Book History and Biblical Literatures

Call For Papers: This section investigates how insights from Book History illuminate scriptural literatures. We consider the culturally contingent concepts of text, authorship, readership, publication, and materiality, marshaling scholars of Hebrew Bible/ANE, Judaism, Early Christianity, Nag Hammadi, Syriac studies, and other sub-fields within the SBL to encourage collaborative and comparative work. We will host three sessions in 2016. The first session welcomes proposals on the theme of PUBLICATION. What did it mean to make a text "public" in the ancient world? If "publishing" is a modern concept that scholars sometimes anachronistically impose on antiquity, what are some ways we might think historically about the promulgation and dissemination of writing in the ancient societies that produced our sources? The theme of the second session is open. Given the lively interest in our 2015 theme of Paratexts, we welcome more submissions that engage this topic (the study of textual frames, such as titles, prefaces, epilogues, colophons, marginalia, etc), but also invite proposals on any topic within the purview of Book History and Biblical Literatures. For both of these sessions, we are particularly interested in proposals that take comparative and theoretical approaches and bring different subfields of the SBL into conversation with one another. In keeping with the interdisciplinary emphasis of the section, we especially encourage submissions from scholars working in Qu'ranic Studies/Islamic Studies. Our third session is an invited panel sponsored jointly with the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section on reading practices in antiquity, featuring classicist William Johnson of Duke University.

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