Bookishness: A Workshop with Jessica Pressman

On Thursday, 27 April, we will be joined by Dr Jessica Pressman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University and author of Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age (Columbia University Press, 2020). Dr Pressman will conduct a workshop on the topic of bookishness—the ongoing fetishization of books in the contemporary age.

Dr Pressman will be introduced by Gulsin Ciftci, and Dr Alexander Starre will act as a respondent. The workshop will be preceded by coffee and a collaborative activity, for which participants are asked to bring a bookish object of their choice to contribute to a temporary, onsite “library of bookish objects” to encourage thinking about and around bookishness.

To prepare, we ask participants to read the introductory chapter of Jessica Pressman’s book “Bookishness”. The chapter will be made available after registration via Indico. On Indico, we will also share a link to a Padlet to collect and share digital examples of bookishness.