Text & Textuality Symposium

This day-and-a-half-long, in-person symposium brings together scholars, practitioners, and archivists to present research on the broad topic of “textuality.” This symposium deliberately draws together various modes of engagement with texts, including practical book arts, digital humanities innovations, early forms of codex-making, print technologies, and Archives.  Panels on on print and digital technologies; the development of radical archives and bookstores in the early twentieth century; textiles in and as texts; Arab, Francophone, and East Asian graphic novel cultures; and “natural texts,” such as ice and animal tracks will be anchored by two plenary talks, by Jesse R. Erickson (Morgan Library) and Whitney Trettien (University of Pennsylvania).  The symposium will dovetail with Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections’ exhibit, “Say It!” which features Bryn Mawr’s robust but largely uncatalogued collection of posters, banners, and pennants. 

DAY 1 – Friday, March 20, 2026

8:30 - 9:00am —- Breakfast – Old Library 129

9:00 - 9:15am —- Welcoming Remarks – Jamie Taylor, Bryn Mawr College

9:15 - 10:30am —- Opening Keynote – Jesse Erickson, The Morgan Library & Museum – “r/Textuality: Toward a Unified Theory of Scriniumatics”

10:45 - 12:00pm —- PANEL 1: Text & Textiles (Presider Colby Gordon)

• Sylvia Houghteling, Bryn Mawr College – “To Catch a Color: Text, Dyes, and the Natural World in Early Modern South and Southeast Asia”

• Michele Osherow, University of Maryland, Baltimore County – “Stitching chesed: Lessons on the Book of Ruth from a Seventeenth-Century Embroidered Casket”

• Clare Mullaney, Clemson University – “Helen Keller’s Patchwork: Tactile Collaborations and the Limits of Print”

12:00 - 1:30pm —- Lunch (panelists and presiders only) – English House, Faculty Lounge

1:45 - 3:15pm —- PANEL 2: Textuality & the Natural World (Presider: Sara Grossman)

• Alex Alston, Bryn Mawr College – “Plantation Palimpsest: Ecocriticism and the Fiction of Slavery”

• Hester Blum, Washington University, St. Louis – “Arctic Ephemera”

• Danielle Allor, Haverford College – “Medieval Tree Texts”

3:30 - 5:00pm —- PANEL 3: Archives & Collections (Presider: Rudy Le Menthéour)

• Jonathan Eburne, Washington University, St. Louis – “Societies of Friends of the Book”

• Marija Dalbello, Rutgers University – “Working Class Archives and the Idea of Textuality”

• Martín Gaspar & Laurel Gabbard, Bryn Mawr College – “The Good, the Bad, and the C.I.A. in the Emir Rodríguez Monegal Papers at Bryn Mawr College”

5:00 - 6:15pm —- Reception at Say It! Special Collections Exhibit – 1902 Gallery, Canaday Library

DAY 2 – Saturday, March 21, 2026

8:30 - 9:00am —- Breakfast – Old Library 223

9:00 - 10:00am —- PANEL 4: The Politics of Print (Presider: Jennifer Harford Vargas)

• Belle Handler, Philly Soapbox – “Printing Is for Everyone: Book Arts Technology and Accessibility”

• Bryn Michaelson-Ziegler, Rosenbach Museum & Library – “Finding Purpose in Print: Responding to a Hostile Digital Age”

10:15 – 11:45am —- PANEL 5: Text & the Body (Presider: Pardis Dabashi)

• Janelle Rebel, Bryn Mawr College – “Touching Posters & Other Acts of Cataloging Divination”

• Alexandra Gueydan-Turek, Swarthmore College – “The Violence of Form: Radical Textuality in Mazen Kerbaj’s War Diaries”

• Seth Williams, Barnard College – “Text as Dance, Dance as Map in Early Modern England”  

12:00 - 1:15pm —- Closing Keynote – Whitney Trettien, University of Pennsylvania – “Punched Holes & Piano Keyboards at the Origins of Digital Text”

1:20 - 2:30pm —- Lunch (panelists and presiders only) – English House, Faculty Lounge

Organized by:

 Jamie Taylor, Mary E. Garrett Alumnae Professor of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College