Thank you to everyone who came out to One Book One Chicago History of Reading program last week and made it a success. Don’t forget, there’s one more OBOC program at DePaul this season, and it’s taking place this week:

The Book as Object
Wednesday, October 10, 7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
DePaul University, Lincoln Park Campus
John T. Richardson Library, Room 300
2350 N. Kenmore Avenue
A book exists as more than just a vessel for the written word—it’s an artwork, a collectible and, of course, a target for thieves. Join librarian Scott Walter and artist Matthew Girson, along with cultural critic Rachel Shteir, author of The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting, as they discuss various personal and cultural ways of experiencing The Book beyond reading. Sponsored by DePaul University’s Department of English.

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The DePaul Humanities Center is looking forward to their next event as well: On Friday, November 2nd, 2012 at 6:00 p.m. at the DePaul Art Museum, 935 W. Fullerton (a reception will precede at 5:30 p.m.), Anne K. Knowles will present: Geographic Imagination’s Role in the Digital Humanities.

Visualizing places, movement, and spatial relations has become a prevalent theme in the digital humanities. Such visualizations are inherently, if not explicitly, geographical, yet geographers have not generally been in the vanguard of this exciting new vein of scholarship. This presentation argues that geographers have a key role to play as masters of geovisual methods and as scholars with long practice in applying geographic imagination to research questions. Examples will come primarily from collaborative research among geographers, historians, and cartographers on the geographies of the Holocaust.

Anne Kelly Knowles is Associate Professor of Geography at Middlebury College. For more than fifteen years, she has been a pioneer in historical geographic information systems. Her two edited books, Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History (ESRI Press 2002) and Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (ESRI Press 2008), along with special issues of the journals Social Science History and Historical Geography, have become benchmarks in this interdisciplinary field. As an historical geographer, Knowles has specialized in American immigration and industrialization, the subjects of Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio’s Industrial Frontier (University of Chicago Press 1997) and Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2012). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. Anne is currently finishing her work as lead editor of Geographies of the Holocaust, a collection of essays issuing from the interdisciplinary Holocaust Historical GIS project.

This event is free and open to the public. Please click to enlarge the poster for more information.

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The 2013 Women and Gender History Symposium at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be taking place on February 28th through March 2nd, 2013, and they have issued a call for papers. From the symposium description:

More than two decades have passed since a rich body of literature made Women’s and Gender History a vital field with exploitation as a key theme. Today, exploitation remains an important idea in Women’s and Gender History. But, African American feminist Patricia Hill-Collins told us that exploitation “cannot be reduced to one fundamental type” and that these multiple forms of exploitation are organized in a “matrix of domination.” Exploitation is multidimensional and nuanced. It transgresses time and space. It moves across bodies, borders, and genders. It shapes social relationships. Exploitation, then, should be approached from a multifaceted angle using a transdisciplinary lens.

However, we must not reinscribe intellectual imperialism, assuming that gender is a synonym for women. For example, gender, like race and class, is a historically situated, constructed social category that changes meaning at different historical moments. Yet women and gendered subjects have been exploited by these categories, depending on the space, time, and political condition before them. They have never been passive, but active agents in resisting exploitation.

We seek papers that engage the concept of exploitation broadly across time period, across genders, across sexualities, across and beyond the nation-state borders. While we value essays that take a historical approach, they need not be historical. We strongly encourage papers that use a transdisciplinary approach to understand various aspects of Women’s and Gender History/Studies. We especially encourage submissions that focus on traditionally under-studied topics within the larger field of Women’s and Gender History/Studies, and among them, indigenous women and queer indigenous subjects. Submissions with a focus on transnational exploitation are also strongly encouraged. Again, we would like to reiterate that we are not only interested in how subjects in Women’s and Gender History/Studies have been exploited, but also the various methods they have used to resist exploitation.

Possible Topics May Include (but certainly not limited to):

• Media and exploitation
• Transnationalism and Women’s and Gender Studies
• Transnational sexuality
• Exploitation of bodies
• Settler Colonialism and Exploitation
• The law and exploitation

Please submit your 300-500 word abstracts by November 15th, 2012 to gendersymp@gmail.com.

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The Book Cellar is celebrating this week’s release of Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story, an anthology that asks twenty contemporary masters of the genre to answer “What does it take to write a great short story?” by sharing their favorite stories from the pages The Paris Review with personalized introductions.

Aleksandar Hemon, a local contributor to Object Lessons, will be reading at The Book Cellar on Wednesday, October 10th at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public, and books will be available for purchase. Visit www.bookcellarinc.com for more information.