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…

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…

SHARP 2021 talk “Moving Textual Histories: Students Editing Women’s Writing in the American Prison Writing Archive”

Leuner, SHARP 2021, talk draft Panel “Rejecting “Big Dick Data”: Data Intimacy in Large-Scale Book History Projects”, with Kate Ozment and Kandice Sharren, moderated by Michelle Levy. Moving Textual Histories: Students Editing Women’s Writing in the American Prison Writing Archive http://apw.dhinitiative.org/ Trigger warning: this talk includes discussion of imprisonment, trauma, and bodily and emotional harm suffered within the prison system. [Slide 1: Title] Authors writing in prison have made significant contributions to textual histories, but for those without publishers, digital projects that aggregate and share their stories play vital roles in advancing justice for incarcerated people and the prison abolition movement. However, personal accounts have…

MLA 2021, “Recovery, Identity, and WikiData: What Literary Scholars Need to Know,” Panel

On Friday 8 January 2021, I joined three colleagues on a panel organized by my co-editor and colleague Deborah Hollis, head of Special Collections at University Libraries, University of Colorado Boulder. Speakers on our panel include, clockwise from the upper left, Chris Long (CU Libraries), myself, Deborah Hollis (CU Libraries), and Danna D’Esopo (SCU class of 20). Our panel examined a history of our DH project The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing as it relates to a specific kind of recovery scholarship to create, edit, and share authority records for lesser-known women writers. We addressed authority records created specifically for…

BWWC 2020 (TCU), co-presenting with Danna D’Esopo (’20)

From College Notes, March 27, 2020: “On March 6, Kirstyn Leuner (English) and Danna D’Esopo ’20 (English) co-presented their paper, “By A Woman, in Red: Anne B. Poyntz and the Blush of the Page,” at the 28th annual British Women Writers Conference, held at Texas Christian University. Their paper argued that Poyntz begins her book of letters and poems, Je ne sçai quoi (1769), with a dedication printed in red ink in order to make her book appear to blush. The blush is, on the surface, the customary apology that all 18th-century women writers were expected to make for their published writing. But Leuner and D’Esopo…

Slow Tech @ #MLA20, “The Letterpress Studio as Campus Maker Space” #s683

This MLA 2020 roundtable “The Letterpress Studio as Campus Maker Space” features the following speakers Ryan Cordell Northeastern U Emilie Hardman Massachusetts Inst. of Tech. Kirstyn Leuner Santa Clara U Andrew Rippeon Davidson C Kurt M. Koenigsberger Case Western Reserve U Andrew Griffin U of California, Santa Barbara Britt Starr U of Maryland, College Park Jonathan Senchyne – Respondant, U of Wisconsin, Madison The title of my talk is “Slow Tech in Silicon Valley” At Santa Clara University, our press does not have an official mission statement or slogan. But the philosophy that I argue best serves SCU’s letterpress program…

Talk on Student-Centered Course Design in Digital Humanities Surveys for Undergrads (Matariki DH Colloquium)

I delivered this talk at the Matariki Digital Humanities Colloquium, 23-25 October 2016, Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario). Writing an “Introduction to Digital Humanities” Syllabus? You May Need to Screw Around, Too! Many a Digital Humanities syllabus begins with an essay by Stephen Ramsay called “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or, What You Do With A Million Books.” I do this, too! The essay argues that we can study a culture with too many texts to read by “browsing” according to our interests and embracing serendipitous experiential learning, as if we’re wandering in the library stacks. Ramsay calls this “screwing around” or…

“Romantic Women Writers and The Stainforth Library: ‘Making Women Writers Count'” (NASSR 2016)

[I delivered this talk on the “Panelists, Collectors, Archivists” panel on Thursday, August 11, 2016, at NASSR. Thanks to my co-panelists Lauren Gillingham, Thomas McLean, and Marc Mazur, to our moderator Eric Gidal, and to those who made Q&A a useful and energetic discussion to kick off the conference. I hope you will respond with questions or comments.] Francis John Stainforth (1797 – 1866) was a British Anglican priest, a bibliophile, and a collector’s collector of shells, stamps, and most of all, books. He owned what we have so far found to be the largest private library of Anglophone women’s…

Stainforth Project Update, December 2014

Team Stainforth has had an extremely productive summer and fall, as we began to work collaboratively across two institutions: CU-Boulder and Dartmouth College, where I’m managing the project for my Neukom Institute postdoctoral fellowship. Follow our project blog for more frequent updates. We added two important mentors to our team, both at Dartmouth College: Professor Ivy Schweitzer, English Dept. and Women and Gender Studies, and Professor Mary Flanagan, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities and Professor of Film and Media Studies. I also want to thank Professor Dan Rockmore, Director of the Institute, and the Neukom staff who have…

Digital Crucible Presentation, Oct. 6-7 (Dartmouth College)

I recently presented a talk at the Digital Crucible conference at Dartmouth College, Oct 6-7, 2014. Here is my original abstract as a placeholder. In the near future, I will post a revised and updated version of the talk I delivered, along with my slides. I am in the process of making revisions to account from some very helpful feedback I received from conference participants. Special thanks to Amanda French, Kelli Towers Jasper, Dan Shore, Ivy Schweitzer, and Tom Luxon for your responses and questions. Original title: 19th-c. Library Catalogs & Stainforth’s Feminist Archive of Women’s Writing Abstract: My talk…