Rare Book School

About Rare Book School

Since 1972, the Book Arts Press and Rare Book School have offered more than 600 public lectures on a wide variety of bibliographical topics.

Publisher

Rare Book School Lectures

Category

education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

5 Aug 2015

Latest episode

23 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

449 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   23 Jul 2026

   Mike Kelly: Indigenous Agency and Intervention in the Bibliographical Record (2026 NEH-SHARP Lecture)

   Mike Kelly delivered the 2026 NEH-SHARP Living American History in Primary Documents Lecture, "Indigenous Agency & Intervention in the Bibliographical Record," at the University of Virginia on 22 July, 2026. About the Talk: This talk draws from the past thirteen years that Mike Kelly has spent building the Native American Literature Collection in the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College, as well as current work to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into library, archives, and museum practices. The history of the Indigenous people of North America engaging directly with printing technology extends from the first presses in seventeenth-century New England to the comics, games, and more produced by the Indigenous Imagination Workshop in the twenty-first century. Kelly will demonstrate how a deep knowledge of traditional bibliography coupled with an understanding of Indigenous history results in a rich and complex understanding of this aspect of book history. At the same time, there are many ways to incorporate Indigenous methodologies and perspectives into our curatorial practices, which Kelly and his colleagues have attempted to do at Amherst. About the Speaker: Mike Kelly has served as the Head of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections since 2009; prior to that time he was Curator of Books at the Fales Library & Special Collections at New York University. He received his Master’s in Library Science from the University of Texas at Austin where he spent two years as an intern at the Harry Ransom Center; he also holds an M.A. in English from the University of Virginia. In 2016, he was awarded the Reese Fellowship for American Bibliography and the History of the Book in the Americas by the Bibliographical Society of America for his work on the bibliography of Samson Occom, a member of the Mohegan tribe of Connecticut. He co-curated (with Carolyn Vega) the exhibition “I’m Nobody! Who Are You? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson” at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which ran from January through May 2017. In the summer of 2018, Mike co-taught the course H-150: A History of Native American Books & Indigenous Sovereignty in Amherst for Rare Book School and he just completed teaching the online RBS course G-90v: Indigenous Agency and Intervention in the Bibliographical Record.

2. 

   21 Jul 2026

   M. Stamm: Landscapes, Labor, and the Infrastructures of Printed Newspapers (2026 Karmiole Lecture)

   Michael Stamm delivered the 2026 Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Lecture on the History of the Book Trades, "Landscapes, Labor, and the Infrastructures of Printed Newspapers," on 8 July 2026. About the Talk: Printed newspapers have become endangered as digital distribution has transformed the news business and the ways that people access information. This talk returns to the decades in our previous century when the printed newspaper thrived as the center of the news cycle, and it highlights some of the hidden landscapes, labor, and infrastructures enabling that. Twentieth-century newspapers were not just outlets for news but were also the material products of industrial capitalism manufactured by business firms organized like those in other mass production industries. These firms drew upon natural raw materials and developed infrastructures of production and distribution gathering large and diverse human labor forces including lumberjacks, paper mill operators, and newsboys. We often think about printed texts as relationships between authors and readers, but this talk draws attention to some of the hidden materials, people, and infrastructures involved in producing and circulating printed newspapers. About the Speaker: Michael Stamm is Professor of History at Michigan State University. He received his B.A. in English from UC Berkeley in 1994 and his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 2006. He has been at MSU since 2008, and he has served as Chairperson of the History Department since 2022. He is a political, cultural, and environmental historian specializing in media and journalism history. His first book, Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), traced how American newspapers have responded to competition from “new media,” which in the decades after 1920 meant radio broadcasting. His most recent book is Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), which offers a history of the printed newspaper tracing its production from the forest to the reader. In 2019, the book received Canadian Business History Association’s Best Book Prize. He is currently completing a book entitled Communicating with Nature: Agriculture, Materiality, and the Industrial Information Age, which traces the use of farm crops in the manufacturing of paper and ink and in the circulation of public information.

3. 

   21 Jul 2026

   Matt Kirschenbaum: From text to .txt: Making Material Messes in a Sloppy World (2026 Malkin Lecture)

   Matthew Kirschenbaum delivered Rare Book School's 2026 Sol M. and Mary Ann O’Brian Malkin Endowed Lecture, "From text to .txt: Making Material Messes in a Sloppy World," on 6 July 2026. About the Talk: By the turn of the millennium, the word “text” had become a verb. Three-and-a-half years ago, ChatGPT was released into the wild, decisively severing the link between writing and human expression. In 2025, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year was “slop.” This talk will offer an attenuated archaeology of what someone we know once called the textual condition. And not to give away the game, but that condition is not good: today, text functions as something much more like a fossil fuel or other extractable resource than a medium for communication and expression. Nonetheless, the talk also asks how we can still make some good old fashioned material messes in a world of slop. Examples will be provided. Refreshments will be served. There may even be a book or two. About the Speaker: Matthew Kirschenbaum rejoined UVA in 2025 as Commonwealth Professor of Artificial Intelligence and English after 25 years at the University of Maryland, where he finished as a Distinguished University Professor. He considers himself a student of texts and textual technologies in all their social and material forms, and his scholarship and teaching have explored literary intersects with printing and bookmaking, archival science, media archaeology, digital humanities, and now artificial intelligence. He is the author of three books, most recently Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage from the University of Pennsylvania Press (2021). His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008) was the winner of multiple awards, including the MLA Prize for a First Book. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (2016) enjoyed widespread public media attention. Recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Critical Inquiry, and ELH; and he frequently writes for popular outlets, which have included the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Kirschenbaum is an active member of the Modern Language Association’s task force on AI in Research and Teaching, and a member of the teaching faculty at Rare Book School. He has been a Guggenheim and an NEH Fellow, and is a practicing letterpress printer. Current projects includes two books, the first on the political economy of text in the present moment and the second on the weaponization of AI in what some have called a full-blown epistemic crisis. You can find him on Bluesky at @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social.

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13 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 70 / 100

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85

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0

YouTube

86

Engagement

50

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