Houghton Library welcomes Andrew Stauffer, Professor and Chair of English, University of Virginia, and Peter Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania, who will give the Fall 2024 George Parker Winship Lecture.

Stauffer's lecture on "Damage, Loss, and the Transfiguration of Books" will focus on readers' marks, insertions, corrections, and erasures in personal copies of nineteenth-century books, drawn from his Book Traces project.

Stallybrass's lecture on "Erasures: Censorship and the Uniqueness of Copies" will focus upon unique acts of censorship and the undoing of censorship in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and Italy, to show how the examination of multiple copies of the “same” edition and the “same” text reveals an extraordinary variety of strategies of censorship by multiple agents; and will explore how writers, printers and booksellers reacted to and resisted censorship. 

Their lectures will be moderated by Deidre Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Harvard University.