News | April 18, 2016

Rare Book School Receives Mellon Foundation Grant to Support “Bibliography Among the Disciplines” Conference

Charlottesville, VA, April 18, 2016-Rare Book School (RBS) at the University of Virginia has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a four-day international conference, “Bibliography Among the Disciplines.” To be held in Philadelphia in October 2017, the meeting will focus on developing object-oriented methods, skills, and collaborative projects across disciplinary fields, time periods, regions, and languages. The project will culminate in 2019 with a volume of essays contributed by conference participants.

The conference and subsequent volume will seek to build on the ongoing series of symposia conducted by Rare Book School’s Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography, established in 2012 through funding from the Foundation. The conference sessions will include both traditional and innovative formats: plenary addresses, short presentations, roundtable, workshops, working groups, and site visits. The conference will be widely advertised to more than 30 academic associations and societies, as well as professional organizations for scholar-librarians, museum curators, conservators, archivists, collectors, and antiquarian booksellers.

“This conference comes at an important time for academics, librarians, and curators alike, as an increasing number of libraries and museums seek to address questions about the dissemination, use, and preservation of original sources,” said RBS Director Michael F. Suarez, S.J. “We are grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for this unique opportunity, which will allow us to bring together junior and senior specialists who are exploring new methods and technologies for analyzing textual artifacts. It is our hope that the conference will help pave the way for future work in bibliography and the global history of the book across disciplines and professions.”

Conference organizers will begin circulating calls for papers in June 2016, with submissions due in September 2016. More information about the “Bibliography Among the Disciplines” conference will be available in May 2016 at: http://www.rarebookschool.org/bibliography-conference.

About Rare Book School (RBS)

Rare Book School provides continuing-education opportunities for students from all disciplines and levels to study the history of written, printed, and born-digital materials with leading s cholars and professionals in the fields of bibliography, librarianship, book history, manuscript studies, and the digital humanities. Founded in 1983, RBS moved to its present home at the University of Virginia in 1992. RBS is a not-for-profit educational organization affiliated with the University of Virginia. More information about RBS is available on its website: http://www.rarebookschool.org.