It’s conference time! One can never start too early. For the SRS 2020 in Norwich, I’m proposing a panel on those marks on pages which are not words (working title above!). I posted a call for papers on Twitter a couple of days ago, and would you know it, for once that thing did its networking magic, and three wonderful early career colleagues replied.
Esther Osorio Whewell from Cambridge works on curly brackets and their affect and effect on cultural practices like devotion and attention in reading. James Misson from Oxford is interested in changes in font and their socio-historical meanings, and my friend and old fellow St Andreian Jamie Cumby, special collections librarian at Perquot Library in the States, is insanely knowledgeable about anything concerning the technical sides of printing, such as type and woodcut and things. She will keep our literary critics’ heads well out of the clouds and in the actual print shop.
I’m really excited to work with everyone, and learn about their fascinating research. Typography/punctuation (i.e. form!) in literature is quite a niche kind of interest, so it feels heartening to meet like-minded people. What we now have to do is write our individual abstracts, as well as a proposal for the panel as a whole, and find a chair. Since we’re four, the format might be a bit less traditional, and we might go with four 15 minute papers, rather than three 20 minute ones. I’m keen to break open usual presentation styles and Q&A sessions, and hope, should we be accepted, we can come up with quirky new methods. The future is ours.
Generally when it comes to conferences and academic events, I’d love for there to be more flexibility for people to attend who cannot attend. What about video-conferencing? Skype-talking? Tweeting, sending questions to the chair in real-time, this kind of stuff? Many are the times that I’d have loved to go to a conference, but simply couldn’t because travelling was too expensive, or I didn’t want to take the plane across the Atlantic. As a zero-waste vegan environmentalist, that’s not something I do. So I’m missing out, and it’s a shame. Hopefully, though, from conference to conference, we keep pushing the limits of communication so that scholars with disabilities, caring responsabilities, environmentalists, and financially disadvantaged people can participate in knowledge exchange. Which, after all, should be at the heart of what we’re doing, right? Amen.