Upcoming Lecture: 'Is There Paper in Our Future? Early American Perspectives on Contemporary Media Shift'

A talk given by Jonathan Senchyne, PhD
Cornell University

School of Library and Information Studies and

the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture

February 6, 2012 11.30-12.30

SLIS Commons (HCW 4207)

This talk reads reactions to the shifting contemporary landscape of paper and digital publication through 18th- and 19th-century American poems and narratives that track the rise of paper as a kind of social medium. Recovering how early Americans saw themselves and their communities archived within paper itself, Dr. Senchyne argues that what often seems like mere nostalgia for paper can be an index of important affective connections between readers and material texts.

Jonathan Senchyne received his PhD in English at Cornell University in December, 2011.  His dissertation is titled, "'Our Paper Allegories': Intimacy, Publicity, and Material Textuality in Colonial and Antebellum American Literature."  His article, “‘Bottles of ink, and reams of paper’: Clotel, Racialization, and the Material Culture of Print” will appear in Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice, edited by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, from the University of Pennsylvania Press in April 2012.