University Libraries Writers Series features SBU Faculty

Joshua Teplitsky and Douglas Pfeiffer, University Libraries Writers Series, February 2016.

Joshua Teplitsky and Douglas Pfeiffer, University Libraries Writers Series, February 2016.

On Tuesday February 22, an enthused audience of students, faculty, staff, and community members attended the first event of the spring 2016 University Libraries Writers Series: A Conversation with Douglas Pfeiffer and Joshua Teplitsky.

Looking at Erasmus of Rotterdam’s learned yet playfully inventive 1516 edition of Saint Jerome, professor Douglas Pfeiffer of English discussed “How Erasmus Invented Historical Context.” Erasmus’ editing revealed just how central non-rational, even fictionalizing methods were to early modern philology – the field often understood as a progenitor of modern fact-based, critical historiography. In the “Social Life of Jewish Books: Archiving Jewish Life in Eighteenth-Century Prague,” professor Joshua Teplitsky of History “unpacked” the library of David Oppenheim and pointed to the ways that the movement of books can reveal more than just intellectual horizons—following their ephemeral traces provides for an expanded archive of social and political life in premodern Europe.

University Libraries Writers Series, February 2016.

University Libraries Writers Series, February 2016.

A lively question and answer session followed. Thank you to our esteemed speakers and guests for a wonderful afternoon. Two more events will be held this semester.

Tuesday, March 22 at 1 p.m. – Celia Marshik: “An Epidemic of Fancy Dress: Representations of Costume in Modernist and Popular Literature” and Ruth (Sue) Bottigheimer:”The Europeanness of the Arabian Nights

Tuesday, April 19 at 1 p.m. – Naomi Wolf: “Victorian Sexualities”

For more information and to register, please visit: http://guides.library.stonybrook.edu/writersseries or contact event coordinators Kristen Nyitray and Sally Stieglitz.

University Libraries Writers Series, February 2016.

University Libraries Writers Series, February 2016.

Kristen Nyitray

Kristen Nyitray

Associate Librarian; Director, Special Collections and University Archives; and University Archivist at Stony Brook University Libraries
Contact her for research assistance with rare books, manuscript collections, historical maps, and SBU history. E-mail: kristen.nyitray@stonybrook.edu.
Kristen Nyitray
Posted in Special Collections & University Archives