Virtual Book Talks

Virtual Book Talks started in 2020 to showcase recent scholarship and creative works related to book history and print culture. Authors featured in the series discuss new publications that integrate the history of the book with fields of study such as race, indigeneity, gender, performance, literature, and popular culture. These publications are often based upon research at AAS and frequently showcase relevant materials from the Society’s collections.

Each installment includes an informal presentation from the author followed by a lively Q&A with the audience. The talks are livestreamed for registered participants and are archived for posterity on the AAS YouTube channel. Each Virtual Book Talk typically lasts 45 minutes to one hour.

Year Presenter or Co-leaders Title Video
2025 Ben Bascom Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States
2025 Bryan Sinche Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature
2024 Sara E. Johnson Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World
2024 Amy Gore Book Anatomy: Body Politics and Materiality in Indigenous Book History Yes
2024 Laura Cleaver , Kristen Doyle Highland , Danielle Magnusson , Kate Ozment Bookstores, Collectors, and the Rare Book Trade in Historical Perspective Yes
2024 Lara Langer Cohen Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States Yes
2024 Duncan Faherty The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters Yes
2024 Martha J. Cutter The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown Yes
2023 Michaël Roy Fugitive Texts: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture Yes
2023 Caroline Wigginton Indigenuity: Native Craftwork and the Art of American Literatures Yes
2023 Christen Mucher Removal in the Archive: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession Yes
2023 Katie McGettigan The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature: Publishing US Writing in Britain, 1830–1860 Yes
2023 Lloyd P. Pratt The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature Yes
2022 Jeffrey Makala Publishing Plates: Stereotyping and Electrotyping in Nineteenth-Century US Print Culture Yes
2022 Marcy J. Dinius The Textual Effects of David Walker's "Appeal" Print-Based Activism Against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829-1851 Yes
2022 Michael D'Alessandro Staged Readings: Contesting Class in Popular American Theater and Literature, 1835-75 Yes
2022 Daniel Diez Couch American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic Yes
2022 Michael Lawrence Dickinson Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic Yes
2022 Sarah Purcell Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era Yes
2022 David K. Thomson Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on the Union Yes
2022 Jennifer Putzi Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry Yes
2022 Hannah Farber Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding Yes
2022 Reed Gochberg Useful Objects: Museums, Science, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America Yes
2022 Matthew G. Kirschenbaum Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage Yes
2021 Mark Rifkin Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form Yes
2021 Elizabeth McHenry To Make Negro Literature: Writing Literary Practice and African American Authorship Yes
2021 Corinna Zeltsman Ink Under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico Yes
2021 Gordon Fraser Star Territory: Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America Yes
2021 Elizabeth Kimball Translingual Inheritance: Language Diversity in Early National Philadelphia Yes
2021 Billy Coleman Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788–1865 Yes
2021 Melissa J. Homestead The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather & Edith Lewis Yes
2021 Laura Heffernan , Rachel Sagner Buurma The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study Yes
2021 Koritha Mitchell From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture Yes
2021 Lucas Dietrich Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920 Yes
2021 Megan Rosenbloom Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin Yes
2021 Craig Dworkin Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality Yes
2020 Brigitte Fielder Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America Yes
2020 Rodrigo Lazo Letters from Filadelfia: Early Latino Literature and the Trans-American Elite Yes
2020 Adam Gordon Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites: Antebellum Print Culture and the Rise of the Critic Yes
2020 Jessica Pressman Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age Yes
2020 Amy Hildreth Chen Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market Yes
2020 Jonathan Senchyne The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature Yes
2020 Glenda Goodman Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic Yes
2020 Derrick R. Spires The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States Yes