Department of English

• Monday, September 22, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

On Monday, we are thrilled to welcome Megan Heffernan (DePaul University) for a talk titled “Between Libraries: The Maintenance of Early Modernity.”

Professor Heffernan writes:

“This talk explores the long afterlife of early modern print within the modern research library. It delves into quotidian practices of book care to explore how institutional collections come to reflect the societies that surround them. Across the late 1960s, the bindery at the Newberry Library took on several substantial projects for the University of Chicago, rebinding hundreds of general and special collections items in modern buckram book cloth. As these books traveled the ten miles across the south side of Chicago, their handling expressed a moment of profound institutional and disciplinary transformation. At the same time that the University of Chicago was building a new research library, the Newberry was reorganizing its departments and labor forces to establish a modern conservation laboratory, largely in response to lessons learned from the 1966 flood of Florence. A confluence of factors brought the collaboration to a close by early 1971. Using bindery records, invoices, and correspondence, this paper offers a microhistory of seventeenth-century English books that were enmeshed in the material and intellectual world of twentieth-century America. While these books emblematize a profound investment in the cultural past, their endurance required a corresponding commitment to the ongoing future of communities of book workers.”

Megan Heffernan is associate professor of English at DePaul University. Her research focuses on material and cultural histories of the book, poetry and poetics, and Shakespeare. She is the author of Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) and serves as reviews editor for Modern Language Quarterly. Currently, she is at work on a book about institutional histories of caring for early modern print and is editing The Poems for the new Cambridge Shakespeare Editions series.