Skip to Content

Search: {{$root.lsaSearchQuery.q}}, Page {{$root.page}}

EIHS Research Workshop: Hidden Choices and Silent Labor: Making Digital Manuscripts and Archives

Marina Rustow (Princeton University) + Bridget Whearty (Binghamton University)
Friday, April 14, 2023
10:00 AM-12:00 PM
1014 Tisch Hall Map
RSVP for access to pre-circulated papers (available April 1): https://forms.gle/yuo7BgkukcrQvYta6

This workshop initiates a conversation across geographies and temporalities around the concealed labor of scribes, librarians, bureaucrats, and scholars who make codices and curate archives to think about process and form. To focus on the labor involved in textual creations as we collect, select, copy, and create digital books and archives, we have invited two scholars, Marina Rustow (Princeton University) and Bridget Whearty (Binghamton University), to present their work on the hidden hands and invisible choices that go into the long durée of producing books and archives.
Presenters: 

Marina Rustow is a social historian of the medieval Middle East who works on the Cairo Geniza, a cache of roughly 400,000 folio pages and fragments preserved in an Egyptian synagogue. Her The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cario Synagogue draws on the Princeton Geniza Project to think about the making of archives and codices.

Bridget Whearty specializes in medieval English literature, digitization, and medieval texts. Her Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor highlights the hidden and erased labor behind digitalizing medieval manuscripts to explore modern labor and the long history of book production.

Discussants:

Catherine Brown (Associate Professor, Arts and Ideas in the Humanities, University of Michigan)

Helmut Puff (Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Collegiate Professor of History and Germanic Languages, University of Michigan)
Building: Tisch Hall
Event Type: Workshop / Seminar
Tags: Books, History, Middle East Studies
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS), Department of History

The Thursday Series is the core of the institute's scholarly program, hosting distinguished guests who examine methodological, analytical, and theoretical issues in the field of history. 

The Friday Series consists mostly of panel-style workshops highlighting U-M graduate students. On occasion, events may include lectures, seminars, or other programs presented by visiting scholars.

The insitute also hosts other historical programming, including lectures, film screenings, author appearances, and similar events aimed at a broader public audience.