Date: February 26th 2010

A reminder that March 12, 2010 is the application deadline for the 2010
American Antiquarian Society Summer Seminar in the History of the Book in
American Culture, whose topic will be "The Global American South and Early
American Print Culture." The seminar will run from Monday, June 14 through
Friday, June 18, 2010, at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA.
Details about the seminar, along with application forms, are available at
http://www.americanantiquarian.org/sumsem10.htm.

The seminar will convene a group of 20 graduate students, faculty, and
others working in the field of print culture to examine what happens when we
view the imagined community of U.S. print culture from the vantage point of
the South. At a moment when industrial print culture was consolidating
itself in the Northeast, "the South" appeared in print in several registers.
While asserting an "American" identity, Southerners represented themselves
as a sectional alternative to the nation that boasted a distinctive regional
culture while simultaneously celebrating local diversity.

This seminar will investigate how these complementary practices of national,
regional, and local self-definition circulated through the material world of
early American print.  How were the South's efforts at sectional
self-fashioning, its attempt to lay claim to the nation, and its engagements
with the wider world mediated through and influenced by the modalities of
book distribution, copyright, authorship, and reading in nineteenth-century
America?  The American Antiquarian Society's unsurpassed holdings of printed
material both from and about the South-including newspapers and periodicals,
political propaganda, illustrations and photographs, and rich collections of
Francophone Louisiana materials-will help us to answer these questions.

Of particular interest to literary scholars and historians, the seminar
should also appeal to art historians and legal scholars, as well as those
researching the multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan, and transatlantic history and
culture of the U.S. The seminar will be led by Jeannine DeLombard and Lloyd
Pratt. DeLombard is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Toronto. Pratt is Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State
University.

Paul J. Erickson
Director of Academic Programs
American Antiquarian Society
508-471-2158