You’re a Times New Romance!

Friday February 9, SCU Letterpress got everyone ready for Valentine’s Day by hosting a card printing and decorating event. We had the best turnout we have ever had at this event, with at least 75 students, faculty, staff, and family members filling Dowd 306 and 310 between 3-5pm to print, decorate, and de-stress on a Friday afternoon. We’ve set the bar pretty high with Valentine’s designs in the past, and I’m happy to say I think we met the bar this year. Kathryn Kain made a stack of special decorative Valentine-inspired stock to print on (see middle photo), they are…

Harvest Fest Letterpress at the Forge Garden, 10.26.23

Letterpress was excited to be invited by the Forge Garden and the Center for Sustainability to be part of Fall Harvest Fest during Mission Week. There were a whole bunch of firsts for letterpress that made this a great learning opportunity: it was our first time printing outdoors at an event, the first time wheeling the table top C&P over on our brand new printing cart (print-on-wheels!), and our first collaboration with Kathryn Kain (Art & Art History). Special thanks to Maria Judnick and Rebecca Nelson for your invitation and for putting so much care and thought into this special…

What’s Critical About Critical Bibliography? A Discussion of a Special Issue of Criticism among Co-Authors and Editors, 6/20/23

This morning, I participated in an organized and moderated hour+ conversation among the contributors to the special issue of Criticism devoted to “New Approaches to Critical Bibliography and the Material Text.” I represented the team of co-authors of our essay, “Activist Bibliography as Abolitionist Pedagogy in the American Prison Writing Archive” by myself, Catherine Koehler, and Doran Larson. “This issue consists of 22 theoretically engaged essays and shorter interventions that foreground under-represented approaches to bibliography, book history, and media studies, incorporating intersectional anti-racist, feminist, queer, postcolonial, labor-centered and disability studies methods. The works in this issue do not merely add representation to…

New Pub Alert: “Activist Bibliography as Abolitionist Pedagogy in the American Prison Writing Archive” in Criticism 64.3-4

I co-authored this article with Catherine Koehler and Doran Larson, a project that began in 2021. Our collaboration grew out of our shared relationship to teaching with and editing the American Prison Writing Archive, which Doran founded and directs. Here is the link to our essay, and here is a link to the full special issue “New Approaches to Critical Bibliography and the Material Text,” edited by Lisa Maruca and Kate Ozment. Myself, Catherine, and Doran were really excited to see this project published yesterday!

2023 British Women Writers Conference: A Plenary, A Roundtable, and a Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon

The 31st British Women Writers Conference was held at UVA from Thursday May 25 through Saturday May 27. It was my first in-person BWWC since the pandemic, so I went “all in”. It was also my last conference as the Web and Media Manager (WAMM), a position on the executive board I created and have devoted a lot of energy to since 2013, the year after I co-hosted the annual conference at CU-Boulder with Kelli Towers Jasper and Jill Heydt-Stevenson (faculty advisor). After 10 years of service as the WAMM (2 new websites and various social media accounts later), it…

DH “Book Talk” on the Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing with ARC

For International Women’s Day 2023 #IWD2023: Just released, the Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing‘s “DH book talk” with ARC (Advanced Research Consortium), 18thConnect, and NINES editors featuring Kirstyn Leuner, Deborah Hollis, Chad Marks, and Susan Guinn-Chipman of the Stainforth project; and Emily Friedman, Laura Mandell, Lauren Liebe, and Elizabeth Brissey of ARC. This conversation was an absolute delight for me personally, having so many collaborators and inspiring scholars in the “room” at the same time talking about a project that our team has been collaborating to build and peer-review for the last decade. We are so proud that our project…

Printer’s Valentines, 2/8 CAH Open House Letterpress Event

On Wednesday 2/8 SCU Letterpress helped co-host the Center for Arts and Humanities Open House held on the 3rd floor of Dowd. The many people who contributed to putting on this event included Michelle Burnham, Amy Randall, and Britt Cain of the CAH; and myself, Kathy Aoki (AAH), Renee Billingslea (AAH), and Heather Turner (English) of the DHI and SCU Letterpress. We had a great array of participants and visitors at the Open House and printing event, from our CAH Frank Sinatra Artist in Residence Mark Duplass, to groups of students, staff, and faculty from across campus. Visitors started in…

MLA 2023 slides: “Blood Type: Printing Battlefield Labor in the 18th Century”

If you’re at MLA this weekend, please come to our New Directions in Book History panel! Session 264, Friday January 6, 12-1:15pm in Moscone West 3000 (level 3). I’ll be presenting on the labors of making eighteenth-century printing ink, especially red ink, and how that work matters when you read texts printed in colors other than black ink (but black ink, too). Here are my slides – they may change slightly before tomorrow, but these are a final draft. I’m concerned that the red text pages may be hard to read or inaccessible to some, so I will provide a…

Stainforth News: Rare Book Dealer Catalog Citations and New Stainforth Bookplate Sightings to Map!

The Stainforth project got two unexpected, new kinds of citations recently — in a rare book dealer’s catalog. The https://www.19thshop.com/ catalog contains a listing for a first edition of the auction catalog for the Stainforth library. I’ve laid hands on one of these only at the British Library, so this is cool! The dealer’s description cites both my article in SEL as well as a description of the Stainforth library from the project website, http://stainforth.scu.edu. It’s certainly nice to know that both print and digital scholarship on the Stainforth library are receiving a variety of kinds of traffic and use….

Forge Garden Meets Book Arts!

Yesterday (Wednesday 11/16/22) SCU Letterpress hosted a really fun afternoon holiday gift making event with new collaborators! Maria Judnick (English) dreamt up this event, which she called “Forge Garden Fun,” to marry her recent training in letterpress printing at the San Francisco Center for the Book with her new role at the Center for Sustainability at SCU. Maria teamed up with Becca Nelson, Sustainable Food Systems Program Manager at the Forge, to design and set a quote by Robin Wall Kimmerer from her book Braiding Sweetgrass. Further, they created decoration stations in the room next to the press (Dowd 310)…