Lecture Library of Congress: November 6

Israeli Comics: Past and Present
A illustrated lecture by Ofer Berenstein,
a graduate student at Bar-Ilan University in Israel
Cover art for The magnificent adventures of Dugi Libretzem, #2 by Hagai Giler
Thursday, November 6, 2008, at 1:00 P.M.
Montpelier Room, James Madison Building, 6th Floor
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Sponsored by the Prints and Photographs Division, Serial and Government Publications Division
and the Hebraic Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division
Request ADA Accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 TTY or ADA@loc.gov
For further information, call Sara W. Duke at (202) 707-3630

Lecture at Library of Congress: Debra Band on The Song of Songs

The Hebraic Section
African and Middle Eastern Division
The Library of Congress
Presents
An Illustrated Lecture
By
Debra Band
“The Song of Songs:
The Honeybee in
The Garden”
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
12:00 – 1:00 PM
African and Middle Eastern Division Reading Room
220 Thomas Jefferson Building
101 Independence Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20540
Free and Open to the Public
For information: Peggy Pearlstein
(202) 707-3779 or ppea@loc.gov
Request ASL and ADA accommodation 5 days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ada@loc.gov

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Postscripts

Inscriptions: A Special Issue of Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds
Special Issue editors:
Jeremy Stolow (Communication Studies, Concordia University, Canada)
Lisa Gitelman (History of Science, Harvard University)
Call for Papers
The title of this special journal issue, “Inscriptions,” is meant to draw attention to a muchneglected
topic in the study of sacred texts: their materiality. Our goal is to challenge a longstanding
‘discursive’ bias among scholars of literature and belief, whereby it is often assumed that the study of
texts is sufficiently exhausted through an examination of the authorial intentions and the interpretive
possibilities of linguistic utterances, with recourse to the well-honed tools of philology, hermeneutics,
psychoanalysis, narratology, or deconstructivist reading strategies. While recognizing the importance of
such work, we wish to approach texts by focussing instead on their physical properties, as well as the
dynamic interactions of devices, techniques, and habits that lie beneath and within a given text, helping to
define the conditions for its perceptual apprehension and bodily engagement.
For this special issue of Postscripts, we seek contributions that elaborate and extend our proposed
consideration of the materiality of sacred texts broadly considered, attending to such things as their
layout, their material substrate (leather, paper, computer screens, etc), or the relationships between sacred
texts and their complementary technologies of transportation, storage, indexing, artificial illumination, or
waste management. What are the connections between materiality and belief? How have new media
helped to reveal or to confound sacred matter? Are there historically and culturally specific pathways
from text to relic? While we wish to keep this call for papers as open as possible, we are especially
interested in papers that offer historical, ethnographic, archaeological, and/or material cultural analyses of
particular texts and their material environments.
Submission instructions:
Please send a short proposal (a title plus an abstract of circa 200 words), and a brief bio-note
(including your contact details) to jeremy.stolow@concordia.ca. All submissions received by 1 January
2009 are assured full consideration.
About the Journal:
Postscripts is a new, fully refereed journal devoted to the academic study of scripture around the globe.
The study of sacred texts has historically been a highly technical, specialized and elite practice, held in
preserve by religious authorities and professional scholars. As important as this technical and specialized
work is, it represents only a small proportion of the rich panoply of engagements with texts that are
foundational in the lives of individuals and communities around the world -- texts that travel under the
name of 'scripture' or 'sacred' text. Postscripts takes seriously a broad array of historical and
contemporary engagements with such texts and aims to open up the discussion of sacred texts by crossing
traditional boundaries, bringing different disciplinary tools to the process of analysis, and opening up a
sustained dialogue between and among scholars and others who are interested in religion, textuality,
media and mediation and the contemporary world.
For more information, visit Postscripts at: http://www.equinoxjournals.com/ojs/index.php/post/index 􀀁

Call for Papers: "Authority and the Book in Medieval Culture"

>DEADLINE: 1 DEC.
>
>CALL FOR PAPERS
>
>The 26th Annual New England Medieval Studies
>Consortium Graduate Student Conference
>
>Yale University
>April 4, 2009.
>
>Theme: "Authority and the Book in Medieval Culture."
>
>Abstracts from graduate students are now being
>accepted for the 26th Annual New England
>Medieval Studies Consortium Graduate Student
>Conference, the theme of which will be "Authority and
>the Book in Medieval Culture."
>
>The organizers hope that this broad heading will
>elicit proposals for papers from all disciplines of
>Medieval Studies.
>
>Of especial interest are papers dealing with
>palaeography and manuscript studies; hagiography;
>literary studies; art history; history and
>historiography; gender studies; religious studies;
>musicology and medieval liturgical studies; as well as
>biblical exegesis and the relationship between Latin
>and various medieval vernaculars. Further, we look
>forward to receiving proposals that take more
>theoretical approaches to ideas of authority in the
>medieval period. We also hope to have one panel
>devoted to papers that explore different aspect of the
>history of modern Medieval Studies.
>
>Papers are to be no more than twenty minutes in length
>and read in English. Abstracts of no more than 250
>words should be sent by e-mail to
>
>Andrew.Kraebel@Yale.edu or
>SamanthaLily.Katz@Yale.edu.
>
>A hardcopy may be mailed to:
>Andrew Kraebel
>Department of English
>Yale University
>P.O. Box 208302
>New Haven, CT 06520-8302
>
>The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2008.
>
>Graduate students whose abstracts are selected for the
>conference will have the opportunity to submit their
>paper in its entirety for consideration for the Alison
>Goddard Elliott Award.
>
>The conference will also feature a plenary speaker, to
>be announced at a later date.
>

Perugia Geniza exhibit

More from the Italian Geniza here: http://documentiebraici.unipg.it/indexENG.php

Paul Saenger, Rosenbach Lectures

surely relevant to the Jewish book:


The 2008 Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography

Paul Saenger, The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois

The Latin Bible as Codex

April 14: "Christian Versification"
April 15: "The Birth of Modern Chapters"
April 17: "The Printed Codex"

http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/lectures/rosenbachs.html

The distinguished scholar of medieval reading practices Paul Saenger
presents three lectures on the development of the medieval and early
printed Bible. Co-editor of the 1999 *The Bible as Book: The First
Printed Editions*, Saenger has also published *Space Between Words:
The Origins of Silent Reading* (1997) and the *Catalogue of the Pre-1500
Western Manuscript Books at the Newberry Library* (1989).

These lectures, free and open to the public, will start at 5:30 PM in
the Rosenwald Gallery, located on the 6th floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich
Library, 3420 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA. Entrance to the Library
is from Locust Walk (just north of the statue of the broken button).

Printing the Talmud exhibition: Yeshiva University

This exhibition sponsored by Yeshiva University has an impressive website:

http://printingthetalmud.org/