2:30 pm, Thursday, December 13, 2018
Library of Congress
Rosenwald Room
LJ 205 Jefferson Building, 2nd Floor
Free and Open to the Public
Space is Limited

“Working towards a feminist history of printing”

What does it mean to strive for a feminist praxis when the subject of your work is not printers but printing? If there are no human agents in your story, how do you make it an inclusive one that invites everyone to participate? In this talk, Dr. Werner draws on her experience of writing a book introducing handpress printing to explore how to create a feminist history of printing. Looking at how scholars, theorists, artists, and poets have talked about the acts of printing and being a female maker, she weaves a practice of historical connections and present acts that makes a case for the necessity of opening our field to all questioners. 

Sarah Werner is a book historian and digital scholar based in Washington, DC who usually describes herself as an independent librarian. She taught early modern printing history at the Folger Shakespeare Library for nearly a decade and is the author of Studying Early Printed Books 1450–1800: A Practical Guide, coming out from Wiley this winter. She is also the author of Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage and numerous articles on theater practice, book history, and digital practices. Last year she gave the Pforzheimer Lecture at the Harry Ransom Center on “Early Digital Facsimiles” and she has been a plenary speaker at RBMS and part of the Rare Book School lecture series. Her current project is a technological and cultural study of facsimiles.