Lockport ahead: Speaking at the History Center of Niagara, Thurs May 19

So excited to be giving my first talk on scrapbooks for the Public Scholars in the Humanities program of the New York State Council for the Humanities, which has 31 scholars giving talks around the state. I have been completely wowed by those I met at our workshops last summer — Richard Heyl de Ortiz, who speaks about the foster care system, Sally Roesch Wagner, who speaks on the 19c women’s rights movement, and the cartoonist Robert Sikoryak who graciously shlepped to my university in Jersey City to give a brilliant presentation on the history of cartoons/graphic novels, and two dozen more. Just looking at the list of speakers again is inspiring. If you’re in NY State, your organization can invite one! Or more!

Tomorrow I head upstate to speak about scrapbooks at the History Center of Niagara, hard by the Erie Canal, with stops in Glen Falls along the way. I hope people respond to the invitation to bring their scrapbooks (50 years old or more — the scrapbooks, not the people). I’ll bring some of mine, too. And yes, I’ll talk about how people without much power — African Americans, women’s rights advocates — used scrapbooks to speak back to the media.

Thursday, May 19, 7 pm. Niagara County Historical Society,  215 Niagara Street, Lockport, NY 14094. Looking forward to seeing you!

 

Scrapbook talk DC May 23, 3:30

Washington, DC was such productive rummaging ground for my research for Writing with Scissors. I am grateful that the Library of Congress saved the scrapbooks of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clara Barton, and Anna E. Dickinson, among others, and that Howard University’s Moorland Spingarn Collection preserved some of William Dorsey’s that didn’t end up at Cheyney University, one of John Wesley Cromwell’s, and the extraordinary collection that Joseph W. H. Cathcart passed along to Cromwell. So glad to be heading speaking about these and other scrapbooks in DC at the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies, Friday May 23, 3:30, at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, 500 17th St. NW, Washington, DC, RCR Room, Main Atrium. (Yes, that’s the same address as the Corcoran Gallery — plan your afternoon accordingly!)

 

Speaking at Harvard April 11 on Writing with Scissors

Boston! Writing with Scissors talk this Thursday April 11 at Harvard’s Mahindra Center for the Humanities at the History of the Book Seminar that Leah Price and Ann Blair run. Bob Gross responds. So exciting to be in such illustrious company! Looking forward to seeing you there!.

Click here for more information from Harvard’s Mahindra Center for the Humanities.

March 27 talk at Massachusetts Historical Society

From Mrs. Albert T. Leatherbee’s Anti-Suffrage scrapbook

Some of the extraordinary scrapbooks I worked with at the Massachusetts Historical Society will be on display there for my talk March 27, 6 pm (come early for wine and cheese). The lively (I’m told) talk, with lots of pictures, is on 19th Century Activists and Their Scrapbooks. Writing with Scissors talk at MHS — sign in to let them know you’re coming.

Reviewed in New York Review of Books

A page about Frederick Douglass from the scrapbooks of L. S. Alexander Gumby – Columbia Univ. Libraries

Christopher Benfey’s review in the New York Review of Books blog of Writing with Scissors, “Scrapbook Nation,” makes great connections between scrapbooks and the writings of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. He reproduces some of the Dickinson writings on scraps of paper in the Amherst College archives that I had the chance to see this fall, with Karen Sanchez-Eppler’s class. Gorgeous and tantalizing. I’m so thrilled to have this brilliant and beautiful writer enjoying my book! (And I’m inspired to catch up on his other reviews – enjoyable reading.)

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/feb/20/scrapbook-nation/

Talk in Manchester, UK Feb. 28

Pass the word to your Manchester friends — talk on Writing with Scissors at Manchester Metropolitan University coming up Thursday Feb. 28 at 4 pm.

Details on talk at Manchester Metropolitan University

NYC talk on scrapbooks – Feb 13

Wed. Feb. 13 informal talk on scrapbooks – New York Metro American Studies Association, at Hunter College. Plenty of pictures!

Thanks, St. Mark’s Bookshop!

I’m so proud to have given a talk at the St. Mark’s Bookshop, a Lower East Side neighborhood treasure.

Margarita introducing the talk

Audience at St. Mark’s

Speaking at St. Mark’s Bookshop

Audience at St. Mark’s

Ellen signing books

Link

Short interview about 19th century scrapbooks

Interview on WAMC’s The Roundtable

I’ve gotten fascinating emails from people who heard me interviewed on WAMC’s The Roundtable – a good reminder to post this link.

Scrapbooks: The Facebook of 1800s — The Durham Herald-Sun’s write-up of my scrapbook talk at Duke

Write up of my Duke University talk

So great that the Duke University library put some of the scrapbooks I was speaking about on display for people to look at.