Books and Print between Cultures, 1500-1900*

Keynote speaker: Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Distinguished Professor & Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences, UCLA)

Organized by Yael Rice (Amherst College, History of Art & Asian Languages and Civilizations)
This interdisciplinary symposium will investigate the role that books (codices, rolls, scrolls, and other related media), prints, and their associated technologies played in mediating and instantiating cultural difference in the early modern period. By framing the history of books and prints as meandering and material, this symposium aims to contribute new dialogues to the study of the global early modern.
The symposium will begin at 4pm on Friday, September 18, with an open house at Amherst College's Archives & Special Collections, with Sanjay Subrahmanyam's keynote lecture following at 5:30pm. A full day of talks (8:45 am - 5:45 pm) is scheduled for Saturday, September 19. The topics are diverse and cover early modern book / material cultures and practices from the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman Empires and from East Asia to Latin America.
For more information, including the full program and paper abstracts, please see the symposium website: http://booksandprint.sites.amherst.edu/
The symposium is free and open to the public; however, we do ask that those wishing to attend register through the symposium website.
Please also note that a similarly themed symposium ("Agents of Contact: Books and Print between Cultures in the Early Modern Period"), organized by András Kiséry (City College of New York), is scheduled to take place in New York City on September 25:
https://agentsofcontact.wordpress.com/
*This event has been generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Dean of Faculty, the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations (the Tagliabue and Hall Funds), the Department of Art and the History of Art, and the Program in European Studies at Amherst College; and the Book Studies Concentration at Smith College.

SCHEDULE
September 18, 2015
Robert Frost Library (level A), Amherst College
4:00 – 5:15 pm
Open House, Archives & Special Collections
Cole Assembly Room, Converse Hall, Amherst College
5:30 pm
KEYNOTE LECTURE: Sanjay Subrahmanyam (University of California, Los Angeles), ““No want of Persian bookes of all sorts”: The Market for Books and Images in Mughal Surat (ca. 1700-1760)”
6:30 – 7 pm
Reception

September 19, 2015
Cole Assembly Room, Converse Hall, Amherst College
8:45 am
Coffee
9 – 9:15 am
Yael Rice (Amherst College), Welcome & Opening Remarks
9:15 – 11 am
DISSEMINATION
Chair: András Kiséry (City College of New York)
Byron Hamann (The Ohio State University), “Congealed Circulation, Mediterratlantic Slavery, and the Costume Book of Christoph Weiditz”
Nir Shafir (University of California, Los Angeles), “How to Become a successful pamphleteer and author in the early modern Ottoman Empire“
Aaron Hyman (University of California, Berkeley) & Dana Leibsohn (Smith College), “Colonial Surfaces: Prints, Loss and Latin America”
11 – 11:15 am
Coffee break
11:15 – 1 pm
TRANSLATION
Chair: Brian Ogilvie (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Stephanie Porras (Tulane University), “Going viral? Maerten de Vos’s St Michael the Archangel”
Dipti Khera (New York University), “Copying Contexts: Picturing Places and Histories in Udaipur Court Painting and Picart’s Atlas Historique”
Hansun Hsiung (Harvard University), “Emblematic Technologies: Knowledge, Scientific and Moral, between Copperplate, Woodblock, and Ink Painting”
1 – 2:15 pm
Lunch
2:15 – 3:45 pm
RETICULATION
Chair: Leyla Rouhi (Williams College)
Sebouh Aslanian (University of California, Los Angeles), “The Early Arrival of Print in Safavid Iran: Port Cities, Global History, and the Armenian Printing Press of New Julfa (1636-1650, 1686 1693)”
Lisa Brooks (Amherst College), “The Harvard Indian College and the Emergence of a Collaborative, Multilingual American Literature” (1650-75)
3:45 – 4 pm
Coffee break
4 – 5:45 pm
CULTIVATION
Chair: Mitch Fraas (University of Pennsylvania)
Indira Peterson (Mount Holyoke College), “The Devan?gar? Press of Serfoji II of Tanjore: The Printed Book and Vernacular Modernity at a Colonial Indian Court”
Ayesha Irani (University of Massachusetts, Boston), “Islamic Bengali Literature’s Trajectory from Manuscript to Print: The Politics of Language, the Archive, and Literary Historiography”

Cynthia Brokaw (Brown University), “The Journal of Sichuan Studies, Western Learning, and Classical Studies in Late Nineteenth-Century China”