Speakers at Remix in Retrospect

I am happy to announce that the following speakers have agreed to take part in the symposium:

Professor Adriaan van der Weel, Book and Digital Media Studies, Leiden University
Adriaan van der Weel is Bohn Professor of Modern Dutch Book History and lecturer in Book and Digital Media Studies at Leiden University. His research interests include the digitisation of textual transmission and popular reading and publishing. Van der Weel is member of the editorial board of Logos, Forum of the World Book Community. His most recent book project is Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge, which will appear with Manchester University Press in August 2011. 

Dr Kate Eichhorn, Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, New York
Kate Eichhorn's research is broadly concerned with the aesthetic and political efficacy of our everyday practices in those places where literature, art and social activism meet. One of her current book-length projects is Adjusted Margin: The Copy Machine as a Co-Agent of Social Change (a media history investigating how copy machines supported the rise of feminist and queer counter-publics in the late twentieth century). In addition to her research in the fields of book and publishing history, cultural studies and media studies, she is a writer and literary editor. 

Dr Adam Smyth, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London
Adam Smyth's research explores the literature and culture of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His research interests include the circulation and evolution of texts between different readers, writers, and forms of publication, and the cultures of manuscript and print. He published on textual fragmentation in seventeenth century England, on printed anthologies and on life-writing. He is currently working on a book titled Literature and Laughter in England, 1485-1660,and a book on the 1630s Anglican religious community of Little Gidding.

Dr Jenna Ng, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge
Jenna Ng is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her research at CRASSH explores the intersections between image, presence and mobility in digital media technologies, particularly on how the kinesthestic in digital media images challenge screen engagements in digital culture today. She researches primarily on the cultural, technological and critical dimensions of images in digital media, with particular interests in mobile media, haptic devices, motion and virtual capture systems. Her other research interests include digital cinema, cinephilia and Asian cinema (Chinese, Japanese, Singaporean). 

James Barrett MA, HUMlab, Umeå University Sweden
Jim Barrett is a doctoral candidate at Umeå University in Sweden in English Literature and works as a teacher and researcher in HUMlab. He researches on narrative in transcultural and digital media contexts, with a particular interest in the concepts of reading and performance. He also works with digital art, virtual worlds, pedagogy that involves digital media, and digital culture. He teaches cultural studies, literature, and narrative design in 2D and 3D media. 

Feike Dietz MA, Department of Early Modern Dutch Literature and Research Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht University
Feike Dietz' PhD-project 'Emblematic Dynamics in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century: Word, Image, Religion' is part of an international research project and focuses on the reception of the Counter Reformational emblem book Pia desideria (Antwerp, 1624) in the early modern Northern Netherlands. Her publications include an article on manuscript rewritings of printed emblem books in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. 

Remix in Retrospect: The Symposium

The annual Re-Mix symposium is organised within the framework of the English-language interdisciplinary minor program ‘Re-Mix: Creativity, Participation and Ownership in a Digital Age’, which is hosted by the Department of Arts and Culture at VU University Amsterdam. This year, the symposium is more specifically connected to the course ‘From Commonplace to Copy-Paste: Readers Using Texts’, focusing on a diachronic point of view. 

How may knowledge of historical developments in manuscript and print culture feed the current debate on authorship, reading, copy-right, and creativity in the digital age? And how may a contemporary point of view help us understand and evaluate past practices?

Six internationally renowned speakers will discuss the changing roles of authors and readers in different stages of media history (from manuscript to print and digital textuality) and the implications of these changes for the creation of texts and the status of authorship. 

A round table discussion involving all speakers as well as the audience will conclude the afternoon.

Date: 21 October 2011
Time: 1 PM-6 PM
Location: VU University Amsterdam