MacKay Lecture Series

2005-06 

In recent years, the history of the book has emerged as a promising new field of interdisciplinary inquiry.  Transnational in scope, it adopts methodologies from literary criticism, bibliography, history, sociology, and information studies.  It has grown to encompass the socio-economic history of book culture, the social production and consumption of books, and the actual use of books in everyday life.  Lately, it has turned its attention to the experience and practices of readers and reading communities.  Because it focuses on an artifact that is fundamental to every civilization on the planet, book history is vital to humane studies.

Lecture One

"Why Americans Didn't Read Churchill."

Jonathan Rose, Professor of History, Drew University, Madison NJ

Thursday, March 16, 2006 - 8 pm, Ondaatje Auditorium, McCain building

Professor Rose is the author of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale UP, 2001), which won the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize, the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, the British Council Prize, the SHARP Book History Prize, and was named a Book of the Year by the Economist magazine.

He was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), and he continues to co-edit the society's journal, Book History.  His other publications include The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (U Massachusetts P, 2001), The Revised Orwell (Michigan State UP, 1992), British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820-1965 (Gale, 1991), and The Edwardian Temperament 1895-1919 (Ohio UP, 1986).  With Simon Eliot, he is editing A Companion to the History of the Book, which will be published by Blackwell in 2007.  Currently he is working on a study of Winston Churchill's literary career.

 

 
Lecture Two
 
"Poetry in Practice:  American Readers and the Uses of Verse"

Joan Shelley Rubin, Professor of History, University of Rochester. Rochester NY

Thursday, March 30, 2006 - 8pm, Ondaatje Auditorium, McCain building

Broadly speaking, Professor Rubin is concerned with the values, assumptions, and anxieties that have shaped American life, as reflected in both high culture and the experiences of ordinary people. Currently she is investigating two aspects of the history of books and reading in the United States. First, she is exploring the status and uses of poetry between 1880 and 1945 in order to differentiate the history of reading from literary history and to assess the diffusion of modernism in the early twentieth century. The roles of educators, ministers, publishers, and literary critics, as well as the responses of readers, figure in that undertaking. Second, she is co-editing a volume for a collaborative History of the Book in America since 1945, including the impact of electronic media.  She is the author of The Making of Middlebrow Culture (U of North Carolina Press, 1992), and articles on recitation and poetry reading in schools and public meetings.

 

Lecture Three 

“St Jerome in Antarctica: Journeys through the Textual Imagination”

Bill Bell, Senior Lecturer in English and Director of the Center for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh UK

Thursday, April 6, 2006 - 8pm, Ondaatje Auditorium, McCain Building

Bill Bell is Director of the Centre for the History of the Book at The University of Edinburgh in the UK.  He teaches in the Department of English Literature and is General Editor of The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, to be published in 4 volumes by Edinburgh University Press.  He has recently edited two collections of essays: Across Boundaries: The Book in Commerce and Culture (1999) and Nineteenth Century Media and the Construction of Identities (2000) and was recently appointed area editor for cultural and media theory to The Oxford Companion to the Book. He was a member of the editorial team of the Duke-Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle and has published widely on nineteenth century literature and culture.  He has held visiting posts at the Australian National University, the University of Ottawa, and St John’s College, Oxford.  He has served on a number of scholarly bodies, including Councils of The Bibliographical Society and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing and is presently completing a book on the history of reading.

The MacKay History Lecture

"Can a State Be Illegal and Independent?  Can a State Be an Empire?  Or a Post-colony? Rhodesia's Independence in the Era of Decolonization"

Luise White, Professor of History, African Studies Faculty at the University of Florida

Thursday March 23, 2006 - Room 1028, Rowe Bldg., 6100 University Ave.

Dr. White is the author of The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (University of Chicago Press, 1990), Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (University of California Press, 2000), and The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe (Indiana University Press, 2003), and is co-editor of Africa Words, African Vocies: Critical Practices in Oral History (Indiana University Press, 2001).