Thinking Through Printing
A Symposium on Book Arts Studios and
Book History Scholarship
University of Toronto | June 4 – 6, 2026
www.ThinkingThroughPrinting2026.ca
Dates: June 4 – 6, 2026
Location: University of Toronto (in-person only)
Proposal due date: January 19th, 2026, 11:59 pm EST
Submit proposals to: Submission Form
For scholars of the history of books, reading, authorship, design, and publishing, first-hand experiences with the technologies and practices of the book arts have moved from the margins to the centre of their discipline. Experiential bibliography has flourished within academic programs in book history and adjacent fields, which are increasingly populated by aspiring printer-bibliographers, faculty and students alike. To that end, book arts studios are becoming vital spaces for book history education and research.
Essential for the long-term success of these initiatives is a coherent and focused conversation on the rationales, educational goals, and research potentials of print studios and other spaces for experiential bibliography. As a follow-up to the 2025 Building Book Labs symposium at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, this event will gather present and future leaders working at the intersection of book history, research creation, and digital scholarship to reflect on achievements, share strategies, explore challenges, and plan future projects that combine book history scholarship and experiential learning in the book arts.
The Thinking Through Printing symposium will offer participants two full days of experiential workshops, roundtables, and exhibitions (June 5-6), plus a public keynote talk by Ryan Cordell (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; June 4), founding director of the Skeuomorph Press & Book Lab.
What are the research questions in book history that can only be answered via work in a print studio? How does experiential bibliography open up areas of inquiry for students and advanced researchers alike? In an age of unsettling technological change, what role do older printing technologies and practices have in helping society understand the power of words, images, and material artifacts? How might we understand the past differently by making bookish artifacts of our own within communities of practitioner-scholars? How can research creation projects that emerge from these book arts studios be better supported and recognized in academic contexts?
Our symposium will address these high-level questions through a multi-modal approach that reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the book arts and book history, combining roundtable discussions, experiential workshops, student-led poster sessions, rare book library tours, a keynote lecture and roundtable (both open to the public), and other activities.
We invite brief statements of interest (max. 300 words) which address: 1) your interest and experience in the field; and 2) a proposal for a specific topic, question, or experiential workshop that you would like to address or have addressed by the symposium. For those interested in facilitating a 90-minute workshop, please provide a short description of the activity, its goals, and tools, supplies, and other resources needed for the workshop. Workshops could be hands-on, discussion-based, or both.
Topics for workshops, roundtables, and subsequent discussions will be chosen by the program committee with the goal of representing a broad range of approaches and outputs in experiential bibliography.
Examples of workshop and roundtable topics include:
- Interdisciplinary research methods combining book arts, book history, and digital humanities;
- Book arts studios as sites for pedagogical research;
- Advocacy for and implementation of experiential, studio-based research creation in the humanities;
- Connections between contemporary and historical practices in printing;
- Material and practical challenges in the implementation of experiential activities;
- Productive connections (and tensions) between digital and analog technologies, practices, and ways of thinking about material texts; what can digital scholarship learn from the book arts (and vice versa)?
- Working and teaching with artifacts that have culturally specific histories (e.g. Indigenous type, as potential objects for repatriation), whose provenance is complex and raises ethical questions about their use
Please fill out this Submission Form to apply. The deadline for proposals is Monday, January 19, 2026 at 11:59 pm EST.
Any questions about the event or the application process may be sent to thinkingthroughprinting@utoronto.ca.
Publishing in the Archives Profession 