Emerging Book Cultures in Asia and the Middle East: Materiality, Paratexts, Practices: Interdisciplinary Transregional Conference Convened at CU April 6-7, 2024
The conference “Emerging Book Cultures in Asia and the Middle East: Materiality, Paratexts, Practices,” was convened on April 6 and 7, 2024, in the British and Irish Studies Room in Norlin Library. Each day the conference convened from 10:15am to 5:45pm, with a reception at the Koenig Alumni Center on April 6 and a dinner at Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse on April 7. In addition to the speakers, approximately 25 members of the campus community and beyond attended the event on April 6, and approximately 15 on April 7.
The conference featured a total of 18 presentations by speakers who are both emerging scholars and major figures in their fields. While all speakers addressed questions related to the history of textual cultures and book production in different regions, they spoke from disciplinary perspectives ranging from History, Religious Studies, Literary Studies, and Art History. Presentations were 25-30 minutes each, with a moderated Q&A session of 5-10 minutes thereafter. Within the Q&A, a number of prevalent themes emerged with regard to trends in the use of different material surfaces for writing, based on local environmental and cultural factors, methods for structuring text for improving legibility, and discrete forms of communities that emerge around textual production, compilation, and collection. Because of the prevalence of such themes throughout the two days of the conference, in the final discussion session on the second day of the conference (Sunday April 7), the participants considered the possibility of publishing either an edited volume or a special journal issue based on the papers presented.
Participants and audience members alike agreed that the range of papers was effective in covering and connecting vast spatial and temporal distances, filling in gaps in the individual knowledge of the fields of scholarship represented while provoking new modes of thinking. The conference also served to highlight the interconnectedness of the book history of the regions represented within CU Boulder’s Department of Asian Languages & Civilizations: South Asia, China, Japan, Korea, and the Middle East.
A complete program of the conference can be found at /alc/ebcc. Below is a photograph of the participants, taken on Sunday afternoon in front of Norlin Library.