UK Research

For most of March, I’ve honed in on my dissertation–finishing up research on two chapters and writing.  I spent nearly two weeks in England attending a conference on eighteenth-century print doing a little work at the British Museum.  (And I tried to take a few days to play the flâneur, walking along the streets of London–and the occasional train.)

There are lots of projects underway . . . more on each of these and my research findings in future posts, but, in the meantime, just a few photos from my wanderings abroad.

The Beauty of Letters

While in England, I took a brief detour to Birmingham, where I presented a paper at a conference entitled, The Beauty of Letters: Text, Type and Communication in the Eighteenth Century held at the University of Birmingham and co-sponsored by the Baskerville Society, the Bibliographical Society, and the Centre for West Midlands History.

Upon my return, I noticed the following snippet on my talk posted by The Fine Press Book Association.

My talk “Compositors of types: typography and design in eighteenth-century America” had a broad topic–printers and typography during the American Revolution, but focused on two figures: Mary Katharine Goddard, Baltimore printer of the Declaration of Independence and Philadelphia-native Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration, who experimented with literature, music, and design and employed local printers to create the most cutting-edge typography being done in the Americas and England, and arguably throughout Europe.