International conference (coord. Isabel Hofmeyr) at Wits University
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).
