The Society for Textual Scholarship

Materiality, Memory, Forgetting: Cross-currents in Textual Studies and Memory Studies

The New School, New York City, June 3-5

Tentative Program

All conference panels will take place in The New School’s Wolman Hall located on the 5th Floor of the Eugene Lang Building, 65 W. 11th St.

When you arrive at the building entrance, go through the turnstile; the guard will be expecting conference attendees; then take the ground floor elevator to the fifth floor, where you will exit into Wolman Hall.

Tuesday June 2

Tour of Granary Books — 5-6 pm

112A Powers Street, off the Graham Ave L or Metropolitan G

Hosted by MC Kinniburgh & Conley Lowrance

Granary Books, Inc. is pleased to offer a tour of its new Brooklyn studio space to members of the Society for Textual Scholarship, on the occasion of the annual conference. Granary Books is a longtime publisher of artists’ books, as well as a rare books and archives dealer that specializes in collaboration with research institutions. Join us for a behind-the-scenes review of in-progress rare book and archival collections, artists’ book prototyping and publications, and a review of our reference collection that specializes in contemporary poetry, postwar avant-garde practices, and bibliography. Space is limited to 16 guests; please RSVP to info@granarybooks.com.

Wednesday June 3

8:30-8:50am: Welcome & Opening Remarks

9:05-10:20 am: Session 1

1a. Digital Editions and Infrastructures

• Brandon Hurst, University of Connecticut — Digitally Remembering Wilde: The Making of a Fluid Text Edition of “The Decay of Lying”
• Kenneth Price, University of Nebraska-Lincoln — The End and the Means: The Whitman Archive and the Digital Life Cycle
• Kornelija Mikalauskaite, Vilnius University — Procedural Remembrance: Interfaces as Evidentiary Regimes

1b. Commemoration and Countermemory

• Jack Murphy, Duquesne University — Welcoming, Mourning, and Graves: Derridean Hospitality in Cemeteries
  Maria Wiktorska, Jagiellonian University — Archive and Dustbin: The Destruction of Heroic Decorum in Tadeusz Różewicz’s Drama Ujawnienie (“Revelation,” 1950)
• Conley Lowrance, Granary Books — Memory & The Mimeograph: Memory and Reconstruction in the Archive of Laurence McGilvery’s The Floating Bear Facsimile Edition, 1973

1c. Coloniality and Modernity

• Jaime Vargas-Luna, Lehigh University — Indigenous Texts from Early 17th Century Peru: Survival and Transformation in the Peruvian Colonial and Post-Colonial Archive
• Sofía Falomir Sánchez, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México — Neobaroque Nature and Ecocritical Memory: Vegetal Archives in Lezama’s Paradiso (Read by Clairette Atri Mizrahi, PhD Candidate, The Graduate Center, CUNY)
• Nancy LaGreca, St. Mary’s University — Latin American Women Novelists of Modernism: The Forgotten Voices of Women’s Modernity

10:35-11:50 am: Session 2

2a. Genetic Criticism

• Mateusz Antoniuk, Jagiellonian University, Centre for Creativity Research — The invention of the past: Genetic criticism and memory studies
• Mattis Gravingen, University of Oslo — Montage as Method: Material Operations in the Avant-textes of Les années
• Giovani Kurz, University of Sao Paulo — Epistemic dissonance: Genetic Criticism and cultural memory in Latin America

2b. Ancient/Medieval Textual Memory

• Ilknur Taş, Independent Scholar — Memory Inscribed in Clay: Materiality, Forgetting, and Recollection in Hittite Ritual Texts
• Leopoldo Fox-Zampiccoli, New York University — A Potential History of Texts on Stone and Little More: Envisioning translingual memory crafting in the Syro-Anatolian Iron Age (1200-700 BCE)
• Seth Richardson, University of Chicago — Blinkered Pasts: Historical Claims and Memorial Effects in Hammurabi’s Babylon

2c. AI, Data, and Digital Memory

• Ajith Kumar Abhirami, University of Basel — Materializing the Book as a Memory Crypt: Printed Echoes of Digital Forgetting in Technelegy by Sasha Stiles
• Xinyue Gao, Washington University in St. Louis — From Remembering to Rendering: Generative AI and the Algorithmic Assembly of Memory
• Melissa Vincent, London School of Economics — Breaking the Circuit of Data Loss: Information Infrastructures and Emerging Methods for Recovering Lost Virtual Possessions

11:50am-1:20 pm: STS Board Meeting

1:20-2:35 pm: Session 3

3a. Manuscript Transmission and Memory

• Giulia Benghi, Indiana University — Petrarca’s Fragmenta and Disperse: Can Textual Variants Be Proofs of Memorization and Oral Transmission?
• Gabriel Ford, Drake University — The London, British Library MS 25718 (Ad2) Canterbury Tales: Cohesion, Copying, and Collation
• Abigail Palmisano, Campbell University — “Ald” English in the Katherine Group: Textual Transmission as Linguistic Memory

3b. Latin American Archives and Memory

• Maria Laura Bocaz, University of Mary Washington — Tracing the Hidden Origin of the Idea of Hell in the Creative Process of a Latin American Masterpiece: El lugar sin límites
• Daniel Balderston, University of Pittsburgh — Writing It Slant: Borges’s Working Draft of “Death and the Compass”
• Kimberly Ramirez, CUNY-LaGuardia — Editing Exile: Mediated Memory and Forgetting in the Unaccompanied Cuban Children’s Exodus

3c. Reading and Memory

• Barbara Hochman, Ben-Gurion University — Epistolary Advice for Twenty-first Century Black Children
• Joshua Kotzin, Marist University — Edith Wharton on Reading and Memory
• Christopher Leary, Queensborough Community College (CUNY) — Memory at the Threshold: Norway’s State Publishing Programme and My Struggle

2:50-4:05 pm: Session 4

4a. Indigenous Memory

• Liliana Naranjo — Writing Against Erasure: Textualidades Oralitegráficas and the Politics of Indigenous Memory in Latin American Poetry
• Amy Gore, North Dakota State University — Lists, Compilations, and Anthologies: The Collective Impulse in Indigenous Literary History
• Danielle Van Wagner, University of Toronto — Decolonizing the Penal Press: Indigenous Activism and Incarcerated Memory

4b. Remembering/Forgetting – Affiliated panel with the European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS)

• Katja Gottlieb and Krista Stinne Greve Rasmussen, Aarhus University — Portable Monuments in Print: Grundtvig, Hymnal Authority, and Cultural Memory
• Jon Tafdrup and Katrine Laigaard Baunvig, Aarhus University — Forgetting by Design: Archival Infrastructure and the Maintenance of Cultural Memory
• Bram Oostveen, Huygens Institute — Digital Editions as Monuments: About a digital edition of Dirkje Kuik’s Huishoudboekje met rozijnen

4c. Collecting, Libraries, and Memory

• Christopher Walsh, Rutgers University — A Midwestern Maestro’s Legacy: Memorial intervention in the book collection of Charles R. Schmitter
• Amanda Gailey, University of Nebraska-Lincoln — Emily Dickinson and the Alienist
• Amy Weng, Princeton University — Godly and Learned Divines: Analyzing Preachers’ Styles by Quantifying Cited Authorities in Early English Printed Sermons

4:30-5:45 pm: Keynote Session

Unfolding a Reading: Strategies for Co-Creating with Indigenous Archives

Editing Jaime de Angulo’s Old Time Stories

Jerome McGann, University Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia

This talk examines Jaime de Angulo’s OTS as a singular experiment in twentieth-century poetics, “A Modernist Classic of Native California” where anthropology, linguistics, art, and the visible language codes of print technology converge a critical revaluation of Western modernity. Taking the oral cultures of Native California as its Modern subject, the prosepoetic narrative exposes the forbidding obstacles to comprehension raised by the abstracting codes of standardized print technologies. The work throws up an array of signs that tell the reader to “Stop, Look, and Listen” to what the poetic action is doing in saying what it says: that linguistic codes are not language and that their derivatives, cultural codings, abstract the lifeways of all individual and social human being, not least of all the lifeways of Modernity. Performing an argument about all the “Sciences of the artificial,” the work invites its readers to reperform it by “paying attention” to their part in the action of the storytelling. The work thus situates itself within the broad Modern and post-Modern debates about translation, myth, and cultural survivance, “The Prisonhouse of Language” that Modernity discovered for itself. Because the genre of de Angulo’s narrative is children’s literature, however, its tone is not monitory but exemplary, and the examples it sets are challenging exactly because their simplicities are often so estranged.

Making Indian Fetishes

Madeleine Reddon, Assistant Professor, Loyola University

Looking at two examples (a poetry collection, Matthew James Weigel’s Whitemud Walking, and a document drawn from my own family archive), this paper examines a set of interlocking textual histories around state archives of dispossession and discusses how Indigenous scholars and writers navigate its de-materializing force. Specifically, this paper argues that the secular production and collection of documents authorizing the state’s land expropriation practices belongs to a spiritual practice of “fetish making,” which installs the “vanishing Indian” as an icon of colonial power.

5:45-6:00 pm: STS Student Awards Naming Recognition

6:00-7:45 pm: Evening Reception

Thursday June 4

8:30-9:00 am: Coffee

9:00-10:00 am: Keynote Session

Antimonumentos and the Politics of Contested Time

Alexandra Délano Alonso, Professor, Department of Politics and Global Studies, The New School

Benjamin Nienass, Associate Professor, Political Science and Law, Montclair State University

In a context marked by more than 130,000 enforced disappearances, practices of public memory in Mexico have emerged as challenges not only to state violence and negligence, but to the very temporal and material logics of memorialization. This keynote dialogue examines the corridor of antimonumentos (antimonuments) in Mexico City as a form of insurgent memorialization that refuses closure, permanence, and state authorization. Installed anonymously, these interventions—located in streets, roundabouts, and plazas—stand in contrast to both traditional monuments and other memorial practices. They bring past events into sustained relation with present struggles and future possibilities, disrupting linear narratives of resolution and reconciliation. Moving along the Ruta de la Memoria (Route of Memory) and engaging visual documentation of these spaces, we explore how antimonuments enact a protest against a dominant regime of time—one that seeks to delimit mourning, foreclose accountability, and relegate violence to a closed past. Instead, these practices insist on an open-ended temporality, inviting ongoing participation, appropriation, and reinterpretation. In recent years, the associative logics of these interventions have expanded, linking local struggles over disappearance and impunity to broader transnational movements. In doing so, antimonuments exemplify a form of multidirectional memory that exceeds national frameworks and reconfigures solidarity across contexts of violence and resistance. Structured as a dialogue, the keynote reflects our ongoing collaborative engagement with mourning, memory, and the politics of time.

10:15-11:30 am: Session 6

6a. Race and Archives

• Alejandra Aguilar Dornelles, Florida Atlantic University — The Brazilian Press and the Female Body as Agent of Memory against Slavery
• Ileana Marin, University of Washington, Seattle — Materializing Memory: Artists’ Books as Multisensorial Encounters with Slavery and Revolution
• Yung-Hsing Wu, University of Louisiana at Lafayette — What and How Does The Bluest Eye Read?

6b. Performance, Adaptations, and Memory

• Madeleine Read, Bilkent University — Fantasia in the Theater
• J.P. Conlan, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus — A Blazoned Inducement to Host Troupes of Traveling Servant Players: The Interplay of Unreliable Text and Particularized Memory in Gerald Legh’s Oft-Reprinted The Accedens of Armorie (1562)
• Alexander Rienerth, University of Washington — Monstrous Memories in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire

6c. Infrastructures of Memory: Collections, Artifacts, and Historical Study of the Spanish Empire – Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) Allied Session

Moderator: Kinohi Nishikawa, Princeton University

• Peter Haskin, Yale University — Collective Memory and Historical Patrimony in the Hiram Bingham III Archives
• Manny Medrano, Harvard University — Knotted Cords in the Library: Inca Quipus and Book History in Two University Rare Book Collections
• Angelina Coronado, Columbia University — Print Circuits of Imperial Design: Architectural Guides in the Spanish Habsburg Empire

11:45 am-1:15 pm: Graduate Student Lunch

1:30-2:45 pm: Session 7

7a. Translation, Multilingualism, and Memory

• Claire Dauge-Roth, CUNY Graduate Center — Translating the Vague: The Language of Memory in Etel Adnan’s Leporellos
• Richard Huddleson / Riocárd Ó hOddail, National University of Ireland, Maynooth — Memories of Place and Language: (Re)Writing Texts and Histories in Early Twentieth Century Catalan Youth Movements

7b. Poetry, Memory, Textuality

• Jiayue Qiu and Chen Chang, Tongji University | Harvard University — Remembering Through Revision: Manuscripts, Memory, and Historical Consciousness in Bei Dao’s “The End and the Beginning”
• Ray Matsumoto, University of California, Los Angeles — The Kurokawa Women: Textual Memory and the Afterlives of Sexual Violence in Postwar Japan
• Augustina Andriuskeiviciute, Vilnius University — Memory and Its Evaluation through Typescripts

7c. Keywords for Textual Studies – Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) Allied Roundtable

Moderator: Kinohi Nishikawa, Princeton University

• Claire Climer, Brown University — “Archive”
• Sara Penn, New York University — “Labour”
• Dennis Schäfer, Princeton University — “Loss”
• Maeva O’Brien, Yale University — “Scale”

3:00-4:15 pm: Panel Session 8

8a. Origins, Canon, and Memory

• Cecelia Ramsey, Princeton University — What Do We Mean by “Literary Afterlives”?
• Nicole Salama, Loyola University, Chicago — Notes Toward a Conception of the Social Canon
• John Young, Marshall University — Recovering Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground and Forgetting Its Periodical Origins

8b. Books and Bodily Memory

• Chloe Burns, Binghamton University — “For all ȝour fressh formz”: Materiality, memory, and the body in Terne Wathelyne
• Coco Fitterman, The Graduate Center, CUNY — The Book Unbound: ‘Bookness’ in Bervin, Salehi, and Carrión
• Sarah Pobuda, Duquesne University — Herbaria as material sites of assembled memories

8c. Mediating Memory and Form across a Century of Latin American Texts

Moderator: Daniel Balderston, University of Pittsburgh

• Hugo Salas, University of Pennsylvania — Textual Variance and Cinematic Form in Doña Bárbara
• María Julia Rossi, CUNY, John Jay College — Radical Textual Mediation: Translation, Editing, and Queer Memory in Los Amorales
• Laura Pensa, Brown University — Making New Memories through Historical Fiction: The Very “New” Latin American Historical Novel in Argentina

4:30-5:45pm: Panel Session 9

9a. Personal Archives and Memory

• Victoria O’Dea, Loyola University Chicago — “Dangerous as Lucifer Matches”: The Revelation of the Brontë-Heger Letters and the Reimagining of the Brontë Myth
• Ursula Carmichael, McGill University — A Moment in Time: Postcard Messages and Memory-Making in the Early 20th Century
• Colbey Emmerson Reid, Columbia College Chicago — “The Process Archive: Making and Unmaking Fashion”

9b. Trauma, Textuality, Memory

• Reynaldo Ales, Florida National University — The Mystery of the Missing Memories: Rewriting a Misremembered Life
• Natalia Matuszewska, Polish Academy of Sciences — A History Told in Voices: Polish Memory Beyond the Archive in the Fiction of Wiesław Myśliwski
• Manjot Kaur, Mehr Chand Mahajan DAV College for Women, Chandigarh, India — The Wall of Truth and Archiving Memories of 1984 Anti-Sikh Violence

9c. Editions Wrapped in Memory

• Andy Reynolds, Texas Tech University — Negotiating Montalván: Editing a Modernist Afro-Peruvian Novel Today
• Stephanie Browner and Iris Parsons, The New School — Origin Stories: Charles W. Chesnutt’s “Rena Walden” and The House Behind the Cedars
• Clare Charlesworth, Adelaide University — ‘the incommunicable past’: locomotive affect and the writing of “My Ántonia” (1918; 1926)

5:50-6:50pm: Presidential Address

No Wreck-master: Or, The Text of Margaret Fuller’s Death: Arguments for a Variorum

Marta Werner, Professor, Emerita, Dept. of English, Loyola University Chicago

Who hasn’t heard the story of Margaret Fuller’s death? And yet, who has heard it?

On July 19, 1850, the barque Elizabeth foundered and sank within sight of Fire Island, carrying Fuller’s body far into the Atlantic. At last, what returned from the sea was not an event—the event of her death—secured in fact, but a dispersed archive of fragments—testimony, report, letter, memory—each speaking differently, none speaking finally. This address imagines a variorum of the text of Fuller’s death that refuses textual closure. Where editorial tradition gathers variant versions in order to stabilize meaning, this imagined variorum gathers them in order to remain within instability, within the drifted record itself. To read this record is to encounter variance not as deviation from a stable account, but as the irreducible multiplicity through which the event enters language—and through which both the textual condition and our condition are constituted together. Across the nineteenth-century archive, the text of Fuller’s death arrives in waves. It is seen from shore and written in haste; it is remembered in notes and letters, reconstructed in memoir, stabilized in biography, and again destabilized in reading. Figures such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson walk the edge of its aftermath; William Henry Channing and Thomas Wentworth Higginson gather its remnants into narrative form. Each attempt to contain the event produces another version of its dispersal. At the limit of the archive, even exhaustive testimony fails to produce convergence. The text of Fuller’s death cannot be reconstructed because it was never singular in its telling; it arrives already divided, already multiple, already in motion. Against the desire for editorial, narrative, or memorial closure, this address turns to the variant as an animating force. Drawing on Fuller’s emblem of the sistrum, it conceives textual difference as vibration: restless, non-teleological, preventing the stilling of the archive into a single account. In this telling, the variorum becomes not a technology of stabilization, but a mode of attention adequate to distributed loss—a way of reading in which absence continues to generate form. No wreck-master.

Friday June 5

8:30-9:00 am: Coffee

9:00-10:15 am: Session 10

10a. The Press and Collective Memory

• Kevin Anzzolin, Christopher Newport University — Materiality, Memory, and the Politics of Translation in México de afuera
• Dipanjan Maitra, Louisiana Tech University — “A Retentive and Active Memory”: Memory, Information Labor, and the Women Readers of the Press-clipping Bureau
• Inessa Medzhibovskaya, The New School — Lament for the Patriarch (The Memory of Tolstoy in Jewish Press)

10b. Italian Archival Memory

• Michelangelo Zaccarello, University of Pisa — Literary Archives as Cultural Ecosystems: Italian Documents Old & New, Paper & Digital
• Lorenzo Ferraro, University of Genoa — Editing Utopias under Fascism: Shaping Memory and the Canon
• Daniel Falcone, United Nations International School — Italian Unification in New York, Monuments as Text

10c. Memory Collectivity Monuments

• MC Kinniburgh, Granary Books, Inc. — Memory Houses and Literary Archives: Practices of Remembering in the 21st Century
• Jeffrey Glover, Loyola University Chicago — Flags, Feathers, and Parchment Paper: Remembering the Treaty of Watertown (1776)
• Gabrielle Dean, Johns Hopkins University — Memory We Hold in Our Hands: An Experiment in Collective Memory

10:30-11:45 am: Closing Plenary & Remarks

Black Artifacts: Reading and Writing as Historical Practice

Shawn Anthony Christian, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English, Florida International University.

Ayesha K. Hardison, Susan D. Gubar Chair and Associate Professor, Department of English, Indiana University Bloomington

Walton Muyumba, Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor, Department of English, Indiana University-Bloomington

This panel explores Black textual artifacts, or African American narratives engaged in acts of re-membering to preserve and recast archives of late twentieth-century Black intellectual, activist, and creative work. Proposed papers analyze essays, fiction, and film to illustrate the challenge Black cultural production poses to master narratives of history as well as dominant modes of mourning, commemoration, and forgetting. In “Narrating Black Time and Space,” Ayesha Hardison delineates the cultural geography of Detroit by parsing Denise Nicholas’s novel Freshwater Road (2005), a historical fiction of presence and absence, to weigh the Civil Rights Movement’s legacy. Thinking within and through Detroit in the context of Freedom Summer, Hardison considers the city as a site of memory that counters notions of the movement as exclusively Southern and deconstructs the city as a refuge for Southern migrants. Walton Muyumba takes up James Baldwin’s post-civil-rights efforts to discern a historical reckoning in his paper “James Baldwin as Critical Documentarian.” To this end Muyumba offers a comparative analysis of Baldwin’s performance as roving cultural critic in Hartley and Fontaine’s documentary I Heard it Through the Grapevine (1982/2024), in which he tours the South, and his book-length essay The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) about the Atlanta child murders. Finally, in “Their Names Together: Remembering James Baldwin, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Bayard Rustin,” Shawn Christian examines how necrologies—brief lists of names and birth and death dates—function as textual tools that shape collective memory and reverence, ultimately creating meaningful legacies. Christian examines memorial paratexts and dedications (specifically, in Other Countries: Black Gay Voices [1988], Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston [1989], and Karla Holloway’s “Epilogue/In Memoriam” in Passed On[2002]) and attends to form to show how ostensibly minimal textual gestures produce material traces that name, revive, and historicize Black gay subjectivities.

2:30-3:30 pm

Tour: Center for Book Arts

28 West 27th St, 3rd Fl New York, NY 10001

Co-sponsored by STS and BSA

Exhibit: “after futura”

Eva Parra, Co-curator

Please join Eva Parra, co-curator of the “after futura” exhibition at Center for Book Arts, for a tour of the exhibit. (RSVP only – RSVP email forthcoming)

after futura is an exhibition curated by Camilo Otero and Eva Parra that revisits Hansjörg Mayer’s futura (1965–1968), a series of twenty-six broadsides bringing together artists and poets working at the intersection of experimental publishing, typography, and language-based art. Produced at a moment when artists’ publications were emerging as an independent field, Mayer’s project positioned the printed page as both exhibition space and circulation network, connecting an international community engaged in conceptual and material approaches to language.

The exhibition presents the complete futura series alongside archival documentation of the original project, situating it within broader histories of postwar experimental publishing. In dialogue with this historical framework, Center for Book Arts has commissioned ten contemporary artists to produce new broadsides that extend Mayer’s original premise by treating the typeface Futura and the spatial format of the broadside as shared infrastructure for artistic experimentation.

These newly commissioned works will be published as a limited-edition set by Center for Book Arts. The project will also be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog featuring newly commissioned essays and documentation of the historical futura series. (“after futura” )