2021 Conference Speakers
The American Printing History Associationʼs 46th annual fall conference will be hosted online through the Grolier Club of New York, from October 22–23, 2021. “Impresos: Printing Across Latin American and Caribbean Cultures” will explore common themes promoted by our organizations, with a focus on the study of printing history and practices of peoples and cultures related to Latin America and the Caribbean. The conference will be available with bilingual captioning in English and Spanish.
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Oradores ~ Speakers
María Carolina Ceballos
Multilingual Writing in Artists’ Books
María Carolina Ceballos is a Colombian book artist with an interdisciplinary focus. She has exhibited her work in various cities in Colombia, the United States, and Japan, and some of her books can be found at the University of Iowa Special Collections. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from the Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano and a Minor in Photography from the same university. In 2021, she graduated from the MFA in Book Arts at The University of Iowa, where she also worked as a book conservation technician and digital book design instructor. In her recent artistic practice, she has been exploring traditional book-related crafts and applying them to a body of work with creative multilingual writing, and music notation, and performance. She has been the recipient of recognitions like the Caxton Club Grant Award 2020–2021, and an MFA degree with distinction from the University of Iowa Center for the book.
paloma Celis Carbajal
Las meras meras calaveras de Posada: The Skeleton Caricatures of Posada
Paloma Celis Carbajal is the Curator for Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Studies for the New York Public Library. She was the bibliographer for the Ibero-American Studies and Romance Languages Collections at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2004 to 2018. In 2006, she founded the Cartonera Publishers Project at UW-Madison, which now consists of a collection of over 2,300 cartonera books and the Cartonera Publishers Database –a digital archive of scans of the book covers and metadata about these publications, plus audio of interviews to several of these publishers. It is the largest and most comprehensive collection worldwide. She has published and/or presented on the topic of cartonera publishers in the US, Mexico, Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru, Spain, France, Mozambique, and Germany. In 2009, she co-edited Akademia Cartonera: A primer of Latin American Cartonera Publishers, published by Parallel Press/UW-Madison, and co-organized the conference “Cartonera Publishers: Recycling Latin American Bookscapes” at UW-Madison. As elected President of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), she organized in 2016 its 51st Annual Conference at the University of Virginia “Nuestro norte es el sur”: Mapping resistance and resilience in Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies.book.
Roger Chartier
Printing Across the Atlantic. A Comment
Roger Chartier is Emeritus Professor at the Collèhe de France and Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Forthcoming Book: Won in Translation: Textual Mobility in Early Modern Europe.
Meghan Read Constantinou
Latin American Connections in the Grolier Club Library
Meghan Constantinou has served as Librarian of the Grolier Club since 2011 and has been a member since 2013. She received her MA in Art History from the University of Delaware in 2010 and her MLIS from Pratt Institute in 2012. Her research interests include the history of private collecting, provenance studies, feminist book histories, and the book arts.____
Charles cuykendall Carter
Las meras meras calaveras de Posada: The Skeleton Caricatures of Posada
Charles Cuykendall Carter is the Assistant Curator of the New York Public Library’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle. He oversees the processing of all collection materials (including rare books, manuscripts, prints, scores, original artwork, realia); works with researchers; contributes to collection development; hosts presentations; and curates exhibitions. Most recently, he served as the principal developer and writer of the Audio Guide to the Polonsky Exhibition of the New York Public Library’s Treasures. Carter is the producer and director of a video series for the NYPL called New Accessions, which showcases remarkable newly-acquired materials from the New York Public Library’s research centers. Recent episodes include: Keats in NY, upon the 200th anniversary of the death of the English poet John Keats; Black Comix, featuring work by young writers and artists from the Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival; and Les Doubles Surprises, about a rare 19th century French toy book. A dedicated member of APHA, Carter served on the board from 2012 to 2020.
Nicole Cecilia Delgado
Keynote Presentation, October 23, 2021: La Impresora, Puerto Rico
La Impresora is an artist-led studio dedicated to small-scale editorial work and allocating resources to support independent publishing, directed by the Puerto Rican poets Nicole Cecilia Delgado and Amanda Hernández. We specialize in Risograph printing, a mechanized print-making technique that has recently been rescued by independent graphic artists and micro-publishers around the world for its efficiency, performance, and ecological character (we use non-toxic materials and soy inks). One of the main objectives of our studio is the learning, use, and improvement of traditional publishing, printing, and hand-made book-binding techniques. More than just a workstation, La Impresora is a cultural project: a site that fosters the exchange of tools and skills related to book arts through collaboration with writers, artists from various disciplines, and individuals who seek to publish their own projects. With this in mind, our workshop has become an informal “book-making school”, a space to learn and share knowledge that is not formally taught in Puerto Rico, which is usually mediated or limited by the supply and demand of the publishing market.
Anton duPlessis
Anton duPlessis curates the Colonial Mexican Collection at Cushing Memorial Library and Archives (Texas A&M University) and directs the Primeros Libros de las Américas, an international collaborative creating a digital collection of 16th Century novohispano imprints. He has advanced degrees in Spanish and Political Science and is a Certified Archivist. He has been co-PI on grants from the Council on Library & Information Resources, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has published and presented on the primeros libros, digital projects, platforms & image viewers, and metadata for Spanish language special collections materials.
Sonia Farmer
Pressing Onward in The Bahamas: Poinciana Paper Press
Sonia Farmer is a Bahamian writer, book artist, publisher, and educator whose practice shifts the gaze in forming Caribbean identity, culture, and space. Through her small press, Poinciana Paper Press, she works with writers and artists to advance cultural ownership and voice in Caribbean narratives and self-publishes her poetry collections, chapbooks, and artist’s books, including Infidelities (longlist, 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature) and A True & Exact History (winner, 2019 Holle Award for Excellence in Book Arts & semi-finalist, the 2020 MCBA Prize). She holds a BFA in writing from Pratt Institute and an MFA in book arts from the University of Iowa.
Agnes Gehbald received her Ph.D. in Latin American History at the Universität zu Köln, Germany, and currently works as a postdoctoral research assistant in Modern History at the Universität Bern, Switzerland. Her research interests include book history, cultural biographies and the itineraries of things, the history of popular culture, and the study of the Enlightenment in Spanish America.
Marina Garone Gravier
Marina Garone Gravier es doctora en Historia del Arte (UNAM). Desde 2009 es investigadora del Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas (UNAM), donde fundó y coordina desde 2012 el Seminario Interdisciplinario de Bibliología (SIB-IIB-UNAM). Es miembro del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores de México y delegada por México de Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). Sus líneas de investigación son: la historia del libro, la edición, la tipografía y la cultura visual de México y América Latina; la cultura impresa en lenguas indígenas, y las relaciones entre diseño y género. Es autora de más de una docena de libros sobre historia del libro y la imprenta de América Latina, su perfil académico se puede consultar en https://marinagaronegravier.wordpress.com.
Elizabeth Haven Hawley
President, American Printing History Association
Elizabeth Haven Hawley, Ph.D., is chair of the Special and Area Studies Collections Department at the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. She also is president of the American Printing History Association (2018–2021) and Secretary of the Rare Books and Manuscript Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (2017–2019). Haven Hawley is a historian of technology and science who specializes in non-destructive characterization of print artifacts, historical printing practices, and technological access in society. She applies these skills to administration and management of international heritage research collections. She has been a visiting faculty member in the History of Science and Technology Program and program director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, and taught as adjunct faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has served on the instructional team for descriptive bibliography classes for summer courses at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia for more than a decade.
Eric Holzenberg
Director, Grolier Club of New York
Eric Holzenberg is Director of the Grolier Club of New York, America’s oldest and largest society for enthusiasts in the book and graphic arts. A former chair of the Rare Books & Manuscripts Section of ALA/ACRL, and past president of the American Printing History Association, Mr. Holzenberg holds MA degrees in library science and history. Among other books for the Grolier Club, he is the author of The Middle Hill Press (1997), and co-author of For Jean Grolier & His Friends: 125 Years of Grolier Club Exhibitions & Publications, 1884-2009. He has in addition written numerous articles, and lectured widely, on various topics in bibliography, bibliophily, and book history. His course on “The Printed Book in the West Since 1800” has been taught annually at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School program since 1998. Mr. Holzenberg is an avid collector of (among many other things) books on architecture and design, particularly the Gothic Revival, and the Aesthetic Movement.
Amelia Hugill-Fontanel
Impresos Coordinator, APHA Vice President of Programs
Amelia Fontanel is a curator at the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection, a renowned library that collects on design, typography, and the book arts. As manager of the Cary technology collection, she is responsible for teaching and maintaining some 30 different presses and thousands of fonts of metal and wood type. She is actively involved in the letterpress community, holding board positions with the American Printing History Association and the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum.
Jorge N. Leal
Jorge N. Leal is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside. He is a cultural and urban historian of the ethnic Mexican and Latinx experience in Southern California. Dr. Leal earned his Ph.D. in U.S. history at the University of California, San Diego. He also holds an M.A. in History and a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and History from California State University, Northridge. Dr. Leal is the curator of The Rock Archivo LÁ, a public history repository that collects, shares, and examines Latina/o/x youth cultures ephemera.
Belinda Ugalde Mellado
Imprenta Enlace. A Live Tradition of Mexican Letterpress
Belinda Ugalde Mellado is a freelance graphic designer and educator at the Universidad Anáhuac Veracruz. Her projects include visual identity and books for commercial and public institutions. She also designs posters focused on social and cultural themes, inspired by her Mexican identity. From 2016 to 2018 she participated in the letterpress shop at La Ceiba Gráfica, a center located in Veracruz and specialized in traditional graphic arts. While there, she developed handmade books and promoted letterpress workshops for beginners and students of graphic design. She is currently studying for a Master’s Degree in Art Pedagogy (Universidad Veracruzana) with a research project centered on letterpress printing.
Faride Mereb
Latin American Connections in the Grolier Club Library
Impresos Moderator and Translator; book designer, art director, teacher, and researcher
Faride Mereb is a Venezuelan editor and graphic designer. She is the founder and director of the publishing house Ediciones Letra Muerta, based in Caracas Venezuela. In 2016 she was awarded gold in the editorial category in the Latin American Design Awards for Al Filo, by Venezuelan poet and journalist Miyó Vestrini.
Juan Neves-Sarriegui
The Periodical Press in the Rio de la Plata in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, c. 1780–1830
Juan Neves-Sarriegui is a doctoral student in History at the University of Oxford working on the history of the periodical press in the Rio de la Plata region (in present-day Argentina and Uruguay) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His research looks at the relationship between print, periodicals, and political life in the period of imperial crisis and revolution. He has a degree from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina), and two Masters from the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and the University of Oxford (UK). His doctorate is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.
John O’Neill
The Hispanic Society of America and its Latin American Collection
John O’Neill, Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books, has worked at The Hispanic Museum & Library since 1996. He holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Philology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Albert A. Palacios
Albert A. Palacios collaborates with faculty, students, librarians, and Latin American partners to develop digital scholarship initiatives. He holds advanced degrees in Architecture, Information Science, and Latin American Studies, and a doctorate in History, focusing on manuscript censorship, printing privilege, and publishing networks in 16th-century Mexico. He co-directs several digital humanities projects including the NEH-funded “Enabling and Reusing Multilingual Citizen Contributions in the Archival Record”, NEH-AHRC-funded “Unlocking the Colonial Archive: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Indigenous and Spanish American Historical Collections”, the Primeros Libros de las Américas project, and the Title VI-funded “LLILAS Benson Curriculum” resource.
Iván Pérez Pineda
Licenciado en Ciencias de la Computación por la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), tiene el Máster de Gestión de Contenidos Digitales por la Universidad de Barcelona y la Universidad Pompeu Fabra (España) y Diplomado en Gestión del libro antiguo por la Universidad de Granada (España). Está especializado en el desarrollo de Colecciones Digitales de libros antiguos, gestión de repositorios documentales y de proyectos de preservación digital y digitalización. Es jefe de TI en la Biblioteca Histórica J. M. Lafragua de la BUAP y colabora en proyectos nacionales e internacionales sobre el desarrollo de colecciones digitales del patrimonio documental.
Neil Safier
Uncovering Presses in Unexpected Places, Latin America in Print from Lisbon to Trinidad
Neil Safier is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Brown University and is affiliated with the Department of Hispanic Studies, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative. From 2013 to 2021, he served as Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library. He received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 2004 and has held teaching and research appointments at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is the author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, 2008; paperback edition, 2012), which was awarded the 2009 Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the Institut Français d’Amérique. A Spanish translation, La Medición del Nuevo Mundo, was released from Marcial Pons (Madrid) in 2016. Recipient of numerous research fellowships at libraries and archives, including the Huntington Library, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, he has a wide collection of published books and articles to his name, including essays in Isis, Book History, The Huntington Library Quarterly, Revista Brasileira de História, and Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales. He also serves on a number of international academic and library boards, including the History of Science Society and the Council of Cultural Patrimony of the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico), in addition to being a member of the Grolier Club and the American Antiquarian Society. His current research relates to the history of print and knowledge-making in the Luso-Brazilian world during the Age of Revolution and the environmental and ethnographic history of the Amazon River basin from the prehuman to the present.
Mercedes I. Salomon Salazar
Licenciada en Humanidades y Maestra en Diseño de la Información por la Universidad de las Américas, Puebla (ambas summa cum laude). Master en Conservación y Restauración de Bienes Muebles por el Istituto per l’Arte e il Restauro Palazzo Spinelli, (Florencia, Italia). Desde 2017 dirige la Biblioteca Histórica “José María Lafragua” de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. En dicha institución ha ocupado los puestos de Jefe de Conservación (2005–2014), y Coordinadora de Proyectos (Oct–Dic 2016). Es coordinadora de los proyectos digitales “Catálogo Colectivo de Marcas de Fuego”, Primeros Libros de las Américas: impresos americanos del siglo XVI en las bibliotecas del Mundo” y “Estampas de la Academia de Bellas Artes de Puebla. Modelos y ejemplos gráficos para la enseñanza del dibujo”.
Cristina Soriano
Uncovering Presses in Unexpected Places, Latin America in Print from Lisbon to Trinidad
Cristina Soriano is Associate Professor of Latin American history at Villanova University. Her first book Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela, published in 2018, received the 2019 Bolton-Johnson award for the best English-language book in Latin American History by the Conference of Latin American History, and the 2020 Fernando Coronil Prize for Best Book about Venezuela, awarded by the Venezuelan Studies Section of LASA. Recently she was a visiting Research Scholar at the Davis Center for Historical Studies in Princeton University, where she worked on her new project on the effects of imperial transitions in the Island of Trinidad.
Arielle D. Steimer-Barragán
María de Sansoric: A Printer Beyond the Archive
Arielle D. Steimer-Barragán is a Latin American Studies Masters’ candidate at California State University, Los Angeles working on her thesis, “María de Sansoric, Paradigmatic Example of a Woman Printer of the Sixteenth-Century.” Her work aims to find new ways to think about print culture, women printers, and black and indigenous peoples in print spaces during the early modern period in New Spain. She has also been recently accepted into the History Ph.D. program at the University of California, Irvine, where she plans to research women printers in colonial Mexico as well as explore their connections to print culture across the transatlantic world. Her research interests include print culture, history of the book, gender studies, indigenous and black intellectual culture, Spanish Empire, and Latin American written and visual culture.
Rachel Stein
Uncovering Presses in Unexpected Places, Latin America in Print from Lisbon to Trinidad
Rachel Stein is Research & Instruction Librarian at The Latin American Library at Tulane University. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University. Her doctoral research examined the printing of books on America, Africa, and Asia in seventeenth-century Lisbon. She has published reviews in The Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America and The Journal of Early Modern History and has a forthcoming article on integrating second language and special collections pedagogy. She is a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon-Rare Book School Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.
Joseph Velasquez
Corridos Visuales and the Power of the Multiple
Joseph Velasquez is an Artist who uses popular culture and social issues to create compelling and unique narratives which invite the viewer to share his perspective on social activism and community engagement. As a Latino Veteran of the US Armed Forces, he has lived in California, Texas, Wisconsin, and Florida, and these diverse geographic locations have shaped his experiences and his expression. He is also the co-founder of Drive By Press mobile Printmaking Studio.
Juan Villanueva
Keynote Presentation, October 22, 2021: Typefaces as Cultural Objects
Juan Villanueva is a typeface designer, letterer, and educator in New York City. He grew up in Lima, Peru and Clifton, NJ. Juan spends his days designing typefaces at Monotype and teaching at Type@Cooper and the Letterform Archive. He has previously taught at the City College of New York and the Cooper Union Summer Art Intensive Program. Juan is the founder of Type Crit Crew, an initiative to make type design education more accessible and inclusive to students anywhere in the world. Follow his lettering explorations and education initiatives on his Instagram and Twitter at @juan_kafka.
Corinna Zeltsman
Uncovering Presses in Unexpected Places, Latin America in Print from Lisbon to Trinidad
Corinna Zeltsman is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University. She is the author of Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (University of California Press, 2021). Trained as a letterpress printer, she is also a fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School and a member of the Seminario Interdisciplinario de Bibliología at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.