SoFCB Annual Meeting

This year’s annual meeting theme is “Unfinished.” The book is always in the process of being formed. Attention to those journeys of formation reveal not only the shape of material objects but also important patterns of social and cultural community formation. Of course, not only the objects of our research are unfinished; the field of Critical Bibliography itself is a project in formation. As Lisa Maruca and Kate Ozment recently have pointed out, critical bibliography draws from a number of fields to focus our attention not only on “structures of oppression upholding the circulation, preservation, and organization of material texts” but also “the possibilities of liberation therein.” Multiple commitments animate the always unfinished project of critical bibliography, and the tension between sometimes conflicting priorities contribute to its unfinished, generative quality. We invite contributions that pay attention to the book as an unfinished material and social object in any context. We welcome papers that comment on novel combinations of tradition and innovation that make and remake the texts, the communities that we study, and the disciplines that we inhabit as librarians, scholars, and curators.