The 2025 Annual Meeting
Convene
75 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY
Ibn al-Nadim, Kitab al-fihrist (Baghdad, 987-1000). Chester Beatty Library.
The BSA Officers and members of the Council warmly invite you to attend the Society’s Annual Meeting on 24 January 2025!
Our Annual Meeting takes place during Bibliography Week, is an annual event held in January when the several national organizations devoted to book scholarship and the book arts, including BSA, the American Printing History Association, and the Grolier Club, have their annual meetings. BSA typically holds its annual meeting each year on the Friday of Bibliography Week.
About the Annual Meeting
The Annual Meeting features the New Scholars Program, a keynote lecture, and for the first time ever, synchronous panel presentations in the morning. Details about the New Scholars program will be shared in November 2024.
Registration for the Annual Meeting is required, opening November 2024.
Ahmed El Shamsy, Professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago.
The 2025 Keynote by Dr. Ahmed El Shamsy
Bibliography after Empire: Documenting and Classifying Knowledge in the Tenth-Century Muslim World
In the late tenth century, a Baghdadi bookseller by the name of Ibn al-Nadim embarked on the ambitious mission of compiling a comprehensive and systematic inventory of all books ever written in or translated into Arabic. By that time, the vast Islamic empire that had once stretched from Iberia to India had fragmented, but the shared cultural and intellectual space defined by the lingua franca of Arabic continued to flourish. What Ibn al-Nadim sought to produce, then, was a complete record of the knowledge available in his time. In his extensive introduction and his catalog of more than eight thousand books, Ibn al-Nadim offers us a glimpse into a knowledge economy that was still expanding even though the empire that had launched it no longer existed.
About the speaker: Ahmed El Shamsy is a professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law. He has published two books, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (2013) and Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (2020). He is now writing a book about the emergence and early history of Sunni Islam.
The Annual Meeting Program
We warmly invite you to attend the full day’s events on 24 January. This year the program will start at 10 am with three synchronous panel presentations. The Editors of PBSA will host a brown-bag lunch session starting at noon, with the New Scholars program beginning at 1 pm.
Details about the morning sessions and the New Scholars Program speakers will be announced in November 2024.
Schedule of Events, Friday, 24 January
10 to 11:30 am, synchronous panel and workshop sessions
11:30 am to 1 pm, lunch // PBSA brown bag session from 12-1 pm (optional)
1 to 2:30 pm, New Scholars Program
2:30 to 3 pm, Coffee Break
3 to 5 pm, Keynote Lecture and brief business meeting
5 to 6:30 pm, Reception
BSA Events Throughout Bibliography Week
You are cordially invited to attend our free programming throughout Bibliography Week! As in recent years, the BSA will host events on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, and all day on Friday.
Wednesday evening: BSA x Center for Book Arts Lecture, “The Best Kept Secret: 250 Years of Blooks” (registration coming soon)
Thursday evening: BSA x NYSL Members Mixer (registration now open!)
Friday, all day: BSA Annual Meeting (registration coming soon)
About the Meeting Venue: Location & Access
The meeting will be held at Convene, 75 Rockefeller Center in New York City. Registration is required for attendance; all registrants will receive a QR code by email the evening before and the morning of the event for access to the event space. Should you have any concerns about security protocols in the building, please feel welcome to contact the BSA office by email at any time.
About our in-person program
This year’s program will be presented to our in-person audience only, with recordings of the New Scholars talks, the keynote lecture, and the business meeting made available on YouTube in February 2025. Sign up for our email newsletter to be the first to know when recordings have been released!
Health safety protocols
Masking is encouraged but not required.
In alignment with our host venue’s policy, we strongly recommend staying up to date on vaccinations at all times. Proof of vaccination will not be required for entry.