Reminder of approaching deadline: November 30, 2006

CALL FOR PAPERS
SHARP 2007 Conference: Open the Book, Open the Mind

* Plenary speakers will include Adrian Johns and Louise Erdrich *

The fifteenth annual conference of the Society for the History of
Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) will be held in Minneapolis
at the University of Minnesota on July 11-15, 2007. SHARP is the leading
international association for historians of print culture, enlisting
more than 1,200 scholars world-wide; its members study "the creation,
dissemination, and reception of script and print, including newspapers,
periodicals, and ephemera," as well as the history of books. The
forthcoming conference is organized in cooperation with the College of
Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota; University of Minnesota
Libraries; Minneapolis Public Library; Minnesota Historical Society, and
Minnesota Center for Book Arts -- a part of Open Book.

The conference theme, "Open the Book, Open the Mind," will highlight how
books develop and extend minds and cultures, and also how they are
opened to new media and new purposes. However, individual papers or
sessions may address any aspect of book history and print or manuscript
culture.

The conference organizers invite proposals for individual presentations,
and also for complete panels of three presentations on a unifying topic.
As is the SHARP custom, each session of 90 minutes will feature three
papers of up to 20 minutes, providing time for substantive discussion
with members of the audience. Proposals should be submitted via the
online conference website by November 30, 2006: please go to
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/SHARP2007proposals and follow the directions
provided there.

Each individual proposal should contain a title, an abstract of no more
than 300 words, and brief biographical information about the author or
co-authors. Session proposals should explain the theme and goals, as
well as include the three individual abstracts.

In keeping with the theme of the conference, a "pre-conference" of
practical workshops and a plenary session devoted to book arts and
artists' books will be held at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts at
Open Book, near the University of Minnesota campus, on Tuesday, July 10,
2007. Details about that pre-conference and about the main conference
program, registration, and housing arrangements will be made available
early in 2007 at the general conference web site,
http://www.cce.umn.edu/conferences/sharp. Much information about SHARP
2007 and its location, including hotel-reservation information, is
already available there.