Book History and Biblical Literatures
Program Unit Type: Section
Accepting Papers? Yes
Call For Papers: This unit investigates how insights from Book History illuminate scriptural literatures. We gather scholars of Hebrew Bible/ANE, Judaism, Christianity, Nag Hammadi, Syriac studies, and modernity in a theoretical and historical conversation about the culturally contingent concepts of text, authorship, readership, publication, and materiality. We are accepting abstracts for two panels, with two additional co-sponsored panels of invited papers. The first panel is an open call: we are interested in new work engaging with questions of Book History, broadly conceived, and are particularly hoping to highlight the work of early career researchers, junior scholars, and graduate students. Our second panel aims to focus on the lives of individual manuscripts. We invite abstracts for short (10–12 minute) papers that present a profile or “biography” of a single manuscript, taking into account—for example—its production, use in original context, transmission, use in secondary or tertiary contexts, storage, burial, excavation, trafficking, dismemberment, reconstruction, display, and/or digitization. Our hope is that this panel will spark productive conversations by juxtaposing manuscripts representing diverse traditions and different methods of scholarly analysis. Our joint panel with Religious Worlds of Late Antiquity will invite reviewers to engage Monika Amsler's The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture, and our joint panel with the Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship will invite panelists to present on the topic of the Vulnerable Bible.
Program Unit Chairs
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