Media Before 1800
Under the co-direction of Daniel Kline (University of Alaska Anchorage), Fiona Somerset (University of Connecticut), and Stephen Yeager (Concordia University), Media Before 1800 brings cutting-edge discoveries from the disciplines of manuscript and early-print studies into conversation with the interrelated disciplines of media archaeology, infrastructure studies, and media ecology. The “1800” of this series title comes from Friedrich Kittler, whose description of the 1800 discourse network continues to influence the dominant periodizations of media history. Books in Media Before 1800 will examine media from the medieval and early-modern periods to make challenging and politically efficacious claims that engage with the discourses of critical theory, cultural studies, media history, and media archaeology. In particular, they will complicate the established narratives and counter-narratives of periodization, to look for alternative configurations of the relation between past and present. Those interested in submitting to the series should contact: dtkline@alaska.edu, fiona.somerset@uconn.edu, and stephen.yeager@concordia.ca.
Series Advisory Board
Alexandra Gillespie (University of Toronto); Seth Lerer (University of California at San Diego); Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art); Paul Yachnin (McGill University)
Titles in the Series
Old Media and the Medieval Concept: Media Ecologies Before Early Modernity (2021)
Authors, Publishers, Readers, Texts: Studies in Book History and Print Culture
Edited by Ruth Panofsky (Toronto Metropolitan University) and sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC), Authors, Publishers, Readers, Texts: Studies in Book History and Print Culture will publish new scholarship in the fields of bibliography, book history, and print culture broadly defined.
Founded in 1947, the BSC is a national, bilingual scholarly association that promotes the study of the history, description, and transmission of texts in all media and formats, with a primary emphasis on Canada. Starting in the late-1940s until the mid-1970s, the BSC published a number of bibliographies, facsimiles of early Canadian printing and publishing, and wider studies of Canadian book culture. This new series will reanimate the BSC’s important work in book historical and bibliographical research. Books in Authors, Publishers, Readers, Texts will not be geographically or thematically restricted, but, like the BSC itself, will have an particular interest in Canadian topics and projects. Titles will be published as appropriate in English or French. Membership in the BSC is not a requirement for authors or editors. Those interested in submitting to the series should contact: panofsky@torontomu.ca or ryan.vanhuijstee@concordia.ca.
Text/Context: Writings by Canadian Artists
Privileged as compelling primary sources that illuminate artistic practice, artists’ writings also strongly resist categorization and traditional narrative forms. Text/Context publishes collections of essays, statements, articles, lectures, and other written interventions by Canadian artists, collating published and unpublished texts that are otherwise scattered, hard to find, or not easily accessible to readers. In bringing together artists’ written works, the series explores the interrelations of what and how artists write, as well as where they publish, to the rest of their practice. Books in the series illuminate an artist’s relationship not only to her/his/their own work, but to their peers and to broader social, economic, cultural, and political questions. Text/Context is edited by Geoffrey Robert Little. Artists or editors interested in the series can write to: geoffrey.little@concordia.ca.
Titles in the Series
Some Magnetic Force: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Writings, Michael Parke-Taylor (ed) (2023)
Subject to Change: Writings and Interviews, Liz Magor (2022)
More Voice-Over: Colin Campbell Writings, Colin Campbell and Jon Davies (ed) (2021)
Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018, Ken Lum (2020)
Building Arguments
A collaboration between Concordia University Press and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Building Arguments presents texts by Canadian architects on the built environment, focusing on themes like the design of human interaction; relationships between people and spaces; new technologies and material invention; and sustainability and ecology. With introductions by contemporary scholars or practitioners, books in the series deploy the CCA's rich and deep holdings of mid- to late twentieth-century architectural archives and cast new light on Canadian architects' contributions in the field of architecture writ large.
In taking up writing, either as a discursive pedagogical project or in scholarly or professional publications, architects approach the built environment and the practice of architecture with a tool that might be more accessible or easily shareable with other disciplines. As Denise Scott Brown writes in Words About Architecture (2009), “building an argument is like building a building…there must be a logic and pattern.” Building arguments is always necessary for practitioners of architecture. What, though, can readers gain from the results? By bringing architects’ published and unpublished writings into dialogue with current scholars and practitioners, Building Arguments addresses this question and more.
Titles in the Series
Cultural Production and Everyday Life
Series editors: Miranda Campbell (Toronto Metropolitan University) and Benjamin Woo (Carleton University)
How are culture, commerce, and policy knit together at the level of the everyday? Cultural Production and Everyday Life disrupts narrow, economistic, and instrumentalized views of culture and seeks to expand what counts as “cultural production” and who counts as a “cultural producer” beyond creative industries success stories. By focusing on lived experience and always insisting on thinking of the cultural and the social together, this series provides lines of inquiry into cultural forms, producers, and communities that have been marginalized, received less attention, or otherwise have not been considered cultural or significant.
Cultural Production and Everyday Life will publish short, focused works that offer a more inclusive view of culture and creativity, all while being grounded in empirical inquiry. By examining the unpaid cultural work of hobbyists, volunteers, and aspirants alongside that of paid creative professionals, this series will embed cultural production in lived experience while accounting for the forces that produce “winners” and “losers” in the creative economy. The series will publish contributions that read either as manifestoes for studying the practices and contexts that shape the production of media, communication, and culture, or as focused vignettes exploring particular sites, spaces, and scenes in rich detail. The result is an altogether messier and more illuminating account of cultural production, circulation, and reception, providing new directions for the study of the cultural, media, and creative industries.
Counter-Archives: Media and Material Practices
Series editors: Stacy Allison-Cassin (Dalhousie University), Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia University), and Janine Marchessault (York University)
Archives are increasingly being redefined by the communities who care for and use them. In the twenty-first century, approaches to archives are equally informed by the plurality of regional and local communities as by broadly based nationalist identities or the traditional record-keeping practices of governments and institutions. In the media arts, this recalibration has brought attention to the urgencies for preservation of film, video, and community heritage in various artist-run centres and media distribution organizations, where undervalued media works and collections by women, Indigenous, Black, queer, and media makers of colour are deteriorating and vulnerable to continuing erosion. Under-funding, limitations on archival expertise and human resources have restricted priority on these understudied and neglected materials, which are the focus of this book series.
Books in the Counter-Archives: Media and Material Practices series will explore the theoretical, methodological, and political questions that arise from the evolving nature of archives as keepers of memory and collective histories. Volumes will create a dialogue between scholars, artists, archivists, librarians, curators, media professionals, and policymakers, while reactivating media and materials and refreshing methodologies and approaches to history, to national and transnational cultures, and to community-based collective memories and social practices.
Feminist Tech Histories
Series editor: Alex D. Ketchum (McGill University)
Feminist Tech Histories encourages scholarship that examines the ways in which tech can both support and hinder feminist practices, causes, and worldmaking projects. Books in this series will address questions of how the use of tech has been gendered, racialized, and classed, while revealing how analogue and digital tech has impacted and been transformed by marginalized communities, including Indigenous peoples, LGBT2Q+ folks, people of colour, and immigrants.
Focusing primarily on the mid-twentieth century to the present, this series seeks works that consult physical and digital archives, conduct oral history and interviews, and thoughtfully use mixed methods in order to create a platform for scholars to expand on the history of technology and to show how tech has permeated social and cultural histories more broadly. This series will be a harbour for related topics such as the recovery of the experiences of women users of the early internet, the cultural history of online community formation and social media history, as well as subjects relating to cyber feminism, artificial intelligence, internet-based activism, and the re-purposing of hardware for liberatory endeavours.
Feminist Tech Histories welcomes proposals in disciplines including history, feminist studies, communication studies, media studies, art history, digital humanities, library and information sciences, Indigenous studies, and critical race theory, especially in topics relating to critical studies of data collection, privacy, surveillance capitalism, and the biases perpetuated through automation and machine learning.
