The Peripheral Manuscripts Project is a four-year initiative funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources and culminating in November 2024. By digitizing and cataloging hundreds of medieval manuscripts held in twenty-two partner collections across the Midwest, this collaborative project aims to bring attention to and celebrate the medieval manuscripts in the region, as well as the communities that study and care for them. This talk focuses on those communities as they shift throughout history. Beginning with the ways the project strives to foster community with and among our partners, our attention will then move backward in time, considering contemporary and past communities of researchers and donors and their connections with manuscript-holding institutions; rare book dealers, biblioclasts, and networks of national sales and exhibitions; and finally, the medieval communities that project items originated in or moved through. While weaving together these examples of manuscripts that suggest patterns of circulation and traces of past communities, this talk also reflects on the way the Peripheral Manuscripts Project has allowed the project team to do medieval studies in their own backyard, within their own communities.
Liz Hebbard is Assistant Professor of French/Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at Indiana University, and founding co-director with Patricia Ingham of the Indiana University Book Lab. She is a specialist of the music and literatures of medieval France, particularly French and Occitan song, and a paleographer and codicologist specializing in medieval manuscripts, with particular interest in pre-modern book production and book crafts, material culture, and the reuse of parchment manuscripts as binding material. She has published on troubadour and trouvère song and its reception, medieval manuscripts in Midwestern collections, manuscripts as spoils of the Napoleonic Wars, and on the early 20th century American biblioclast Otto Ege. She has just finished her first book, Manuscripts and the Making of the Troubadours. Hebbard is the Primary Principal Investigator of the Peripheral Manuscripts Project, which will be the focus of her talk.
ChatGPT, Midjourney, Alexa, Siri. Artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Embrace it, fear it, or ignore it? What is the optimal interaction between humans and AI? How can generative AI tools be used creatively to move beyond the functions for which they were designed? Join these three artists and professors as they discuss ways in which they use AI to aid in design processes, improve human interactions, and interrogate power structures.
Between 1880 and 1915, nearly sixty Protestant Christian training schools opened as part of a general effort to equip lay people (not clergy) for city and foreign missions. Not only were these training schools responding to churches’ expanding global outreach but also the critical needs that accompanied the rapid urbanization of U.S. cities and the influx of immigrants. When Lucy Rider Meyer established the Chicago Training School for Home and Foreign Missions in 1885, she was at the front of this educational movement. The Chicago Training School became a launchpad for additional schools, institutions, and efforts including the deaconess vocation for women. In this presentation, Dr. Lisa Shaver, who is currently completing a rhetorical biography on Lucy Rider Meyer, will introduce Rider Meyer and discuss her role in promoting training schools for women. Of local interest, the training school movement included the Kansas City National Training School (1899-1964) and Scarritt Bible and Training School, which opened in Kansas City in 1887 and moved to Nashville in 1924.
A professor of English at Baylor University, Dr. Lisa Shaver teaches courses in rhetoric and professional writing. Her research interests include women's rhetoric, history of rhetoric, writing across the curriculum, professional writing, and literacy studies. Her work has appeared in College English, Rhetoric Review, and the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. Shaver is the author of Beyond the Pulpit: Women's Rhetorical Roles in the Antebellum Religious Press (U of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) and Reforming Women: The Rhetorical Tactics of the American Female Moral Reform Society, 1834-1854 (U of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).
Join us for a presentation by Sam Langsdale, author of Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics, published this September. Her research explores how female-led superhero comics with diverse, inclusive storytelling thrive on the margins of the mainstream genre. Through a feminist lens, Langsdale reveals how these marginalized spaces become sites of innovation, shaping powerful superhero narratives that challenge and redefine traditional norms.
Dr. Sam Langsdale (she/her) is an independent feminist scholar whose work focuses on the cultural politics around representations of gender, sexuality, and race in visual culture. Her comics research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and in award-winning volumes like Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero (UT Press). She is also the proud co-editor of Monstrous Women in Comics published by University Press of Mississippi. Her monograph, Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics, published by the University of Texas Press, is now available. You can read more about her work here: https://www.samlangsdale.com/
