John H. Pollack
John H. Pollack is Curator, Research Services, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. He has worked in this department since 1995. His responsibilities include providing assistance to students and scholars, and teaching and organizing class sessions centered on the collections. He is also responsible for the Furness Shakespeare Library, which is part of the Kislak Center.
John holds a PhD in English from Penn and a BA from Washington University in St. Louis. He specializes in Early American literature and history, and early modern book history. His research has focused on topics including Native American languages; colonial writings from New France; and Benjamin Franklin and colonial education.
Registration information: all three lectures will be held in person and also streamed virtually, via Zoom webinar. Please register separately for each lecture (see below).
“The difficulty lies with reading itself,” the leading book historian Robert Darnton remarked in 1996. “We hardly know what it is when it takes place under our noses.” Detailing its “external circumstances” is one thing; capturing the more elusive process of “inner appropriation” quite another—in fact, he thought the latter “may remain beyond the range of research.” Darnton was thinking mainly about the difficulty of recovering what readers in the past made of the books they read, but his doubts about our ability to describe “the ultimate stage in the communication circuit” remain as relevant for multimedia readers today.
In this three-part series, Peter D. McDonald addresses the challenge of uncovering, and then relating, the fugitive history of reading’s inwardness.
Monday, March 14, 5:30pm: “The History of Sex”: orality, literacy, and the living brain
- Register for this lecture (attending in person)
- Register for this lecture (attending virtually, via Zoom)
Tuesday, March 15, 5:30pm: “The Lure of Literature”: books, histories, and the state
- Register for this lecture (attending in person)
- Register for this lecture (attending virtually, via Zoom)
Thursday, March 17, 5:30pm: “Scant Cream”: sense, nonsense, and the reader re-made
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- Register for this lecture (attending virtually, via Zoom)
For more information about the A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography
Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature and Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He is the author of Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (Oxford, 2017); The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (Oxford, 2009); British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (Cambridge, 1997); and co-author of PEN: An Illustrated History (Interlink/Thames & Hudson, 2021).
