This image is from a faculty seminar that took place on campus over June 4-6, 2012, entitled “Teaching with Books and Other Text-Technologies: Book History, the Book Arts, and Book Studies in the Wellesley Curriculum.” It shows Wellesley professors learning to make woodcut blocks for printmaking in the Book Arts Lab in Clapp Library.
The seminar was led by Curator of Special Collections Ruth Rogers, Book Arts Program Director Katherine Ruffin, and English Department Assistant Professor Sarah Wall-Randell. Part of the new Book Studies Initiative, it was made possible by a generous grant from the Friends of the Wellesley College Library’s “Innovations in Reading and Scholarship” fund.
Here’s a description of the seminar:
At our current moment in history, when texts everywhere are going digital, studying the history and future of the texts we read, and the varied media that have transmitted and will transmit them, has never been more important. The materiality of textual media, whether scroll or codex, page or pixel, can never be separated wholly from texts’ content: meaning is produced in their interaction. This seminar gathered faculty from all disciplines and ranks, both those who already had research and teaching interests in book studies, from ancient to postmodern, and/or in the “digital humanities,” and those who wanted to learn more about using Wellesley’s superb collections of rare books and artists’ books and its outstanding Book Arts Lab, to share research presentations on the role of books in their scholarship and to discuss the present and future of book studies at Wellesley.
Pictured in the image are (left to right): Raymond Starr (Theodora Stone Sutton Professor of Classical Studies), Katherine Ruffin (standing, Book Arts Program Director), James Kodera (Professor of Religion), Alison McIntyre (Virginia Onderdonk Professor of Philosophy), Jacqueline Musacchio (Professor of Art History), Helene Bilis (Assistant Professor of French), Ian Graham (College Archivist), Katherine Grandjean (Assistant Professor of History), and David Teng Olsen (standing, Assistant Professor of Studio Art), who taught the printmaking lesson. Other participants in the seminar who are not pictured are: Alison Hickey (Associate Professor of English), Andrea Levitt (Clapp Professor of French), Eugene Marshall (Assistant Professor of Philosophy), and Ruth Rogers (Curator of Special Collections).
Sarah Wall-Randell, Assistant Professor, English Department
Photo credit: Ruth Rogers, Curator of Special Collections