The workshop is organized by Professors Maura K. Lafferty (Classics) and Roy M. Liuzza (English). For this year’s workshop we invite presentations that focus on the reading, interpretation, and use of manuscripts. The relationship between a text and its readers is reciprocal – the text speaks to readers, readers in turn talk back to the text, and meaning emerges through this series of encounters between readers and texts and negotiations among different readers. Readers sometimes create new texts to answer the ones they read – literary practices such as commentary, quotation, or reference. But they also leave traces of their reading in material ways: physical wear and tear, annotations and corrections, interpolations and excisions, glosses and marginalia, the purposeful grouping or arrangement of texts in a codex or books in a library. How is such evidence recognized and understood? How is it presented to modern readers? What does it tell us about the history of the text? We welcome presentations on any aspect of this topic, broadly imagined.
The workshop is open to scholars and students at any rank and in any field who are engaged in textual editing, manuscript studies, or epigraphy. Individual 75-minute sessions will be devoted to each project; participants will be asked to introduce their text and its context, discuss their approach to working with their material, and exchange ideas and information with other participants. As in previous years, the workshop is intended to be more a class than a conference; participants are encouraged to share new discoveries and unfinished work, to discuss both their successes and frustrations, to offer both practical advice and theoretical insights, and to work together towards developing better professional skills for textual and codicological work. We particularly invite the presentation of works in progress, unusual manuscript problems, practical difficulties, and new or experimental models for studying or representing manuscript texts.
– The deadline for applications is October 15, 2011. Applicants are asked to submit a current CV and a two-page letter describing their project to Roy M. Liuzza, preferably via email to rliuzza@utk.edu, or by mail to the Department of English, University of Tennessee, 301 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996-0430. Presenters will receive a stipend of $500 for their participation. The workshop is also open at no cost to scholars and students who do not wish to present their own work but are interested in sharing a lively weekend of discussion and ideas about manuscript studies. Further details will be available later in the year; please contact Roy Liuzza for more information.
