Enfilade

Fold-out engraving in Charles Crawford, Observations on Negro-Slavery (Philadelphia: Eleazer Oswald, 1790)
(Philadelphia: Penn Libraries, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts)

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From Penn Libraries:

Michael Suarez, Printing Abolition: How the Fight to Ban the British Slave Trade Was Won, 1783–1807
The A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography
Online and In-person, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 25, 26, and 28 October 2021

In this series of highly illustrated lectures (originally scheduled for March 2020), Michael Suarez offers a fresh perspective on British abolition, richly informed by political prints and personal correspondence, newspapers and pamphlets, account books and committee minutes, parliamentary reports and private diaries. Suarez’s revisionist history not only traces the production and distribution of abolitionist print, but also reveals the hidden networks that variously sustained the first humanitarian mass media campaign. Abolition forces brilliantly exploited the power of print to contend with the complex legacies of the American and French Revolutions, the slave revolt in present-day Haiti, and the Napoleonic Wars. Seeking to understand how both abolitionists and their foes exploited systems of influence through printed words and images in many forms, Suarez delineates the strategies that abolitionists devised to overcome accusations of religious fanaticism, economic malfeasance, and political sedition. Exploring the first author’s book tour in the UK, a consumer boycott fostered by the radical press, and the fashionable publisher who clandestinely worked as press agent for the pro-slavery interest, these lectures will demonstrate the power of bibliography and book history to rewrite established narratives and to recover lives and labors typically left out of conventional accounts.

These three lectures will be held in person and also livestreamed via Zoom webinar (advance registration required to receive Zoom link). In addition, the lectures will be recorded and available for viewing and as podcasts approximately several weeks after being presented.

Michael F. Suarez, S.J. has served as Director of Rare Book School, Professor of English, University Professor, and Honorary Curator of Special Collections at the University of Virginia since 2009. Professor Suarez serves as Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. His recent books include The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume V, 1695–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), co-edited with Michael Turner, and The Oxford Companion to the Book (Oxford University Press, 2010), a million-word reference work co-edited with H. R. Woudhuysen. The Book: A Global History, also co-edited with H. R. Woudhuysen, first appeared in 2013. In 2014, Oxford University Press published his edition of The Dublin Notebook, co-edited with Lesley Higgins, in the Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He delivered the 2015 Lyell Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Oxford.

Feeding the Machine: A Triple System of Networks
Monday, 25 October 2021, 5.30pm (EST)

Register for this lecture (attending in person or attending virtually, via Zoom webinar).

Commodity Culture and the Political Economies of Print
Tuesday, 26 October 2021, 5.30pm (EST)

Register for this lecture (attending in person or attending virtually, via Zoom webinar).

Beyond Westminster: Toward More Global Forms of Knowing
Thursday, 28 October 2021, 5.30pm (EST)

Register for this lecture (attending in person or attending virtually, via Zoom webinar).