In 2013, the French Institute of South Africa (Ifas) and the Department of Information Science at the University of Pretoria will be coorganising a series of seminars on book history. At the crossroads of several disciplines (history, literature, palaeography, librarianship etc.), book history has become the spearhead of cultural history worldwide. Introduced in Southern Africa thanks to the works of Isabel Hofmeyr, it has since then led to some major renewal of regional and national history problematics, as found in the recent works of Archie Dick (The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures, University of Toronto Press, 2012) and Andrew van der Vlies (Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa, Wits University Press, 2012) or Adrien Delmas and Nigel Penn (Written Culture in a Colonial Context, UCT Press, 2012).

International seminar co-hosted by the University of Pretoria and Oxford Brookes University Supported by the British Academy’s International partnership and Mobility Scheme

Place : Graduate Centre, University of Pretoria

Provisional programme :

9:00-10:30 Session 1: Situating Book History in (South) Africa
Archie L. Dick, Dept of Information Science, University of Pretoria: “Book history in South Africa: Recent developments and prospects”
Shamil Jeppie, Timbouctu Project, University of Cape Town: “The intersection of manuscript and print in Timbuktu”
10:30-12:00 Session 2: Cultural production and visual culture
Sally Hughes, Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies: “Contemporary print culture from collections”
Lize Kriel, Dept of Visual Arts, University of Pretoria: “Images of readers”
Ria van der Merwe, Department of Historical and Heritage Studies, University of Pretoria:
“Embroidered stories, remembered lives: The MCADF story book project”
12:45-2:45: Session 3: Print and publishing history case studies
Caroline Davis, Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies: “The OUP publication of Oswald Mtshali’s Sounds of a Cowhide Drum”
Gerald Groenewald, Dept of History, University of Johannesburg: “Building a Nation with Books? The Reception and Promotion of Afrikaans Books in Die Huisgenoot, 1916-1939”
Isabella Venter, Dept of Visual Arts, University of Pretoria: ‘From “Home” to home: The South African Lady’s Pictorial and Home Journal as a subtle agent of change for British South African women’s view of race relations in Southern Africa’
Irma du Plessis, Dept of Sociology, University of Pretoria: “The history of childhood from Afrikaans books for children”
3:00-4:30: Session 4: Discussion session on Publishers and their archives
Beth le Roux, Dept of Information Science, University of Pretoria: “Publishers and their archives”
Discussion: Caroline Davis, Archie L. Dick