Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

Back to News

Books and Print between Cultures, 1500-1900, Amherst College

Books and Print between Cultures investigates the role that books (printed books and manuscripts, including maps, scrolls, etc.), prints, and their associated technologies played in mediating and instantiating cultural difference in the early modern period. It approaches these materials as intermediary (“between”), but also as “flows,” a term borrowed from social-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, to underscore the fluid and yet chaotic manner in which books and prints proliferated and were circulated, reconfigured, and reconstituted around the globe. Rather than considering books and prints through a strictly semiotic or iconographic lens—i.e., as assemblages of signs and symbols, texts and images—this symposium foregrounds the materiality of these objects qua objects. It asks, for example, in what ways the formal features and physical components of books shaped their reception abroad; how artisans, collectors, merchants, priests, and litterateurs made sense of alien alphabets, inks, type, and handwriting, among other book and print technologies; with what other media—including textiles, sculpture, architecture, and drawing—books, prints, and their makers were in conversation; and how book- and print-making, -collecting, and -viewing practices translated across space, from one locale to another. By framing the history of books and print as meandering and material, this interdisciplinary symposium aims to contribute new dialogues to the study of the global early modern.
[ssba]

Leave a Reply