STS 2025 Textual Remediations
University of Pennsylvania – May 28-30
Tentative Program
WEDNESDAY, MAY 28
8:30 – 9:00 AM (Kislak, 6th floor of Van Pelt Library)
Registration and check in
9:00 – 9:15 AM (Pavilion)
Welcome
9:15 – 10:45 AM
Panel 1A (Pavilion): Strategies for Remediation in Fashion, Editing, and Ancient Inscriptions
Moderator: Miller Prosser – University of Chicago
- Alice Mandell – Johns Hopkins University. “Tomb Inscriptions in Ancient Judea”
- Chris Cannon – Johns Hopkins University. “-e”
- Colbey Emmerson Reid – Columbia College, Chicago. “More Fashionable Remediations, Please: On Clérambault, Dali Nankeen, and Colina Strada Face Masks”
Panel 1B (Room 625): Pushing Mediums to Visualize the Unseen
Moderator: Stephanie Browner – The New School
- Cole Morgan – University of California, Irvine. “Now and Then: Re-envisioning Photography’s Horizon”
- Ron McColl – West Chester University. “Is There a Text in This Grass?” Toward a new Reading of the Herbarium”
- Sarah Pobuda – Duquesne University. “Reconsidering Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium”
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Panel 2A (Pavilion): Latin American Archival Remediations: Rethinking Recovery and Representation
Moderator: Andy Reynolds – Texas Tech University
- Isabella Vergara – Princeton University. “Veronica Gerber Bicecci’s Los folders rosas and the Afterlives of Archival Absence”
- Andrew Reynolds – Texas Tech University. “Print, Nation, and Martyrdom: Precarity in the Panamanian Archive”
- Juan Ramos – College of the Holy Cross. “Modernista Remediation, Max Grillo, and Revista Gris”
- Laura Catelli – Universidad Nacional de Rosario/CONICET, Argentina. “On visual and textual representations of Indigenous materialities in La civilización Chacosantiagueña y sus correlaciones con las del Viejo y Nuevo Mundo (Emilio and Duncan Wagner, 1934), symbolic violence, and the question of remediation”
Panel 2B (Room 625): Recoveries of Disregarded Texts
Moderator: Alice Mandell – Johns Hopkins University
- Annika Bruce – Marshall University. “Remediating Radical Appalachian Histories through Buffalo Chips”
- Onur Ayaz – CUNY. “‘their own need of a special kind of poetry’: The Shaping of Black American Poetics”
12:30 – 1:30 PM
Lunch break
1:30 – 3:00 PM
Panel 3A (Pavilion): The Italian Job 2025: A Roundtable Discussion on Textual Remediation
Moderator: Wayne Storey
Participants:
Beatrice Arduini (University of Washington)
Marco Aresu (University of Pennsylvania)
Eva Del Soldato (University of Pennsylvania)
Wayne Storey
Response from the author of The Italian Job, Michelangelo Zaccarello (Università di Pisa)
Panel 3B (Room 625): Remediation of Invisibilized Connections
Moderator: Gabrielle Dean – Johns Hopkins University
- Damien Keane – SUNY Buffalo. “Between Literary Broadcasts and Radio Archives: Bibliography and ‘Portrait of James Joyce'”
- Cecelia Ramsey – Princeton University. “The Frenchest Font? On Civilité, Sans Serif, and Typographic Nationalism”
- Ricardo Vázquez Diaz – Salisbury University. “Remediation and Playlisting: Severo Sarduy’s Transatlantic Soundscapes”
3:15 – 4:45 PM (Pavilion)
Plenary Roundtable – What Do You Teach When You Teach the History of the Book? Register to stream online: https://libcal.library.upenn.edu/calendar/kislak/stsplenary1
Chairs and Moderators:
Gabrielle Dean (Johns Hopkins University)
Chris Cannon (Johns Hopkins University)
Participants:
Marissa O Nicosia (Penn State University)
Matteo Pangallo (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Michael F. Suarez (University of Virginia)
Melissa Tedone (University of Delaware)
Geoffrey Turnovsky (University of Washington)
5:00 – 5:30 PM (Lea Library)
Pop-up exhibit before keynote
5:30 – 6:45 PM (Pavilion)
Keynote: Bridget Whearty – SUNY Binghamton
“Lessons from the ‘Bi-Sexed Girl’ of BNF 10318”
Register to stream online: https://libcal.library.upenn.edu/calendar/kislak/stskeynote1
Abstract:
“In puellam hermaphroditam” (which I translate as “About the Bi-Sexed Girl”) is a seven-line poem, composed in North Africa in the early sixth century. It is preserved in one manuscript, made in Italy in the early ninth century. In the seventeenth century, the French philologist Claude Saumaise and others in his circle became fascinated by the entire verse collection, filling the pages of the then-700 year old manuscript with their suggestions, explanations, and proposed “corrections.” The “Bi-Sexed Girl” was first printed in Amsterdam in the mid-eighteenth century. In that first edition and in all subsequent editions—as well as all translations and scholarship growing from them—the poem’s first line is given as “Monstrum feminei bimembre sexus” [variously translated as “two-membered monster of the female sex,” “double-organed monsterwoman,” and “strange mixture of the female gender”]. This opening line has been taken as key evidence of medieval condemnations of lesbian sex, bisexual women, and/or intersex people. There’s just one problem. “Monstrum” is not what the manuscript says.
This talk traces the braided fate of “About the Bi-Sexed Girl” across the centuries, illuminating the twining threads of changing editorial “best practices”; debates about the rights of LGBTQIA+ people to exist free from persecution; and branching media technologies: from manuscripts, to print editions, photographic facsimiles, microfilm, and digitization. Ultimately, I use these newly—and importantly, now digitally—accessible remediations of this short poem to reflect on issues of access, political power, and positionality in queer and trans textual editing.
6:45 – 7:30 PM
Opening reception
THURSDAY, MAY 29
8:30 – 9:00 AM
Registration and check in
9:00 – 10:30 AM
Panel 4A (Pavilion): Remediations of Enduring Artifacts
Moderator: Colbey Reid – Columbia College Chicago
- Emily Brooks – University of Pennsylvania. “Treasuring Pop Bookishness: Remediating Ornamental Codex Culture in Contemporary Fandoms”
- Zihan Feng – Washington University in St. Louis. “From “Climbing Girds” to “Doing with Words”: Computer Writing and the Disintegration of Knowledge Production in the 1990s Chinese Literature”
Panel 4B (Room 625): Relocations of Latin American Literature and Criticism
Moderator: Daniel Balderston – University of Pittsburgh
- Daniel Balderston – The University of Pittsburgh. “Stages of Writing Toward Borges’s Evaristo Carriego (1930)”
- María Laura Bocaz – University of Mary Washington. “Cracking the Code of Notebook 51”
- Martín Gaspar – Bryn Mawr College. “The Monegal Papers at Bryn Mawr College”
- Norah Walsh – University of Mary Washington. “Deciding gender: A comparative analysis of the English translation and revision of El lugar sin límites by José Donoso”
- Leah Leone Anderson – The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “‘María de la paz’: Contextualizing a Tribute to María Rosa Oliver”
10:45 AM – 12:15 PM
Panel 5A (Pavilion): Acts of Transmission
Moderator: Yung-Hsing Wu – University of Louisiana at Lafayette
- Jeffery Glover – Loyola University Chicago. “Remediating Treaties in the Pacific World”
- Sarah Walton – Marshall University. “Disrupting Digital Maps in John Murray’s Handbook for Travelers to the Continent (1836-c.1870s)”
Panel 5B (Room 625): Roundtable: From Silence to Resonance: Quechua Voices, Textual Remediation, and the Memory of Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict
Moderator: Leonardo Torres Llerena – University College London
Participants:
- Leonardo Torres Llerena (University College London)
- Renzo S. Aroni Sulca (New York University)
- Serafín M. Coronel-Molina (Indiana University Bloomington)
- Jesús Rivera Guzmán (University of Pennsylvania)
12:15 – 1:30 PM
Lunch break – hosted lunch for graduate student attendees in Kislak
12:15 – 3:00 PM
Pop-up labs (Fisher Fine Arts Library)
Hands-on demonstrations in printmaking and textual remediation at the Common Press and Materials Library, both in the basement of Fisher Fine Arts Library (follow the signs for Common Press)
Registration link (not necessary to attend but helpful to the organizers): https://libcal.library.upenn.edu/event/14196766
2:00 – 3:00 PM (Pavilion)
Keynote: Amanda Gailey – University of Nebraska-Lincoln
“The Woman Who Wrote her Way out of a Tomb: Forgotten Novels of the Nineteenth-Century U.S. Asylum System”
Register to stream online: https://libcal.library.upenn.edu/calendar/kislak/stskeynote2
Abstract:
Almost a century before sociologist Erving Goffman described “total institutions”— establishments where a population of inmates are subjected to strict regimens and discipline that nearly inevitably result in predictable patterns of abuse, neglect, and survival—an American children’s author, Martha Eugenia Berry, similarly theorized the U.S. asylum system, after she was forcibly confined to one for years on the directive of a single physician. Her two novels about asylums, part of her long effort to abolish the asylum system, have been overlooked by scholarship, but provide insight into the tenacity of institutional power, the limits of reform, and the rise of both psychiatry and the concept of privacy in the United States.
3:15 – 4:45 PM
Panel 6A (Pavilion): Remediating Revision: Digital Thoreau, Dickinson, and Moore
Moderator: Marta Werner – Loyola University Chicago
- Paul Schacht – SUNY Geneseo. “Remediating Textual Fluidity: The Case of Walden”
- Marta Werner – Loyola University Chicago. “And Firmaments Row”: From Archive to Data Firmament in the making of Dickinson’s Birds”
- Cristanne Miller – SUNY Buffalo. “‘Playing w fire is ^a^ great sport deal of fun’: Transcribing Unpublished Work as Re-vision/Re-mediation”
Panel 6B (Room 625): Textual Remediations of African American Novelists: Alice Walker and Charles Chesnutt
Moderator: John Young – Marshall University
- Ken Price – University of Nebraska, Lincoln. “Houghton Mifflin Readers’ Reports and the Shape of Charles Chesnutt’s Literary Career”
- Stephanie Browner – The New School. “Recuperation, Remediation, and Reparations: Reflections on Completing a Scholarly Edition of Charles W. Chesnutt’s Short Stories”
- Yung-Hsing Wu – University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “Alice Walker’s Epistolary Remediations”
5:00 – 5:30 PM (Lea Library)
Pop-up exhibit before keynote
5:30 – 6:45 PM (Pavilion)
Keynote: Tiffany Miller – Colby College
“Weaving Decolonial Ontologies of Kaqchikel Maya Orality, Textuality, and Digital Media in the Guatemalan Highlands”
Register to stream online: https://libcal.library.upenn.edu/calendar/kislak/stskeynote3
Abstract:
Challenging distinctions between “old” and “new” media and narratives about the deprecation of orality in favor of inscribed forms, I methodologically draw from Maya epistemologies of recorded knowledge (tz’ib’) and orality (tzij, choloj, ch’owen) to observe expressive work across media and languages. In my talk, I center my analysis on “Xalolilo lelele’,” an onomatopoeic song about a parakeet by Humberto Ak’abal that simultaneously invokes the K’iche’ Maya language and the language of the Guatemalan natural world. I argue that Maya orality in “Xalolilo lelele'” gets remediated (Bolter & Grusin) into recorded knowledge across print and digital modalities, in poetry collections and video recordings available online. Given the unique ways that video-hosting platforms like YouTube impact the content and overall presentation of the song, I will demonstrate that there are multiple possibilities for the song to be mediated – and remediated – across digital modalities of tz’ib’ as the K’iche’ poet obliges audiences to listen to Indigenous voices, inviting them to promote Indigenous language use and broader understandings of sonoric cultural production.
FRIDAY, MAY 30
9:00 – 10:30 AM
Panel 7A (Pavilion): Remediation as Experience, Method, and Labor in the Marianne Moore Digital Archive
Moderator: Nikolaus Wasmoen – University of Buffalo
- Nikolaus Wasmoen – University of Buffalo. “Publishing the Unpublished: the Double Logic of Remediation in the Marianne Moore Digital Archive’s Notebook Editions”
- Chiaki Sekiguchi Bems – Riga Business School/Riga Technical University. “How and What Moore Read: Re-Indexing the Marianne Moore Library for the Web”
- Juniper Johnson – Northeastern University. “Editing Workflows as Labor Networks in the Marianne Moore Digital Archive”
Panel 7B (Room 625): Transformations in the Digital Age: Challenges and Possibilities
Moderator: Chris Cannon – Johns Hopkins University
- John Young – Marshall University. “Remediating Incomplete Textual Objects: The Challenge of New Challenge“
- Miller Prosser and Annemarie Catania – University of Chicago. “The Book Unbound: A New Era of Digital Publishing”
- Nikki Gray – University of Nebraska – Lincoln. “Migration Patterns in Digital Humanities”
10:45 AM – 12:15 PM
Panel 8A (Pavilion): The Textual Politics of Publication and Remediation in Early Modern Italy
Moderator: Wayne Storey
- H. Wayne Storey. “Variants, Remediation and Publication. An Introduction”
- Giulia Benghi – Petrarchive, Brooklyn, NY. “Repurposed Variants: Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the 15th Century”
- Beatrice Arduini – University of Washington. “Measuring Hell: Dante Between Antonio Manetti and Alessandro Vellutello”
- Michelangelo Zaccarello – Università di Pisa. “A ‘Bibliophilologist’ of the Early 17th Century: Antonio da Sangallo”
Panel 8B (Room 625): Remediations of Antipathies: Rough Drafts, Pamphlets, and Performing Work
Moderator: María Laura Bocaz – University of Mary Washington
- Ronald Broude – Independent Scholar. “18th-Century Shakespeare Editors and the Invention of the Performing Work”
- Mateusz Antoniuk – Jagiellonian University (Cracow, Poland). “From a “worksheet” to a “sheet that works”. The composing process as remediation”
- Olin Bjork – University of Houston, Downtown. “Milton, Printed Marginalia, and the Pamphlet as Remediated Oratory”
12:30 – 2:00 PM
Lunch
12:30 – 2:00 PM
STS Board Meeting
2:00 – 3:30 PM (Pavilion)
Plenary Panel: Digital Remediations
Register to stream online: https://libcal.library.upenn.edu/calendar/kislak/plenary2
- Mary Caton Lingold, “Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica (2016), and a Decade of Performance, Remediation, and Remembrance”
- Francesco Marco Aresu and Isabella Magni, “Expanding the Petrarchive: Beyond the Digital Edition”
- Javier R. Ardila, “Advent, Loss, Rediscovery, and Revival: Four Moments in the History of Oraciones Tradvcidas en la Lengva del Reyno de Angola (1629), the First Booklet Printed in Kimbundu”
3:30 – 4:30 PM (Pavilion)
Awards ceremony and closing remarks (in person and streaming online)
4:30 – 6:00 PM (Kislak, 6th floor of Van Pelt)
Closing reception
The Society for Textual Scholarship 