The Futures of Handwriting is a symposium sponsored by the University of Louisville and the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, in partnership with the Filson Historical Society. It will be held April 12-13, 2019.
The Futures of Handwriting brings together an interdisciplinary array of scholars working in media theory, historical studies, art practice, pedagogy, and other fields in order to address four interrelated questions. The first entails a theorizing of the media itself: what are the futures of handwriting's meanings and affordances? The second pertains to the history of lived experience: how do scribal practices contribute to the futures and/or foreclosures of various peoples and communities? The third is a matter of our own intermedial literacies: how does handwriting figure within larger media ecologies, and relatedly, what is the place of manuscript cultures for establishing communicative forms, from language, to codices, to the very idea of “writing”? The final question is a meta-commentary on the symposium itself: how does handwriting and allied forms of expression together contribute to a sense of time itself? If manuscript comes “after” print, as Peter Stallybrass has claimed, then where are we today?
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