This panel discussion will feature three short talks by eighteenth-century historiographer Marisa J. Fuentes (Rutgers), twentieth-century book historian, Kinohi Nishikawa (Princeton) and seventeenth-century media historian, Whitney Trettien (UPenn). Moderated by NYU’s own Lisa Gitelman, the panel will explore the book and its adjoined archival silences as lenses through which to examine contemporary power struggles, including the ongoing ICE raids, mass incarceration, impeachment proceedings, and persistent dispossession. 

Together, the panelists will consider what it means to study to ‘the book’ during eras marked by scientific, political, and cultural upheavals, examining how print media can psychologically shape mass perception; stand in for often incomplete and often replicated sources of authority; or become deliberately nested, much like the imposing layers of Matryoshka doll, within the systems shaped by Eurocentric and androcentric norms.

Taking up books as physical objects that are created, circulated, and consumed helps to illuminate the power structures that shape knowledge and control the flow of information. Significantly, this approach also highlights how these structures contribute to the injustices we continue to witness today. How can we approach a history of the book that is untethered to the tradition of racial, gender, and socioeconomic supremacy? What is book history in the hands of today’s experts, and how does it speak to present lived realities?  

Speakers:

• Marisa J. Fuentes (Rutgers), author or Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016)

• Kinohi Nishikawa (Princeton), author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (2018)

• Whitney Trettien (UPenn), author of Cut/Copy/ Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (2021)

• Moderated by Lisa Gitelman (NYU), Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014)

☞ Please RSVP here to ensure there are enough snacks and drinks for all!

☞ Questions? Contact Sara Penn at sarapenn@nyu.edu. 

In collaboration with Some Contemporary Poetries Initiative, we warmly invite all to a special Fall session: "James Joyce's Epistolary Poetry" with Jessica Marian on Tuesday October 21st, 5PM in the Event Space, 244 Greene St. RSVP through this form for a copy of the readings, and to help us ensure enough snacks for all!

Artificial Intelligence has exploded into public awareness over the last few years, debates have tended to focus on either cognition or risk. This symposium shifts the focus from these theoretical problems — might machine think? Might they then kill us? — to the mundane world of Really Existing AI we now live in. Questions of culture, equity, and contending with sprawling and often disjointed digital systems are the focus as we put the microscope over Large Language Models and more. 

Hosted by the Remarque Institute, co-sponsored by the Center for Data Science, the Material Texts Working Group (English), the department of Media, Culture, and Communication, Poetics and Theory, and the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness.