Tuesday, February 4, 2025

4-5pm

FND 120

Speaker: Barbara Williams Ellertson

Barbara Williams Ellertson started her second career as an independent scholar in 2014 with the founding of the BASIRA Project: a database collection of “Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art.” During her first career in academic publishing, she designed and produced hundreds of books for university presses, foundations, institutions, and individuals. Experience from managing a small business during decades of technical transitions continues to inform her research work on the cultural role of books during the late medieval and early modern periods. Her studio, BW&A Books, now owned by former employees, continues to produce dozens of books annually.

The BASIRA Project, affiliated with the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, collects artists’ portrayals of books in figurative art between 1300 and 1600 CE. Its extensively expanded schema and public access portal was launched in November 2023. BASIRA has been designed to support interchanges between art historians and book historians, as well as furthering studies in intellectual history, the history of religion, cultural history, material culture, and more.

In 2015, the National Coalition of Independent Scholars awarded Ellertson and Janet Seiz the Eisenstein Prize for best paper: “The Painted Page” was published in The Independent Scholar (Volume 1, Dec 2015). Since then, Barbara has conducted extensive independent research; she has completed three courses at Rare Book School (London and Princeton), as well as the Ligatus Summer School in Barcelona. She conducted a workshop at the Renaissance Society of America’s 2024 meeting in Chicago, and has given two papers at the International Conference of Medieval Studies.