bringing together people who investigate the ways in which knowledge is organized in a personally-produced object meant to be kept by an individual or shared. Some key questions might include: What does a person choose to record and preserve in a hand-made assemblage? How do they organize and share what they have accumulated? How do they adjust and annotate it? How are these objects related to the more outwardly-facing ways in which knowledge, memory, and experience are shared using modern digital means of assemblage? How could they instead serve as private reservoirs of personal heritage?
This year's workshop group is co-convened by:
Diane Reilly, Art History, College of Arts and Sciences
Rowland Ricketts, Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design
Three external fellows who work on bookmaking will join us this year during the April meeting, which will also feature an exhibition and demonstration of artists’ books from the Indiana University collection.
Timothy D. Barrett
Professor and Director Emeritus, University of Iowa Center for the Book
Tia Blassingame
Book Artist and Printmaker, Primrose Press;
Founder, Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective;
Assistant Professor of Art, Scripps College
Giles Bergel
Digital Humanities Senior Researcher, Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford
The workshop will be limited to 12-14 participants, drawn from as diverse a range of disciplines as possible. Each participant would, in the service of interdisciplinary engagement, contribute a title or two to a common bibliography. This bibliography would constitute the cross-disciplinary “intellectual reserves” held in common by members of the symposium. At the workshop, each member would present a "case study" relevant to the question at hand, whether that be a book object, a type of creation, or a larger conceptual category. This presentation would be followed by a broad conversation about the case presented and the question or problem it poses. The specific outline of the conversation will depend greatly on the participants. Discussion may also inspire a more lasting resource or scholarly product, such as a publication or platform for exchange.
APPLICATION DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 30, 2022
To apply, please send a CV and a 250-word statement outlining the reasons for your interest and the relevance of your research to this topic to ias@indiana.edu.
Participants will receive $1000 in research funds.
The IAS welcomes applications from members of the campus community interested in thinking about the epistemological, methodological, and conceptual challenges that attend research (theoretical or applied) on book objects.
