Hurst Professor Sean Silver Talk- Blueness and Slaves: Tristram Shandy and an Empire for Color
Sean Silver is associate professor of literature at Rutgers University, and the Director of the Scarlet Letterpress, a humanities makerspace and book lab. His current work combines close reading with analytical chemistry and historical reconstruction, proposing new ways of revisiting the well-known history of the rise of the novel. Read more at motleyemblem.org.
The marbled page in Sterne's Tristram Shandy could fit in the palm of your hand. But its manufacturing reflected near-global transformations in the pursuit of intense experiences and luxury commodities-- including the conversion of the Carolina low-country to an indigo-planting economy. Beginning from an analysis and reconstruction of that motley leaf, this talk proposes an ecological approach to the history of books. Reading Sterne's novel means encountering the ideas of its author. But reading his book means reckoning with the wider arc of an empire built for color.