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.

The Many Hands of Book History
Conference of the Bibliographical Society of Canada / Société bibliographique du Canada
8-9 June 2026, University of Toronto

The Bibliographical Society of Canada invites proposals for its annual conference on the theme, The Many Hands of Book History. Drawing on Robert Darnton’s foundational article “What is the History of Books”(1985), this conference turns toward the expanded, evolving, and interdependent networks that shape book history. Darnton’s Communications Circuit model traced the movement of books through multiple hands and bibliographers today continue to stretch, challenge, and reimagine that circuit. This year’s theme considers books not simply as paper, ink, and binding, but as profoundly collaborative objects shaped at every stage by labour, creativity, culture, ownership, and interpretation.

We invite participants to explore the diverse social, material, and cultural processes through which books—broadly conceived—have been created, preserved, circulated, and transformed. We encourage papers that explore interactions between any hands involved with the book, including creators, artists, printers, illustrators, binders, publishers, booksellers, readers, collectors, archivists, scholars, and communities. We also welcome contributions that provoke new methodological, material, and theoretical questions—especially from disciplines and practitioners who may not always identify themselves as “book people.”

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Materiality and Meaning: How formats, illustration, binding, decoration, wear, repair, and digital remediation shape the interpretation, circulation, and preservation of textual objects.
• Books as Collaborative and Communal Objects: The ways in which book creation fosters shared identities, reflects or silences human experience, and emerges from the labour and creativity of diverse communities.
• Research Centered on Marginalized Voices: Studies of book culture by, for, and/or from 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, BIPOC communities, persons with disabilities, women, and/or religious or cultural groups.
• Analogue and Digital Materialities: From parchment, paper, ink, and leather to bits, bytes, algorithms, and born-digital forms; questions of reprinting, digitization, open access, and remediation.
• Tools, Methods, and Approaches: Bibliography, critical theory, scientific analysis, digital humanities, artificial intelligence, data-driven research, and other interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary methods.
• Pedagogy and Practice: Teaching with books and cultural heritage materials; hands-on learning; community-engaged scholarship; and the impact of archival and material encounters on students, communities, and other learners.
• The Diverse Forms and Functions of “The Book” Across Time and Place: Manuscripts, archives, zines, artists’ books, digital platforms, print ephemera, community publications, and experimental or hybrid forms.

This conference emphasizes welcoming participation across fields and career stages, including students, early-career researchers, conservators, librarians, book artists, digital humanists, bibliographers, and scholars working within or alongside book history and bibliography. Proposals may engage with material, visual, scientific, technological, or community-based approaches; with Canadian or international contexts; and with intersectional, cross-cultural, and transnational perspectives.

Proposals:

Proposals for twenty-minute conference presentations, entire panels (three presentations), or hour-long workshops may be submitted in English or French. Proposals, which must be submitted via the online form, must include the following elements:

• Title of presentation/panel/workshop
• Abstract indicating argument, context, and methods (max. 250 words)
• Bio (50-100 words) including full name, professional designation (e.g., graduate student, faculty, librarian, researcher etc.), and institutional affiliation or place

In order to accommodate financial and accessibility issues, this conference will be presented in a limited hybrid capacity. Please specify whether your proposal is for an in-person or online presentation when submitting. Priority will be given to in-person presentations, and online presentations must be recorded and submitted prior to the conference.

Applicants to the Emerging Scholar Prize must also include:

• Cover letter (1 p.) explaining the applicant’s suitability for the prize
• CV (max. 3 pp.)
• Proof of student status or of graduation within the past two years (copy of diploma, student identification, or official or unofficial transcript)

Deadline: 30 January 2026

For more information: https://event.fourwaves.com/bsc/pages 

Dear all,
I am pleased to share with you the call for papers for the upcoming ICOHTEC Annual Meeting, which will be held at the Democritus University of Thrace in Greece from 8–11 October 2026, in collaboration with the Laboratory of Technologies, Research & Applications in Education/ School of Humanities and the Ethnological Museum of Thrace in Alexandroupolis, Greece.

The theme of this conference, “Engaging the History of Technology”, invites critical reflections on how history of technology can engage with evolving methodologies, theories and pedagogies, and other branches of historical study to demonstrate that understanding technologies’ pasts are essential to navigating contemporary challenges. The conference, therefore, seeks contributions across spatial and epistemic boundaries: from the everyday and local to the geopolitical and planetary; from archival practice to classroom teaching and public engagement; and from discipline-specific research methods to interdisciplinary collaborations.

Contributors may engage with one or more of the following themes, or even suggest new ways of thinking about: 
1. The History of Technology between the Local, the Regional, and the Global:
• Circulation of technologies, expertise, and knowledge across borders
• Adaptation and appropriation of technologies in different cultural contexts
• Tensions between globalisation and localisation in technological change
• Regional networks and their role in shaping technological trajectories
• Colonial, postcolonial and decolonial dimensions of technology
• Networks of maintenance and repair

2. History of Technology, Historiography and Education:
• Methodological innovations in researching the history of technology
• Interdisciplinary approaches and their challenges
• Teaching the history of technology in universities and schools
• Public engagement and the communication of technological history
• The relevance of technology history to contemporary policy debates
• Digital humanities and new forms of historical scholarship

3. Intersections between the History of Technology and Other Fields of Historical Study:
• Technology and social history: class, labour, gender, and everyday life
• Technology and cultural history: representation, identity, and meaning
• Technology and environmental history: sustainability, resource use, and ecological change
• Technology and economic history: innovation, industrialisation, and development
• Technology and political history: governance, regulation, and power
• Technology and the history of medicine: cultural values, therapeutic practice, and material conceptions about the human body

4. Special Focus: Museums, Material and Intangible Cultural Heritage, and Public Engagement: 
Given our collaboration with the Ethnological Museum of Thrace, we particularly welcome proposals that engage with material and intangible culture, museum practices, and public history. We are interested in innovative session formats that:
• Explore tensions and synergies between academic and museum approaches to technological history
• Demonstrate object-based learning methodologies
• Address the challenges of communicating technological history to diverse publics
• Examine the role of museums in preserving and interpreting technological heritage
• Study visitor engagements with intangible heritage, particularly those of marginalised and silenced ethno-cultural communities
• Critically examine the funding relationships between private technological and industrial interests, and museum

We welcome proposals in the following formats:
Paper presentations
Individual and author teams’ presentations. Please, submit an abstract of up to 350 words.

Panel Sessions
Thematically coherent sessions of 3-4 papers. Panel organisers should submit a panel abstract (up to 400 words) describing the theme and its significance; after approval the conference committee and the panel organisers will issue a specific call for proposals (individual or author teams’ paper abstracts up to 350 words each).

Roundtables
Discussion-based sessions with 4-6 participants addressing a specific question or debate. Organisers should submit a description of the topic and format (up to 350 words); names and brief bios of participants (up to 100 words each); key questions to be addressed.

Graduate Student and Early Career Opportunities
ICOHTEC is committed to supporting emerging scholars. We particularly welcome submissions from graduate students and early career researchers. The conference will feature:
• Visual Lightning Talk Competitions for graduate students
• Mentorship opportunities pairing students with established scholars
• Book development workshops

Submissions of abstracts through the conference website
Opening: 15 December 2025
Deadline: 31 January 2026

Official conference website: https://icohtec2026.hs.duth.gr
Email address: icohtec2026@gmail.com

Please find attached the detailed CfP and feel free to circulate it with your networks.

Thank you very much.

Contact Information

Organising Committee, ICOHTEC 2026

Contact Email

icohtec2026@gmail.com

URL

https://icohtec2026.hs.duth.gr/