Roger Chartier, one of the world's foremost cultural historians, returns to Cornell this month for his final visit as an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large. Chartier will give two public lectures during his stay. The first is titled "Don Quixote in the Printing Shop" and will be Monday, Sept. 17, at 4:30 p.m. in the Guerlac Room of the A.D. White House on campus. The final public talk, "From 'Histoire des Mentalités' to Cultural History. A Trajectory," will be Monday, Sept. 24, at 4:30 p.m., also in the A.D. White House. In addition, Chartier will hold two seminars on the subject of "Textual Materiality and Literary Meaning: Naming and Denaming," Sept. 18 and 25 at 4:30 p.m. in Room 110 of the A.D. White House.
Chartier, who was appointed an A.D. White professor-at-large in 1996, is a French historian of written culture and directeur d'études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Since 1969, he has lectured and published on the relationship between the material history of institutions and the embodied practices that both animate and survive these institutions -- in particular, early modern techniques of reading, disseminating and collecting printed information. The course of Chartier's work indicates the multiple avenues of critical inquiry available to cultural historians; and Chartier is in large part responsible for defining what "cultural history" -- an elusive discipline -- might be.
Recognized internationally for his distinguished work on the history of books, printing and reading, Chartier serves on the advisory boards of research institutes focused on publishing history, such as the IMEC (Institut Mémoire de l'Édition Contemporaine). Chartier's hundreds of articles and books have appeared in at least 10 different languages; the most recent of these to appear in English are Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe (London: The British Library, 1999) and A History of Reading in the West (edited with Guglielmo Cavallo; Oxford: Polity, 1999).
Andrew Dickson White Professors-at-Large are outstanding individuals from the sciences, humanities and arts, who over six-year terms make periodic visits to Cornell and are considered full members of the faculty.
For more information on Chartier's stay on campus, contact Gerri Jones, coordinator for the A.D. White Professor-at-Large program, at 255-9737, or send e-mail to gaj1@cornell.edu.
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