Devin Fitzgerald, "Global Book History"

Seed bank: now with props!

This is a really fun discussion: Fitzgerald starts by helping us think through the category of the “global” book, moving from what he describes as our current model for imagining globality to one that emphasizes a deeper and far more intertwined book history. From a certain point of view, he says, all books are global (but you have to watch the video to understand why).

He then shows how some of the ways that libraries have institutionalized the idea of “special collections” have reinforced Eurocentric notions of what kind of books count or need to be preserved (this a matter not only of content, as he suggests, but of form).

It’s a fun, wide-ranging, and intellectually impassioned reminder that the materials through which culture reproduces itself are as interesting as the ideas that are so reproduced.

Biography

Devin Fitzgerald is Lecturer in the Department of History and Associate Research Fellow in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Prior to coming to Yale, Devin was the Curator of Rare Book and the History of Printing at UCLA Library Special Collections. Devin is an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Critical Bibliography and is currently the Vice President of the Society. He actively uses over a dozen languages in his work and instruction and has taught at both the University of Virginia Rare Book School and the California Rare Book School. His research focuses on global book cultures and intercultural encounters. Some of his publications include, “The Early Modern Information Revolution,” coauthored with Ann Blair, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, “Chinese Papers in the Early Modern World” (Ars Orientalis) and “Manchu Language Pedagogical Practices: The Connections Between Manuscript and Printed Books” (Saksaha).  He is currently working on two monograph length studies. The first examines the interconnected histories of the paper codex. The second is a revision of the second half of his dissertation, which investigated the globalization of the idea of China during the early modern period.