Book History Seminar
Republic of South Africa

12 March 2013
French Institute, Braamfontein
14.00-15.30

Lecturer: Adrien Delmas (IFAS/EHESS)
Towards a History of Philology from a Global Perspective in the Early Modern World

In 2013, the French Institute of South Africa (Ifas) and the Department of Information Science at the University of Pretoria will be co-organising a series of seminars on book history. At the crossroads of several disciplines (history, literature, palaeography, librarianship etc.), book history has become the spearhead of cultural history worldwide.

Far from wanting to structure a field characterised by diversity, the objective of the seminars is, first of all, to explore and list research avenues, whether at the level of concepts (materiality, scripts, genres etc.) or topics (non-Latin alphabets in Africa, reader communities, new information technologies etc.). Two main lines will be favoured in this regard: transnationality first, offering a better chance to grasp the circulation of the written word than the generally adopted national framework; the African dimension secondly, which is largely under-documented in the current literature, and yet which offers many perspectives, including very long-term ones.

The seminars, in which the Universities of Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria will participate, will take place once a month in turn at IFAS and UP. Two international conferences will complete the seminar programme for this semester.