2024:
Noam Sienna - Hidden Stories Travels

• In May, Global Judaica postdoc Noam Sienna delivered the annual Herman Memorial Lecture in Jewish Studies at the University of Regina. Titled “Hidden Stories: How Jewish Books Reveal Global Connections in the Premodern World,” the lecture provided an overview of the Hidden Stories project as well as his own research, with an emphasis on how studying the Jewish book as a material object reveals the connections that underlie the internal relationships of local Jewish communities and the larger social networks in which they are enmeshed.

• In June and July, Sienna travelled to the UK for two weeks, first to teach early modern Sephardi paleography at the annual Oxford Hebrew Manuscript Seminar, and then to the University of Reading to present some of his research on the Ibn Nahmias press at SHARP 2024 (the Society for the History of Authorship, Readership, and Publishing), on a panel about the movement of Jewish books in the early modern world. While there, Sienna was able to visit the impressive letterpress studio and book history research lab set up in the Typography and Graphic Communication Department.

Suzanne Conklin Akbari on Book Circulation and the Jewish Diaspora

Hidden Stories Co-PI Suzanne Conklin Akbari presented two papers discussing diaspora as a framework within the project, focusing particularly on how diaspora functions in three geographical regions - Global Judaica, Ethiopia and Coastal East Africa, and Great Lakes and Eastern Woodlands. Both lectures described how the Hidden Stories project conceptualizes diaspora, as well as related terms such as ‘community of origin’ which can refer not only to those who live in the territory where the book was originally produced but also to those who live in that community’s global diaspora).

• “Mapping the Interconnected Medieval World: Diasporic Communities and Their Books,” Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. 14-16 March. 

• “Mapping the Interconnected Medieval World: Diasporic Communities and Their Books,” Aris Lecture, Center for Premodern Studies at the University of Minnesota (held at Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Minneapolis). 26 March.

2023:

Alexandra Gillespie on Hebrew Books and the Global History of Printing

Hidden Stories Co-PI Alexandra Gillespie presented research on early printing from a global perspective at two gatherings in the fall of 2023: a seminar “Crossroads of Communication,” hosted on the Australian Catholic University’s Rome campus in Monteverde; and the symposium “The Jewish Book in the Early Modern World,” held at the Klau Library in Cincinnati where she discussed scientific methods for the study of early Hebrew printed books. Gillespie was also honoured to deliver the Klau Library Feld Memorial Lecture, “Hebrew Books and the Global History of Printing.” Her presentations explored different aspects of how the long history of printing can transform dominant narratives about the book and the origins of modernity, with a particular focus on the diffuse, often precarious, trans-cultural and trans-national role of Jewish diasporic communities in the development of early printing outside of East Asia. This work is in conversation with the Hidden Stories research on Global Judaica being carried out by postdoctoral fellow Noam Sienna.

You can read more about this and other research areas in the Hidden Stories Newsletters.