Rare Book School Lectures

Mike Kelly delivered the 2026 NEH-SHARP Living American History in Primary Documents Lecture, "Indigenous Agency & Intervention in the Bibliographical Record," at the University of Virginia on 22 July, 2026. About the Talk: This talk draws from the past thirteen years that Mike Kelly has spent building the Native American Literature Collection in the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College, as well as current work to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into library, archives, and museum practices. The history of the Indigenous people of North America engaging directly with printing technology extends from the first presses in seventeenth-century New England to the comics, games, and more produced by the Indigenous Imagination Workshop in the twenty-first century. Kelly will demonstrate how a deep knowledge of traditional bibliography coupled with an understanding of Indigenous history results in a rich and complex understanding of this aspect of book history. At the same time, there are many ways to incorporate Indigenous methodologies and perspectives into our curatorial practices, which Kelly and his colleagues have attempted to do at Amherst. About the Speaker: Mike Kelly has served as the Head of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections since 2009; prior to that time he was Curator of Books at the Fales Library & Special Collections at New York University. He received his Master's in Library Science from the University of Texas at Austin where he spent two years as an intern at the Harry Ransom Center; he also holds an M.A. in English from the University of Virginia. In 2016, he was awarded the Reese Fellowship for American Bibliography and the History of the Book in the Americas by the Bibliographical Society of America for his work on the bibliography of Samson Occom, a member of the Mohegan tribe of Connecticut. He co-curated (with Carolyn Vega) the exhibition “I'm Nobody! Who Are You? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson” at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which ran from January through May 2017. In the summer of 2018, Mike co-taught the course H-150: A History of Native American Books & Indigenous Sovereignty in Amherst for Rare Book School and he just completed teaching the online RBS course G-90v: Indigenous Agency and Intervention in the Bibliographical Record.

Michael Stamm delivered the 2026 Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Lecture on the History of the Book Trades, "Landscapes, Labor, and the Infrastructures of Printed Newspapers," on 8 July 2026. About the Talk: Printed newspapers have become endangered as digital distribution has transformed the news business and the ways that people access information. This talk returns to the decades in our previous century when the printed newspaper thrived as the center of the news cycle, and it highlights some of the hidden landscapes, labor, and infrastructures enabling that. Twentieth-century newspapers were not just outlets for news but were also the material products of industrial capitalism manufactured by business firms organized like those in other mass production industries. These firms drew upon natural raw materials and developed infrastructures of production and distribution gathering large and diverse human labor forces including lumberjacks, paper mill operators, and newsboys. We often think about printed texts as relationships between authors and readers, but this talk draws attention to some of the hidden materials, people, and infrastructures involved in producing and circulating printed newspapers. About the Speaker: Michael Stamm is Professor of History at Michigan State University. He received his B.A. in English from UC Berkeley in 1994 and his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 2006. He has been at MSU since 2008, and he has served as Chairperson of the History Department since 2022. He is a political, cultural, and environmental historian specializing in media and journalism history. His first book, Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), traced how American newspapers have responded to competition from “new media,” which in the decades after 1920 meant radio broadcasting. His most recent book is Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), which offers a history of the printed newspaper tracing its production from the forest to the reader. In 2019, the book received Canadian Business History Association's Best Book Prize. He is currently completing a book entitled Communicating with Nature: Agriculture, Materiality, and the Industrial Information Age, which traces the use of farm crops in the manufacturing of paper and ink and in the circulation of public information.

Matthew Kirschenbaum delivered Rare Book School's 2026 Sol M. and Mary Ann O'Brian Malkin Endowed Lecture, "From text to .txt: Making Material Messes in a Sloppy World," on 6 July 2026. About the Talk: By the turn of the millennium, the word “text” had become a verb. Three-and-a-half years ago, ChatGPT was released into the wild, decisively severing the link between writing and human expression. In 2025, Merriam-Webster's word of the year was “slop.” This talk will offer an attenuated archaeology of what someone we know once called the textual condition. And not to give away the game, but that condition is not good: today, text functions as something much more like a fossil fuel or other extractable resource than a medium for communication and expression. Nonetheless, the talk also asks how we can still make some good old fashioned material messes in a world of slop. Examples will be provided. Refreshments will be served. There may even be a book or two. About the Speaker: Matthew Kirschenbaum rejoined UVA in 2025 as Commonwealth Professor of Artificial Intelligence and English after 25 years at the University of Maryland, where he finished as a Distinguished University Professor. He considers himself a student of texts and textual technologies in all their social and material forms, and his scholarship and teaching have explored literary intersects with printing and bookmaking, archival science, media archaeology, digital humanities, and now artificial intelligence. He is the author of three books, most recently Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage from the University of Pennsylvania Press (2021). His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008) was the winner of multiple awards, including the MLA Prize for a First Book. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (2016) enjoyed widespread public media attention. Recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Critical Inquiry, and ELH; and he frequently writes for popular outlets, which have included the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Kirschenbaum is an active member of the Modern Language Association's task force on AI in Research and Teaching, and a member of the teaching faculty at Rare Book School. He has been a Guggenheim and an NEH Fellow, and is a practicing letterpress printer. Current projects includes two books, the first on the political economy of text in the present moment and the second on the weaponization of AI in what some have called a full-blown epistemic crisis. You can find him on Bluesky at @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social.

Elizabeth Canning delivered Rare Book School's 2026 Kenneth W. Rendell Endowed Lecture, "Women's Libraries & Their Afterlives," on 10 June, 2026. Women's book collections appear in a wide range of forms: as catalogued libraries; as groups of surviving books linked by inscription and family use; or as volumes dispersed but still traceable through the historical record. In some cases, a woman's library may never have existed as a traditional collection. Women's commonplace books record reading lives—and can produce something like a library in manuscript form. Considered together, these collections are not always bounded or stable. Some are large and well-documented; others survive only in small clusters or scattered traces. Drawing on examples ranging from the seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century, this lecture examines how these different modes of creation and survival complicate familiar ideas about what a library can be. Looking for such associations—and for the ways book collections are formed, dispersed, and remade—offers insight into how women and girls lived with books, and into the limits and possibilities of collecting these materials.

RBS faculty member Paul Needham (Princeton Univ.) gave a public lecture on "The Catholicon Press Revisited: The Evidence of Nailheads" on 29 July 2025. You can watch the full recording of the lecture on YouTube at https://youtu.be/o4aMEB38slw?feature=shared.

Christopher N. Warren delivered the 2025 Sol M. and Mary Ann O'Brian Malkin Lecture, “What is Computational Bibliography?”, on 30 July 2025. You can watch the full recording of the lecture on YouTube at https://youtu.be/ElvNacFyoWQ?feature=shared.

Rachael DiEleuterio gave the inaugural Sue Allen Lecture for Women in Book History, on “Curious and Creative Women,” on 28 July 2025. She was joined by Daphne Sawyer, who endowed the lecture in memory of her mother, Mary Sawyer (1925–2024), and of longtime RBS faculty member Sue Allen (1918–2011). You can watch the full recording of the lecture on YouTube at https://youtu.be/2YurCWdLYIo?feature=shared. About the Talk: What do mother-and-daughter book collectors, nineteenth-century book cover designers, and an art museum librarian have in common? Rare Book School, of course! But there's more to the story. All of them are women, deeply passionate about the history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publishers' book bindings. These bindings, many of which were designed by women, are stunning works of art. As the commercial book market boomed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, decorative bindings became an essential part of book production. These publishers' bindings showcased technological advancements in mass production while reflecting contemporaneous artistic movements. Book cover design was one of few creative professions open to women, whose innovations transformed the field until the more cost-effective paper dust jacket took over in the 1920s. By the 1960s, these beautiful covers had fallen out of fashion, relegated to attics and basements, and even destroyed. However, a few dedicated individuals began collecting these bindings as works of art, gradually identifying their unique design styles, designers, and histories. This presentation will focus on a few RBS alumnae who have made it their mission to preserve these remarkable bindings for posterity. About the Speaker: Rachael DiEleuterio has been Librarian and Archivist at the Delaware Art Museum since 2008, where she singlehandedly oversees the Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives. She is a Certified Archivist and has B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Delaware and an M.S.L.S. from Clarion University of Pennsylvania. She first became fascinated with decorative book bindings in 2011, when she attended Sue Allen's class at Rare Book School and hasn't stopped talking about them since.

James H. Marrow gave a public talk on “Iconographic Disjunction in the Ruskin Psalter/Hours: A Flemish Illuminated Manuscript of ca. 1470–80,” on 23 July 2025, as part of Rare Book School's 2025 Summer Lecture Series. You can watch the full recording of the lecture on YouTube at https://youtu.be/LxIPOQ6ehss?feature=shared.

This NEH-SHARP Living American History in Primary Documents Lecture by E. M. Rose was part of Rare Book School's 2025 Summer Lecture Series. You can watch the full recording of the lecture on YouTube at https://youtu.be/VaN2qqFnPto?feature=shared.

Mark McConnell, "Publishing in the Renaissance: Christophe Plantin's Business Strategy" by Rare Book School Lectures

Janine Barchas, "Jane Austen on the Cheap" by Rare Book School Lectures

Mindell Dubansky, "A Parallel History of Books and Blooks" by Rare Book School Lectures

Richard B. Sher, “New Light on the Early Publication History of Boswell's Life of Johnson," Karmiole Lecture, 10 July 2024 by Rare Book School Lectures

"Archive of the People: The Johnson Publishing Company" Lecture by LeRonn Brooks by Rare Book School Lectures

"Scholarly Editing and the Challenges of Attribution" Lecture by Stephen Karian by Rare Book School Lectures

"A Librarian Like No Other: Belle da Costa Greene and Self-Invention" Lecture by Deborah Parker by Rare Book School Lectures

"De Motu Librorum: On the Movement of Books" Lecture by G. Scott Clemons by Rare Book School Lectures

“Buying a Book in Early Modern England” Lecture by Aaron Pratt by Rare Book School Lectures

“'Yongle Dadian:' An Emperors' Encyclopedia” Lecture by Li Wei Yang by Rare Book School Lectures

“Collecting Daily Life in Early American Manuscripts” Lecture by Ashley Cataldo by Rare Book School Lectures

Kailani Polzak, "Pacific Encounters in Print," The Kress Foundation Lecture, 31 July 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Craig Welsh, "The Typesetting & Designs of the Declaration of Independence Broadsides," 26 July 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Christy S. Coleman, "A Nexus of Learning—Museums and the Importance of Public History," 24 July 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Jeffrey Makala, "Lives (& Afterlives) of Stereotype Plates," Karmiole Lecture, 12 July 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Walter O. Evans, "Why Collect?" The 2023 Kenneth W. Rendell Lecture, 14 June 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Barbara E. Mundy, "Books in the Contact Zone," Malkin Lecture, 12 June 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Leah Price, "Reader=Inessential Worker: Book History After Lockdown," 7 June 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

S. Max Edelson, "The Surveyor's Eye," NEH-SHARP Lecture, 5 June 2023 by Rare Book School Lectures

Mary Catherine Kinniburgh is the co-director of Granary Books, an independent publisher and archives/rare book dealer. As a scholar of postwar American poetry and an archives broker, her activities occur at the intersection of research and praxis, and her writing often focuses on the poetics of archival work. In particular, her research explores making sense of high volume in literary collections. In this talk, Kinniburgh discusses her ongoing series "Messy Archivist," which explores the interstitial qualities of working on archives through prose, poetry, and images. Published by her experimental imprint TKS Books, each "Messy Archivist" is a handmade chapbook that is often organized around a keyword, such as messy, or need. For the fourth volume and this talk, the premise is surface: what might be interpreted as an archival surface, and how does our attentiveness to the relationship between surface and depth inform our understanding of archives, especially at scale? Drawing on Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best's concept of “surface reading” in literary texts, the physics of surfing, what puts the “relief” in relief printing, and Kinniburgh's experiences working on specific archives at Granary Books, this talk will contextualize the concept of surface as a lens for the information overload that necessarily comes with archival work, and a critical approach for the toolkits of fellow scholars and archivists of twentieth century American poetry and beyond.

Rezek, Joseph - "Ideologies of the Codex in Hakluyt and Smith" - NEH-SHARP Lecture, 1 Aug 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

Marcus, Hannah - "Characterizing the Elderly across Formats in Early Modern Italy" - 27 July 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

McNamee, Megan - "Significance of a Concertina-Fold Almanac" - Kress Lecture - 25 July 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

Roldán Vera, Eugenia - "Book Trade in the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic" - Karmiole Lecture - 13 July 22 by Rare Book School Lectures

White, Eric - "A History of the Gutenberg Bible (continued)" - Malkin Lecture, 11 July 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

Wisecup, Kelly - "Making and Reading Indigenous Archives" NEH-GBHI - 15 June 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

Rogers, Beverly - "Victorian Connections: Books and Stories" Rendell Lecture - 13 June 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

Wong, Dorothy - “Making Merit: East Asian Buddhist Material Culture” NEH-GBHI Lecture - 6 June 2022 by Rare Book School Lectures

“Lost Archives and Paper Reuse in the Medieval Islamic World” Marina Rustow, Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, and Director of the Geniza Lab, Princeton University A Rare Book School lecture, 20 July 2021

“He Lau Nā Moʻolelo: The Challenge and Promise of Hawaiian Language Textual Archives” Noelani Arista, Director, Indigenous Studies Program, and Associate Professor, Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University A Rare Book School lecture29 June 2021

"Subscription Publishing in America over Three Centuries" by Michael Winship - Rare Book School's inaugural Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Lecture on the History of the Book Trades, presented on Tuesday, 13 July 2021

Goldsby and McGill - "What is 'Black' about Black Bibliography?" - 3 August 2021 by Rare Book School Lectures

Yale, Elizabeth - "Paper-Keeping: Women, Family, Knowledge Work..." - 27 July 2021 by Rare Book School Lectures

Hidalgo, Alex - "The Book as Archive" - 15 June 2021 by Rare Book School Lectures

Robb, Megan - "Print and the Urdu Public" - 23 July 2020 by Rare Book School Lectures

Nishikawa, Kinohi – "From Poet to Publisher: Reading Gwendolyn Brooks by Design" - 16 July 2020 by Rare Book School Lectures

Ramachandran, Ayesha – "An Alternative History of the Atlas" - 2 July 2020 by Rare Book School Lectures

Trettien, Whitney - "A Hornbook for Digital Book History" - 18 June 2020 by Rare Book School Lectures

Full title: "Superheroes and Shocking Affairs, or, Adventures in Cataloging Popular Literature"

RBS-Mellon lecture by Pamela Klassen (Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto), given at Franklin & Marshall College on 25 October 2017. See https://rarebookschool.org/all-programs/events/protest-on-the-page/ for more information on this event.