Following previous years’ precedent, here’s a quick list of conferences I’ll be speaking at this year!
First, I’ll be speaking at the ‘Reading Then, Reading Now’ conference at Harvard, 18–20 April (CFP archived here). I’m writing my paper for this now and I think I’ll have interesting things to say, if I can just work out how to articulate them! The paper comes out of my monograph, and includes some ideas on broader problems for the history of reading (then and indeed now) which I’ve not aired in public before.
Then I’ll be giving two linked papers at the Early Book Society in Dublin and at this year’s Harlaxton Medieval Symposium on ‘The Medieval Book as Object, Idea and Symbol’. These papers relate to my new project on the codicology of missing later medieval English manuscripts. The EBS piece will introduce the project as a whole, while at Harlaxton I’ll deliver a detailed report from my work on the codicology of now-lost books which were once held by institutional libraries.
Finally, in September, I’ll be giving a paper at ‘Dark Archives’. Again, here I’ll be talking about the missing manuscripts, but, given the conference topic and audience, I’ll be speaking with a focus on broader theoretical and methodological issues. And also with some due interrogation of the idea of ‘darkness’: what separates an obscurity which is still diligently being cared for by hard-working archivists and librarians from something which is outright gone?
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