Updates from Executive Director Robin G. Schulze, Professor and Head, Penn State University

October 17, 2008

This has been another year of firsts for the Society for Textual Scholarship.

STS is now successfully launched on a YEARLY conference schedule:

In March of 2008, STS held, for the first time, an ANNUAL conference at a venue outside of New York City. Sixty members of STS converged on the Editorial Institute of Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts http://www.bu.edu/editinst/index.html for a two-day discussion of "Editing Across the Disciplines."

Professors Archie Burnett and Christopher Ricks, the Directors of the Institute, were wonderful hosts. STS owes a special debt of thanks to them for arranging, sponsoring, and directing the conference. Thanks are due as well to Assistant Director Frances Whistler, whose time and effort helped to make the conference such a success.

One significant highlight of the conference was the active participation of the next generation of textual scholars. Thanks to Archie, Christopher, and Frances, the conference welcomed and supported the presentations of large numbers of graduate students engaged in textual work. The Boston Editorial Institute also offered the first-ever STS prize for the best paper by a graduate student at the 2008 conference. First prize went to Mandy Gagel for her paper entitled, "Letters from Violet Paget (Vernon Lee) to Bernard Berenson and Mary Berenson (Costelloe) in 1897." Second prize was awarded to James Stephen Murphy (University of California, Berkeley), for his paper entitled "The Death of the Editor, the Birth of the Data Miner." Bravo to both of these fine young scholars and thanks to Archie, Christopher, and Frances for establishing a prize category that STS will sponsor in future conferences.

Gearing up for STS 2009 Conference, March 18-21, New York University, New York City

The time to start thinking about your paper proposal for STS 2009 is NOW. Proposals are due to the conference co-chairs on or before October 31, 2008.

CALL FOR PAPERS SOCIETY FOR TEXTUAL SCHOLARSHIP
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2009

Program Co-Chairs:
Andrew Stauffer, Boston University [astauff@bu.edu];
John Young, Marshall University [youngj@marshall.edu]

Deadline for Proposals: October 31, 2008

The Program Chairs invite the submission of full panels or individual papers devoted to interdisciplinary discussion of current research into particular aspects of textual work: the discovery, enumeration, description, bibliographical analysis, editing, annotation, and mark-up of texts in disciplines such as literature, history, musicology, classical and biblical studies, philosophy, art history, legal history, history of science and technology, computer science, library science, lexicography, epigraphy, paleography, codicology, cinema studies, media studies, theater, linguistics, and textual and literary theory. The Program Chairs are particularly interested in papers and panels, as well as workshops and roundtables, on the following topics, aimed at a broad, interdisciplinary audience:

• Textual production and the social sphere
• Textual cultures
• Digital editing and textuality
• The production and editing of "minority" texts
• Theoretical and practical intersections between textual scholarship and book history
• Textual scholarship and pedagogy

Papers should be no more than 20 minutes in length. Panels should consist of three papers or presentations. Individual proposals should include a brief abstract (one or two pages) of the proposed paper as well as the name, e-mail address, and institutional affiliation of the participant. Panel proposals, including proposals for roundtables and workshops, should include a session title, the name of a designated contact person for the session, the names, e-mail addresses, and institutional addresses and affiliations of each person involved in the session, and a one- or two-page abstract of each paper to be presented during the session. Abstracts should indicate what (if any) technological support will be requested.

Inquiries and proposals should be submitted electronically to:

Professor Andrew Stauffer, email address: astauff@bu.edu
Department of English
Boston University
236 Bay State Road
Boston, MA 02215

and

Professor John Young, email address: youngj@marshall.edu
Department of English
Marshall University
One John Marshall Drive
Huntington, WV 25755
(304) 696-2349
(304) 696-2448 (fax)

All participants in the STS 2009 conference must be members of STS.

Papers presented at the conference will be considered for publication in TEXTUAL CULTURES.

STS ELECTS A NEW PRESIDENT:

At the most recent meeting of the Society for Textual Scholarship Executive Board, Professor James L. W. West, III, of the Penn State University Department of English was elected president for the 2009-2011 term. A world-renown editor of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Styron, and Theodore Dreiser, Jim is a long-standing member of the Society for Textual Scholarship. Jim will deliver the Presidential Address at the March 2009 conference in New York City. Congratulations Jim, and thank you for agreeing to take on this important role. Thank you, as well, to our outgoing president, George Bornstein, for his invaluable service to STS.

Funds still needed to support the Finneran Award

In the winter of 2005, the STS Executive Board voted to raise money to establish an enduring memorial to Richard J. Finneran in the form of the Finneran Award, a prize given in recognition of the best edition or book about editorial theory and/or practice published in the English language during the preceding two calendar years.

At the 2007 New York conference, the first Finneran Award was presented to Professor Peter Shillingsburg for his wonderful 2006 study, From Gutenberg to Google.: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts (Cambridge University Press, 2006). The committee also awarded a second place prize to Professor Philip Gossett for his masterful study Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago, 2006).

In pursuit of making the Finneran Award a lasting tribute, STS is still working to raise an endowment of $5,000 to support the prize. We are currently three quarters of the way to our goal and we need the help of our members to reach it. If you would like to make a donation in Richard's honor to the Richard Finneran Memorial Fund, please send your check, payable to the Society for Textual Scholarship, to our Treasurer, Professor Beth Loizeaux.

Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux
Associate Professor of English
Associate Dean
College of Arts and Humanities
1102 Francis Scott Key Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742