The 2024 Annual Meeting

From January 22–27, 2024 the Bibliographical Society of America celebrated Bibliography Week with a series of events designed to demonstrate bibliographical practice and its relevance to interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities. The Society’s Annual Meeting concluded the week’s activites on January 27.

The 2024 Keynote Lecture: Dr. Daniela Bleichmar, “Rethinking the Aztec Past, Rethinking the Codex Mendoza“

This talk discussed the production, circulation, reproduction, and changing interpretations of a remarkable early-colonial Mexican manuscript known as the Codex Mendoza. Created by Nahua painter-scribes and Spanish interpreters and scribes only a few decades after the Spanish conquest, the manuscript presents one of the richest and most detailed accounts of the Aztec empire from an Indigenous perspective. The codex was sent to Europe and moved from one notable owner to another for about a hundred years, before entering the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in 1659. As the only Mexican Indigenous manuscript that Europeans found legible for more than three hundred years, it became the most studied, used, and reproduced non-European manuscript in early modern Europe, and a central source for the interpretations of Indigenous books and Indigenous societies. Over the centuries, many notable scholars reproduced the manuscript and offered wide-ranging interpretations, rethinking the Aztec past through them. As we continue to rethink this manuscript today, what are the implications for our understanding of Indigenous manuscripts? A recording of the talk is now available on the BSA YouTube Channel.

The 2024 New Scholars

The Bibliographical Society of America’s New Scholars Program promotes the work of scholars new to bibliography, broadly defined to include the creation, production, publication, distribution, reception, transmission, and subsequent history of all textual artifacts. This includes manuscript, print, and digital media, from clay and stone to laptops and iPads.

The 2024 New Scholars are:

D.F. McKenzie New Scholar: Hallie Nell Swanson (University of Pennsylvania), “Moving Stories: The Indo-Persian Romance”

Jacob Blanck & Dorothy Porter Wesley New Scholar: Yolanda Mackey (Penn State University), “Recovering and Reclaiming Claude McKay’s Lost Novel(s) ‘Amiable with Big Teeth.’”

Katherine F. Pantzer New Scholar: Andreas P. Bassett (University of Washington),  “The Typographical Evolution of Printed Play and Sermon Titles in the Early English Book Trade, 1590–1642”

New Scholars presented fifteen-minute talks on their current, unpublished bibliographical research during the program preceding the Society’s Annual Meeting, held each January during Bibliography Week. The 2023 New Scholars will also presented their papers in virtual pre-screening sessions followed by question and answer periods during the week of January.