The Society for Textual Scholarship

Founded in 1979, the Society for Textual Scholarship is devoted to providing a forum, in its biennial conferences and in its journal Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation (for merly Text) for the discussion of the implications of current research in a variety of textual disciplines. The Society has also recently added a blog on its website and the option of smaller workshop conferences to be hosted by various institutes and universities during the years when the biennial conference does not take place. The 2012 conference at the University of Texas–Austin was organized by Matt Cohen and Coleman Hutchison. Steve Jones and Peter Shillingsburg served as organizers of the 2013 conference at Loyola University, Chicago. In 2014 the Society will be hosted by the University of Washington at Seattle. Jeffrey Knight and Geoffrey Turnovsky head up the organizing committee on behalf of the University of Washington and the Society. For future conference information, please see the Society’s website

(http://textualsociety.org).

The Society is also now an Affiliated Member of the Modern Language Association, and hosts a session at the annual conference in January. Please consult the Society’s website for announcements and additional calls for papers.

Topics subsumed under the Society’s intellectual mission include: the discovery, enumeration, description, bibliographical and codicological analysis, editing, and annotation of texts in disciplines such as literature, history, musicology, biblical studies, philosophy, art history, legal history, history of science and technology, computer science, library science, lexicography, epigraphy, palaeography, cinema studies, theater, linguistics, as well as textual and literary theory. All of these fields of inquiry have been represented in the Society’s conferences, sessions, workshops, and in its journal.

The Society’s conferences encourage the exchange of ideas across disciplinary boundaries. While there are usually period- or author-centered sessions, the plenary sessions address a general textual problem with contributions from speakers from various disciplines. Complementing the plenary sessions, STS members may also submit session proposals (for example, on specific topics or projects or on a theoretical problem).

At each biennial conference, the Fredson Bowers Prize is awarded for a distinguished essay in textual scholarship published in the previous two years. The 2011 Fredson Bowers Prize was awarded to Colbey Emmerson (Reid York College) for her 2007–2008 essay in Florida Atlantic Comparative Studies entitled “Mina Loy’s Design Flaws”. Alan Galey (University of Toronto) won the prize in 2013 for his 2012 essay in Book History, “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination”.

The Society also confers the Finneran Award in recognition of the best edition or book about editorial theory and/or practice published in the English language during the preceding two calendar years. The 2011 Richard J. Finneran Award was presented at Penn State to Paul Eggert for his 2009 study devoted to editing and literary/artistic heritage, Securing the Past. Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature (Cambridge University Press).

The Society offers an Executive Director’s Prize for the best article published in Textual Cultures during the two calendar years prior to the biennial conference. The inaugural award was presented to Michelangelo Zaccarello (University of Verona) for his essay on recent trends in textual editing, “Metodo stemmatico ed ecdotica volgare italiana” (Textual Cultures 4.1 [2009]). In 2013, the Executive Director’s Prize was given to Marta Werner (D’Youville College) for her articles “Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan: Writing Otherwise” in Textual Cultures 5.1 (2010) and “‘Reportless Places’: Facing the Modern Manuscript” in Textual Cultures 6.2 (2011).

The editors of Textual Cultures welcome submissions from specialists in diverse fields. All submissions are refereed, being evaluated both by members of the STS Advisory Board and by selected independent scholars.

All submissions must contain a complete list of works cited with full bibliographical data. Essays in English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish should be submitted to Textual Cultures by doing both of the following:

1. 1). an email attachment in Microsoft Word (with plates and tables scanned as separate files to Daniel E. O’Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, at dosulliv@olemiss.edu;

and

1. 2). direct electronic submission to the Open Journal System site at...