News and Events

To submit items for the News column, please post to SHARP-L or contact the SHARP Webmaster. Consult our Calendar of Events, at right, to see a complete list of upcoming conferences. Calls for Papers includes conference presentations as well as journals.  Job postings and funding opportunities are also listed on that page.

Kerlan Award Winner 2012

Karen Nelson Hoyle, the recently retired University of Minnesota Children's Literature Collection Curator, has been named the 2012 Kerlan Award winner. For more than forty years of dedicated service, Hoyle has been an outstanding scholar, teacher and mentor to countless people who are interested in and passionate about children's literature and the people who create books for children. She has devoted her life to continuing the vision of the Kerlan Library and making it a reality.

The Kerlan Award is given in recognition of singular attainments in the creation of children's literature and in appreciation of the generous donation of unique resources to the Kerlan Collection, housed at the University of Minnesota. The award ceremony will be held on May 5th, 2012. Please refer to the Children’s Literature Research Collections at the University for more information: http://special.lib.umn.edu/clrc/ .

Registration information about the 2012 Kerlan Award Event can be found here:
https://events.umn.edu/Kerlan-Award-Luncheon-and-Ceremony-018230.htm

SHARPweb Expands!

As SHARP grows as a scholarly organization, we are establishing important links to other societies and to researchers all around the world. The recent member survey suggested that while SHARP-L is the most important contact with the group, many members were eager for still more means of communication, taking advantage of the latest technology. The human touch is important, too. Our liaisons represent us at conferences, make contacts and share information face-to-face and sometimes through the new social media. In order to keep abreast of this important activity, we have added a new section to our website. Under the "Discussion" menu item, we have created a new page, "Networking." Visitors to our site will be able to quickly locate our list of liaisons, note the kinds of discussion on book history topics available on blogs, and check the latest news and links from our liaisons. Both AHA and MLA have major conventions coming up in January 2012 and SHARP's liaisons have been busy preparing. Their links and news notes are found on the Networking page. More are sure to follow. Check the page for the latest information whenever you visit the site--it's sure to evolve to better meet our members' needs.

Lee McLaird
Director of Electronic Resources

NEH Summer Seminar Announced

Tudor Books and Readers: 1485-1603, an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers

John N. King of The Ohio State University and Mark Rankin of James Madison University will direct a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on the manufacture and dissemination of printed books and the nature of reading during the era of the Tudor monarchs (1485-1603). In particular, they plan to pose the governing question of whether the advent of printing was a necessary precondition for the emergence of new reading practices associated with the Renaissance and Reformation. Participants will consider ways in which readers responded to elements such as book layout, typography, illustration, and paratext (e.g., prefaces, glosses, and commentaries). Employing key methods of the history of the book and the history of reading, this investigation will consider how the physical nature of books affected ways in which readers understood and assimilated their intellectual contents. This program is geared to meet the needs of teacher-scholars interested in the literary, political, or cultural history of the English Renaissance and/or Reformation, the history of the book, the history of reading, art history, women’s studies, religious studies, bibliography, print culture, library science (including rare book librarians), mass communication, literacy studies, and more.

This seminar will meet from 18 June until 20 July 2012. During the first week of this program, we shall visit 1) Antwerp, Belgium, in order to draw on resources including the Plantin-Moretus Museum (the world’s only surviving Renaissance printing and publishing house) and 2) London, England, in order to attend a rare-book workshop at Senate House Library and consider treasures at the British Library. During four ensuing weeks at Oxford, participants will reside at St. Edmund Hall as they draw on the rare book and manuscript holdings of the Bodleian Library and other institutions.

Those eligible to apply include citizens of USA who are engaged in teaching at the college or university level, graduate students, and independent scholars who have received the terminal degree in their field (usually the Ph.D.). In addition, non-US citizens who have taught and lived in the USA for at least three years prior to March 2012 are eligible to apply. NEH will provide participants with a stipend of $3,900.

Full details and application information are available at http://www.jmu.edu/english/Tudor_Books_and_Readers. For further information, please contact Mark Rankin ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). The application deadline is March 1, 2012.

DeLong Prize Competition Opens

Submissions are now open for the 2012 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Book History Prize.

Submissions must be in the possession of all members of the jury by Wednesday 29 February, 2012. Please submit three copies of each entry, one to each member of the jury. General queries regarding the prize should be directed to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , SHARP Director for Publications and Awards.

See the website for a full description of eligible works. A printable announcement is also online.

Gabrielle Roy Prize Winner Announced

The Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2010 Gabrielle Roy Prize (English Section), which each year honours the best work of Canadian literary criticism published in English, has been awarded to Carole Gerson for Canadian Women in Print, 1750-1918, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. The book was chosen by a jury composed of Alison Calder (University of Manitoba), Laura Moss (University of British Columbia), and Cynthia Sugars (University of Ottawa) from among the twenty books submitted this year, for its outstanding contribution to scholarship on Canadian literature. Gerson’s study constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of women's participation in Canadian book history and the development of Canadian literature. Arguing the ongoing need for recognition of the significance of work done by women, Gerson blends a materialist sociological approach with literary and biographical history. By situating the women she studies within these multiple and overlapping contexts, Gerson furthers our understanding of Canadian social history and advances knowledge of Canadian publishing more generally. The result is a nuanced and probing history of print in Canada.

Carole Gerson is a longtime member of SHARP and was elected to the nominating committee at the 2011conference.

"From Text(s) to Book(s)"--An international and SHARP-sponsored conference

Call for Papers
21-23 June 2012
Deadline for proposals: 15 December 2011

I.D.E.A. (‘Théories et pratiques de l’Interdisciplinarité Dans les Etudes Anglophones’ / Interdisciplinarity in English Studies), the research group of the Nancy-Université English Department, will be hosting an international and SHARP-sponsored conference on the subject ‘From Text(s) to Book(s)’. This conference will provide a forum to discuss the ways in which texts are materialised for consumption by the reading public, both historically and in the contemporary context. Papers that adopt a historical approach to this question might discuss book production practices at specific periods or their evolution over time. Papers with a contemporary focus might deal with cases where the materialisation of texts does not necessarily involve production in the codex form, or discuss the impact that technological developments, like advances in digital printing and the emergence of devices such as Amazon’s Kindle Reader or Apple’s iPad, have had on the passage from text to ‘book’. Case studies of individual works and reflections upon fundamental theoretical questions relating to the making and materialisation of texts are equally welcome.

The full call for papers can be found on the web site that has been put in place for the event: http://idea-udl.org/from-texts-to-books/

Confirmed keynote speakers for the conference are Espen Aarseth (Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen), Daniel Ferrer (CNRS, ITEM, France), David Finkelstein (Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, UK) and Claire Parfait (Université Paris 13, France).

Proposals of no more than 300 words, for 25-minute presentations, should be sent to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and Monica Latham before 15 December 2011. Articles based on conference papers will be considered for publication in the Book Practices & Textual Itineraries series published by the Presses Universitaires de Nancy: http://idea-udl.org/book-practices-and-textual-itineraries/

Conference organisers:

Nathalie Collé-Bak, Monica Latham & David Ten Eyck
With the support of SHARP (the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing)

Nathalie Collé-Bak
Nancy-Université
Département d'Anglais
UFR Langues et Cultures Etrangères

Bureau A113
Tel (00 33) (0)3 54 50 50 30
Fax (00 33) (0)3 54 50 50 21

CLiK Conference Webcast!

SHARP will be hosting a live streaming webcasts from Click-on-Knowledge: web-based knowledge and contemporary scholarship (CliK), University of Copenhagen (KU) 11 - 13 May 2011. See the schedule for list of times and topics. Visit our Multimedia page for this feature.

SHARP Member Andrew Piper wins MLA Prize for a First Book

The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its seventeenth annual Prize for a First Book to Andrew Piper, of McGill University, for Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age, published by the University of Chicago Press.

The committee's citation for Piper's book reads:

Impressive for its international breadth, interdisciplinary method, and eloquent critical voice, Andrew Piper's Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age is a trailblazing study. Offering a fresh account of the expanding circuits of publishing and reading around the turn of the nineteenth century, Piper thinks through and beyond the history of the book to address the history of the bookish imagination and the origins of the bibliographic subject itself. In the course of unfolding a new narrative of the Romantic age, Piper has opened a new perspective on our investments as readers today and on our increasingly mediated relation to the medium of the book.

Andrew Piper is an assistant professor in the Department of German Studies and an associate member of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He received his BA in comparative literature from Princeton University and his PhD in Germanic languages and literature from Columbia University. He is the cofounder of the FQRSC-funded research group, Interacting with Print: Cultural Practices of Intermediality, 1700-1900, which explores how print shaped literary and social communities through its interactions with other media.

The MLA, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. PMLA, the flagship journal of the association, has published distinguished scholarly articles for over one hundred years. Approximately 9,500 members of the MLA and its allied and affiliate organizations attend the association's annual convention. The MLA is a constituent of the American Council of Learned Societies and the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures.

The complete Press Release from the MLA is available online.