Lise Jaillant

As Liaison Officer for SHARP (the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing), it is my role to organise our annual sessions at the Modern Language Association convention. The next MLA convention will take place in Toronto (7 to 10 January 2021). This time,  SHARP  is sponsoring three sessions: 1) A guaranteed session: "Towards sustainability for digital archives and projects" Book historians and other scholars rely on digitised and born-digital archives. How can we make digital archives and digital projects more sustainable? Environmental sustainability; longevity, permanence, availability, Open Access. 300-word abstracts + CV to Lise Jaillant. E-mail Address: l.jaillant [at] lboro.ac.uk Submission Deadline: March 1, 2020 2) A joint session with the Modernist Studies Association "Modernism, Copyright and Public Domains" Impact of early 20th-century works coming out of copyright; Archives now publicly open, includi...

I am delighted to announce the following programme of activities for Ray Siemens's visit in the UK, funded by a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship. Short bio : Ray is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, in English and Computer Science, and past Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing (2004-15); in 2019, he is also Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Loughborough U and Global Innovation Chair in Digital Humanities at U Newcastle (2019-22).  Ray Siemens is coming with several colleagues and team members from the University of Victoria. We look forward to welcoming them in Britain! First Leverhulme Lecture in London : "Impactful by Design: Thoughts Toward Building a Research Project for Diverse Audiences" Speaker: Ray Siemens When? Wednesday 2 October, 4pm to 5.30pm Where? Room LDN104, Lboro London campus Register HERE Masterclass and “surgery” in Loughborough : How to use and develop public tools and...

Interested in poetry and born-digital archives? Looking for an update on my Leadership Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council? See the project website HERE  for news and updates, including on the exhibition we are organising for the 50th anniversary of Carcanet Press (30 Sept. 2019 to March 2020).

Senate House Library holds little-known materials on modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Nancy Cunard and Djuna Barnes. Their experimental texts were published by small presses and little magazines, but also attracted the attention of larger commercial book publishers. To gain greater control over the publication process, Woolf, Stein, Cunard and others created their own presses and engaged closely with the physical materiality of books. To mark the release of the edited collection Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), this exhibition focuses on these fascinating modernist publishers that opened new markets for fiction and poetry. From a mass of little-seen materials in Senate House Special Collections, Leila Kassir and Lise Jaillant have selected books, periodicals, correspondence and ephemera relating to three themes: (1) Women and Publishing; (2) Race and Modernism; (3) Middlebrow and Celebrity. Am...

The next MLA convention will take place in Seattle (9–12 January 2020). As usual, SHARP is sponsoring two sessions: 1) A guaranteed session on Databases and Print Culture Studies Mass-digitized archives of newspapers and books have revolutionized print culture studies. Data-rich collections and their impact on knowledge production and methods. Including use of data science and artificial intelligence. 300-word abstract + 1-page CV. E-mail Address: l.jaillant [at] lboro.ac.uk Submission Deadline: Friday, March 1, 2019 2) A joint session with the International Spenser Society Spenser and the Digital Humanities New book history/ digital humanities projects on Edmund Spenser. Digitization and data-driven research/pedagogy. 300-word abstracts/ CV by 15 March 2019. Lise Jaillant (l.jaillant [at] lboro.ac.uk) and David Baker (davidbak [at] email.unc.edu) Submission Deadline: Friday, March 15, 2019

I have been awarded a major AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Leadership Fellowship to work on the poetry publisher Carcanet Press.  ***See the project blog HERE for news and updates*** A central objective of the project is to make Carcanet's archive more accessible - focusing particularly on the born-digital part of the collection. Here is a short description: Survival of the Weakest: Preserving and Analysing Born-Digital Records to Understand How Small Poetry Publishers Survive in the Global Marketplace Despite its importance in the literary landscape, Carcanet Press has attracted little scholarly attention - in part because the largest part of its archive is closed to researchers. This archive, which comprises born-digital as well as analogue records, is held at the John Rylands Library (Manchester). The project will preserve and make accessible internationally-significant archival materials held in the uncatalogued part of the paper collecti...

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has led to a privacy backlash and to calls for tighter regulation of Facebook and other Internet Giants. Social and computer scientists fear that legitimate researchers could be collateral damage. Yet, there has been no discussion on the plight of Humanities researchers confronted to “dark archives.” With the forthcoming introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (May 2018), it may be even more complicated to access data in the future. This DH@Lboro workshop will bring together academics, archivists and open data advocates to discuss the issues of privacy and access to data. We will focus primarily (but not exclusively) on cultural data and the case of the Humanities. The workshop will take place on 21 June 2018 at the School of Advanced Study in London. Keynote speaker: Olivier Thereaux , Open Data Institute For more information: l.jaillant [at] lboro.ac.uk To register:  https://www.sas.ac.uk/events/event...

The Modern Language Association Convention will take place in Chicago (3–6 January 2019). SHARP is sponsoring two sessions: (1) A guaranteed session on New Perspectives in Book History. New perspectives that are altering the way we do book history. Including global perspectives and digital humanities. 300-word abstract – CV by 1 March 2018; Lise Jaillant (l.jaillant@lboro.ac.uk). (2) A joint session with the William Morris Society: Publishing William Morris and his Circle Perspectives on publishing William Morris and his circle; Morris as publisher; illustrations, printing, and physical book format. Book history/digital humanities approaches welcome. 300-word abstract – CV by 1 March 2018; Lise Jaillant (l.jaillant@lboro.ac.uk) and Kelly Ann Fitzpatrick (kellyann@gatech.edu).

I have been awarded a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (£15,000) for my project “ After the Digital Revolution : Bringing together archivists and scholars to preserve born-digital records and produce new knowledge.” The project will run for one year, from 31 March 2017. Abstract The digital revolution has profoundly affected the ways we encounter archival documents. Yet, archivists and literary scholars rarely "sit at the same table," and this lack of dialogue has an impact on issues of access, particularly in the case of born-digital materials. We will run two workshops to find solutions to this overall problem of access to emails and other born-digital records in literary and publishers’ archives. This will be achieved through three specific objectives. First, we will look at the preservation of collections through data recovery (including the recovery of emails).  Second, we will discuss new ways to make collections findable and usable.  ...

The next MLA convention will be in New York City (4-7 January 2018). Here are the two call for papers for SHARP sessions. Please send us an abstract or share with anyone with might be interested. 1. SHARP guaranteed session Title of session: The Digital Future of Literary Archives Submission requirements: Abstracts, 300 words Deadline for submissions: 10 March 2017 Description: What does the future of literary archives look like? This roundtable will address issues of preservation, discoverability and accessibility following the digital revolution. Contact person information: Lise Jaillant (l.jaillant [at] lboro.ac.uk) 2. Joint session with the Edith Wharton Society   Title of the session : Edith Wharton, Book History and Digital Humanities Submission requirements : Abstract, 300 words Deadline for submissions : 10 March 2017 Description : New approaches in book history and digital humanities to shed light on Edith Wharton...

The next MLA conference will be in Philadelphia (5–8 January 2017). Here are the two call for papers for SHARP sessions. Please send us an abstract or share with anyone who might be interested. 1. SHARP guaranteed session Radical Book History - People, Archives, Methods How do we write radical book history? "Radical" book trade figures, the use of "radical" methodologies or archives. All periods and places. 250-word abstracts by 15 March 2016; Lise Jaillant (l.jaillant@gmail.com). 2. CSE-SHARP Collaborative Session Editions/Author/Readers/Publishers Editor-author relations; editors imagining or constructing readerships; social, interactive, crowd-sourced, translated/bilingual editions; editorial epistemologies, canons, information overload; editions in promotion/tenure; paratext, apparatus, digital/print affordances. 250-word abstracts by 11 March 2016; Anne Coldiron (acoldiron@fsu.edu).

Time to book your tickets to Austin, Texas for the next MLA conference ! SHARP is organizing a panel on "Secret Archives: Privacy, Control, and Access", scheduled to take place at 1:45pm on 9 January 2016. We are also co-sponsoring a reception at the Harry Ransom Center . See invitation copied below. We look forward to seeing you there! Thursday, January 7th, 7 P.M.-9 P.M. at the Harry Ransom Center, 21st and Guadalupe Streets, The University of Texas at Austin campus Please join the Harry Ransom Center and the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin for a reception, co-sponsored by SHARP. Visit the exhibition Shakespeare in Print and Performance and speak with Ransom Center staff and English Department faculty. Wine and light hors d’oeuvres will be served.  Please RSVP by December 15 to rsvp[at]hrc.utexas.edu, attendance is limited to the first 500 attendees.

I am organising a panel at the next MSA conference in Boston . Speakers will include Gail McDonald, Bethany Hicok and myself. Here is a short description: Revolutionizing Academia: Modernism, Pedagogy and the Ivory Tower The relationship between modernism and pedagogy has long been a central concern of New Modernist Studies. As MSA members, we are well aware of the effect of pedagogy on “modernism” and its canon. At the 2013 conference in Brighton, the seminar led by Peter Howarth also invited us to think of modernism as a kind of pedagogy. The experience of teaching and having works taught profoundly affected the imagination of modernist writers – including, of course, Ezra Pound. This panel will further the discussion by focusing on academia, an institution that many modernists regarded as hopelessly traditional and isolated from real life. “By the time their formal educations were complete, Pound and Eliot dreaded the deadening lives academia seemed to hold out of them” – as...

I am happy to announce that my exhibition on Octave Uzanne will be shown at Senate House, London to accompany the conference Aestheticism and Decadence in the Age of Modernism: 1895 to 1945 (Friday 17 and Saturday 18 April 2015). Octave Uzanne was a French bibliophile, writer and publisher whose work shows that Aestheticism and Decadence were anchored in the modern age. Born in 1851, Uzanne abandoned his studies in law when he came into an heritage at the age of 21. He became friends with a group of bibliophiles, who encouraged his interest in eighteenth-century libertine works by neglected writers . As Willa Silverman puts it, "Uzanne's devotion to the France of Louis XIV and Louis XV would also lead him forward, as a proponent of the neo-Rococo aesthetic and decorative arts that at the turn of the century inspired Art Nouveau." This mix of modernism and anachronism was shared by the Goncourt brothers, whom Uzanne particularly admired. Uzanne was also in...

Here are the calls for papers for the two panels sponsored by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) at MLA 2016 - up and available on the MLA's CFP site . 1. SHARP affiliate-organization panel Secret Archives: Privacy, Control and Access “Archive stories” about the difficulties to access certain collections, and what these stories tell us about power and control. 250-word abstracts by 15 March 2015. Lise Jaillant ( L.Jaillant@uea.ac.uk ) Note: this is a guaranteed session. 2. Joint panel, co-sponsored with the Faulkner Society Faulkner in the Digital Age Roundtable: New book history/ digital humanities projects on Faulkner; Use of digital resources to teach Faulkner's work. 250-word abstracts by 15 March 2015. Lise Jaillant ( L.Jaillant@uea.ac.uk ) or Deborah Clarke ( Deborah.Clarke@asu.edu ) The MLA convention will take place in Austin, Texas (7-10 January 2016).

I will be at the Modern Language Association convention in Vancouver in January. I look forward to discussing my new role as SHARP liaison to the MLA. In the following years, I will be in charge of organizing SHARP’s guaranteed and joint sessions, as well as the social events at the MLA. On Thursday 8 January, I will be chairing this session: Into the Digital Future: Amazon, Apple, and Google Make Book History 1. "The Book Trade from the Perspective of Its Businesses: Recent Developments," Daniel Raff, Univ. of Pennsylvania 2. "Amazon et Alia: Self-Publishing and the New Intermediaries," Timothy Laquintano, Lafayette Coll. 3. "Cocreating Fictional Worlds Online: Hugh Howey and Kindle Publishing," Carrie Sickmann Han, Indiana Univ., Bloomington Responding: Greg Barnhisel, Duquesne Univ. For abstracts, visit www.sharpweb.org/ I also look forward to seeing friends and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser Uni...

This Autumn , I am starting a new position at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. It is a very good fit for my project Professing Creative Writing: A History of Writers and Scholars in Anglophone Universities . I am very keen to immerse myself in the life of the prestigious Creative Writing programme! I see Professing Creative Writing as a logical extension of my work on twentieth-century publishing houses. My focus has always been on literary institutions, and all my research has been based on archival work. For the new project, I plan to explore under-studied archives at the University of Iowa, Indiana University and many others. I also want to conduct oral history interviews with key figures associated with creative writing programmes. I continue to be keenly interested in publishing houses, particularly those that made modernist literature available to a wide audience: (1) My monograph on the Modern Library series is going to be published in the coming months by Pick...

This Summer , I am going to Austin, Texas to do archival work at the Harry Ransom Center . I have been awarded a two-month fellowship, jointly supported by the Alfred A. and Blanche W. Knopf Fellowship and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. If everything goes well, I will come back with lots of interesting materials on Albatross and Tauchnitz for my new monograph Cheap Modernism: European Publisher's Series and the Avant-Garde .

The program for the next Modern Language Association conference in Chicago is now available. The SHARP-sponsored roundtable on Book History & Digital Humanities that I am organizing will take place on Sunday 12 January at 10.15am (Lincolnshire, Chicago Marriott). I hope to see lots of fellow book historians/ digital humanists there!

I am very pleased to go to Brighton in late August to participate in a seminar on Modernism as Pedagogy at the Modernist Studies Association conference. Description: As MSA members, we are all aware of the effect of pedagogy on modernism (canons, New Modernist Studies). But can we see modernism itself as a kind of pedagogy? How did the experience of teaching / having works taught affect modernists’ imaginations? Are works interventions in the feedback loops between reputation and the academy (performance works which resist close reading, for instance)? Conversely, can we think about modernist pedagogies; institutions or ideas which embed modernist aesthetics into teaching, intentionally or not (Montessori, progressive education, Bauhaus, the AntiUniversity)? This seminar aims to stimulate thought and further collaboration, with eventual published results. List of participants: Rebecca Beasley (University of Oxford) Angus Brown (University of Oxford) Richard Cole (Univ...