Congratulations to the 2025 New Scholars!

D.F. McKenzie New Scholar: Javiera Barrientos (Rutgers University) ↑

Literary Landfills. Bibliographic Waste and its Representations

In this presentation, I examine the circulation, uses and representations of bibliographic waste found in viceregal vellum limp-bindings held at the Biblioteca Patrimonial Recoleta Dominica, the Biblioteca Nacional de México and the Hispanic Society of America. Here I create a comparative taxonomy that contributes to the characterization of colonial waste paper used within contact zones. Alongside the study of discourses that portray its value, the material analysis of these case studies has allowed me to situate colonial bookbinding practices within, on the one hand, the Transatlantic oceanic book trade, and, on the other, criollo recycling streams of conventional waste, where autochthonous media substrates such as bark paper played a significant role.

About the Scholar: Javiera Barrientos

Javiera Barrientos is a book historian and book binder interested in the intersections between material cultures, literary genres and gender, particularly but not restricted to the Global Early Modern period. She earned her BA in Universidad Católica de Chile, her MA in Universidad de Chile and is currently a doctoral candidate in Literatures in English at Rutgers University, working in the Rutgers Book Initiative. She has worked as a bibliographical investigator in Archivo Central Andrés Bello and the National Conservation and Restoration Center of Chile. She is the co-founder of the Center for the Studies of Pretty and Useless Things (CECLI), a Chilean-Mexican collective dedicated to interdisciplinary research about objects and material culture. She also works as a bookbinder and bookbinding instructor in her own private workshop, Notas de Arte.

BSA New Scholar: Sharmeen Mehri (SUNY Buffalo) ↑

Dastur Dr. Dhalla Collection: A Case Study on Zoroastrian Community Libraries

Dastur Dr. Dhalla Collection: A Case Study on Zoroastrian Community Libraries aims to historicize Zoroastrians, an ethno-religious minority in South Asia, particularly within print culture and their role in community libraries. Much has been written about Indian Zoroastrians and their role in printing presses, in forming Gujarati type-sets, and in preserving their community libraries in India. This talk adds to the story of Zoroastrian community libraries on the other side of the border in Karachi, Pakistan, which holds the Young Men’s Zoroastrian Association and part of the Dastur Dr. Dhalla collections in one of the largest Parsi settlements of Pakistan, the Dinshaw Avari Colony. Utilizing the Dr. Dastur Dhalla collection in the YMZA library as a case study, I argue that the role of Zoroastrian community libraries is a core instrument in deploying a unified image of the community and continues to promote a reformist vision of Zoroastrianism. This talk will detail specific items from the collection such Genealogical Trees of the Nine Families of the Athornan Section of Udwada (1925), the library’s accession, distribution, and readership history to demonstrate the cross-border interactions, further revealing the on-going education on Zoroastrianism between postcolonial nations in the subcontinent as well as the United States. In addition, the goal is to introduce the audience to Zoroastrians and Parsis, and their historical impact within the spheres of bibliography and public-facing engagement in their communities.

About the Scholar: Sharmeen Mehri

Sharmeen Mehri is Ph.D. candidate and an international student from Karachi, Pakistan. She holds a Master of Arts degree in English Literature, Language, and Theory from the City University of New York, Hunter College. Sharmeen was an Archival Creators fellow for the South Asian American Digital Archive in 2021-2022 for which she collected oral histories and created an online museum exhibit on migration stories of South Asian Zoroastrians to the United States entitled, Memories We Carry. For 2023-2025, Sharmeen will be a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.

Jacob Blanck New Scholar: Jessica Modi (Yale University) ↑

The Matter of Diasporic Record: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Print Culture & Poetics

In the June 1967 issue of Negro Digest/Black World, Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “Boy Breaking Glass” interrupts a review of Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. On the following page begins a debate between Wole Soyinka and Leopold Sénghor on Black diasporic identity during African decolonization. Acting as a hinge between the two, Brooks’ poem concatenates the imagined communities through which Negro Digest circulates. However, scholarship on the poem has lost this diasporic frame. It discusses the poem as contextless lyric or within the context of Brooks’ 1968 collection, In the Mecca, wherein it appears between two domestically focused poems. In my paper, I will examine how the poem’s original print context makes this poem tractable within the African diasporic and anti-colonial discourse from which Brooks’s work often is excluded. My paper asks: To what extent can this kind of reading revalue African American belonging within anti-colonial movements, especially for Black women like Brooks who were not able to travel as extensively as their male counterparts? Black-owned and operated printed media were foundational to the development of internationalist solidarities in the 1930s to the 1950s and burgeoning communication networks outside the mainstream, white press (Denning, 1996; Edwards, 2003; Goldsby, 2022; Horne, 2017; Nishikawa, 2015, 2019; Spires, 2019; Von Eschen, 1997). By analyzing Brooks’s poem “Boy Breaking Glass” in both its original periodical format and its codex revisions, its codex revisions to show that Brooks charted négritude as giving way to Third Worldism. Thus, this paper contests the pre-1967 characterization of Brooks’s poetry as hyper-local and instead recasts it as steeped in the anti-imperial discourse of African diasporic thought. I employ “scalar belonging” as a heuristic for understanding Brooks’s simultaneous entanglements with community organizations, national political agendas, and anti-colonial movements. Altogether, I will tell the story of how, in the midst of decolonization, nuclear escalation, and Jim Crow, Black poets like Brooks made formal experimentation and alternative print formats and integral to diasporic self-determination in the burgeoning world order.

About the Scholar: Jessica Modi

Jessica Modi is a PhD Candidate in English Literature and African American Studies. They are interested in 20th/21st-century African American and black diasporic literature; poetry and poetics; history of the book; Marxism; postcolonial studies and decolonial aesthetics; media studies; and creative writing.

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