Lynn Ransom
Lynn Ransom joined Penn Libraries in February 2008 as the Project Manager for the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts and is a founding member of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. Lynn holds a B.A. in art history from the University of the South and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in medieval art history, with an emphasis on manuscript illumination. Before coming to Penn, Lynn held positions in the manuscript collections at the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. She also served as a researcher at the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University. She has published on manuscript illumination of the 13th and 16th centuries. Her current research interests involve the provenance of medieval manuscripts and the research potential of Name Authorites in Linked Open Data contexts.
Lynn oversaw the NEH-funded redevelopment of the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts (2014-2017) into an open-access, user-maintained finding aid for the world's pre-modern manuscripts and served as the Principal Investigator for the US team on the Mapping Manuscript Migrations project, a Round 4 Trans-Atlantic Platform Digging into Data Challenge Award recipient (2017-2020). She is currently serving as the Director of Digital Medievalist (until 2022) and the President and Executive Director of Digital Scriptorium (2021-2023). She is also Co-Editor of the Schoenberg Institute's journal Manuscript Studies. A list of her other publications can be found here.
The Book and the Silk Roads approaches the “book” in a capacious way: it is a writing surface, taken from the natural world, hand-crafted to bear textual records. Books can be rolls, leaves, screenfolds, codices, tablets, and even standing stones. To reveal their meanings, to read their diverse texts and scripts alongside their materials, physical structures, and layers of accretions, we need to marshal innovative, interdisciplinary approaches and a collaborative methodology, embedded within a global perspective. Over the past year and a half, we have worked to transform our understanding of the human past and its nonhuman contexts by establishing a wide range of research partnerships, laying the groundwork for a global history of the book. In this talk, we will offer an overview of The Book and the Silk Roads that 1) summarizes the lessons learned during the pandemic, as our project has pivoted in a nimble way to accommodate increased use of online environments and limitations on research travel; 2) outlines some of our research findings, from birchbark Kashmiri manuscripts to palimpsests from Sinai; and 3) describes our increasingly substantial public humanities focus, including our upcoming exhibition at the Aga Khan Museum, Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads.
A recording of the lecture is now available via this link.
More information about the SIMS Online Lecture Series can be found here.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari is professor of medieval studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Her books are on optics and allegory (Seeing Through the Veil) and European views of Islam and the Orient (Idols in the East), and she’s also edited volumes on travel literature, Mediterranean Studies, and somatic histories, plus the Open Access collections How We Write and How We Read. Her most recent book is The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (2020), co-edited with James Simpson.
Alexandra Gillespie is Principal of the University of Toronto Mississauga, Vice-President of the University of Toronto, and Professor of English and Medieval Studies. Her research is concerned with medieval and early modern texts and books, especially: the shift from manuscript to print; the relationship between book history, literary criticism, and literary theory; the global development of early book technologies; and digital and non-destructive scientific approaches to the study of premodern books. She is a faculty member in the University of Toronto Mississauga Department of English and Drama and the University of Toronto Department of English, Centre for Medieval Studies, and Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture. She is a Fellow of Victoria College and Trinity College at the University of Toronto.
Professor Akbari and Professor Gillespie are Co-PIs on The Book and the Silk Roads project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
