Reposted by Mira ‘Assaf
We're looking forward to discussing @miramiraculous.bsky.social's paper next Monday! Still time to sign up if you'd like to receive the paper and join the session.
Mira ‘Assaf
@miramiraculous.bsky.social
1.6K followers 763 following 129 posts
Book: Royal Marriage, Foreign Queens,& Constructions of Race in Early Modern England, under contract @ACMRSPress | 23-24 Long-term Fellow, @FolgerLibrary | Arab | dilettante
![[ SEMINAR • SAA 2026 ]
SHAKESPEARE & PUBLIC LIBRARIES
This seminar examines the role of public libraries (local, national and international) in the preservation, dissemination, and study of the books and other media that transmit works by Shakespeare and other early modern writers. The recent identification of two books once owned by John Milton—a Shakespeare First Folio and a copy of Holinshed's Chronicles-at two American public libraries (The Free Library of Philadelphia and the Phoenix Public Library, respectively) and the presence of another of Milton's books (a sammelband of early Italian editions) at a third (The New York Public Library) invites us to acknowledge and rethink an implicit bias towards well-funded elite libraries and collections as privileged sites of textual and historical research. How might our knowledge of early modern textual history and the history of early modern books in the longue durée change with greater consideration of public collections? What do (and could) scholarly partnerships with public libraries look like-and what can they achieve in terms of bolstering the value of humanistic inquiry? How might the histories of (and transmitted by) the early modern books in these collections, which we are uniquely positioned to tell, relate to the specific local communities that they serve? In this way, the seminar is also interested in the ways that public libraries feature Shakespeare in the promotion of their circulating collections, educational programming, and public events, as many U.S. public libraries did during the quatercentenaries of Shakespeare's death in 2016 and of the publication of the first folio in 2023. While the idea for this seminar emerges from our experiences working in American public libraries, we would welcome contributions from scholars and librarians considering the role of public libraries in Shakespeare and early modern studies in various different regional and national traditions.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:oh4p26m2rd2cibjqvf2bse54/bafkreiaazajgst3ydy73ehvnbbxmvzrbbw3edutrkg6kgamublvov3ig5m)
