Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem has authored a new book on how children learned about the material world at the close of the eighteenth century. The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children's Literature, 1762-1860, funded in part by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, was recently published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

PhD candidate Courtney Richardson defended her dissertation, "Art as Information: Re-reading Quicksand," on December 8.

A project to examine the circulation of newspaper reports about anti-Black violence in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. newspapers could provide context to the spread of white supremacist ideologies in social media today. 

The old, green hand press that used to be stationed on the first floor of the iSchool building is getting a new lease on life. It has been moved to the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab, where students and community members will be using it for letterpress printing. The Washington-style hand press, which was manufactured in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century by Reliance, was used for teaching and fine printing at the University of Illinois for decades before becoming a show piece at the iSchool.

A new book on information policy includes chapters by Professor Emeritus Alistair Black and Associate Professor and Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Emily Knox. Research Handbook on Information Policy, edited by Alistair S. Duff, was recently published by Edward Elgar Publishing. The handbook covers topics such as the history and future of information policy, freedom of information and expression, intellectual property, and information inequality.

Associate Professor Ryan Cordell will deliver the keynote address at the Marbach-Weimar-Wolfenbüttel (MWW) Research Association Mid-Term Conference, which will be held virtually from Germany on October 14-15. The goal of the MWW is "to provide future-oriented impulses for collaboration in the field of humanities and cultural studies research." The association's mid-term conference will focus on engagement with material and medial losses in the archive and library.

iSchool researchers presented their work at Balisage, an annual conference devoted to the theory and practice of descriptive markup and related technologies for structuring and managing information. The conference, which attracts markup practitioners and theoreticians worldwide, was held virtually from August 2-6.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Ryan Cordell will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2021, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. He previously served as an associate professor of English at Northeastern University (NU) and core founding faculty member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks.

Professor Emeritus Alistair Black discussed his research at the UK's Library and Information Group Work-in-Progress Conference, which was held virtually on November 27. At the conference, he presented an analysis of the 1962 feature film Only Two Can Play as a tool for learning about the history of the post-war public library in the UK.

Professor Emeritus Boyd Rayward was recently interviewed in Mons, Belgium, at a meeting of scholars involved in the HyperOtlet research project. This multi and transdisciplinary project is focused on Le Traité de documentation, a major book in the history of information sciences that was written in 1934 by Paul Otlet, a Belgian lawyer, bibliographer, internationalist, and pacifist whose ideas foreshadowed current digital and other technologies such as the Internet, hypertext, and Wikipedia.

Associate Professor Bonnie Mak is an invited speaker at Literature and Formats, a symposium on the materiality of texts, which will be held at the University of Copenhagen on November 15-16. Organized by the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, the event will bring together an international slate of speakers to examine the complex relationship between text and format. Mak's paper, "Scholarship and Its Formats: Documenting the Humanities," explores the enduring features of humanistic scholarship in different technological contexts.

Bonnie Mak will join book artists, conservators, and archivists for a discussion of the future of the book at the symposium, "Codex: History, Art, and Practice." Hosted by the Ohio Preservation Council and the State Library of Ohio, the symposium brings together information professionals from across the state who are interested in the preservation of documentary heritage. 

Professor Emeritus Alistair Black discussed his research on British military intelligence at the conference "Information and Communication in Wartime," which was held July 25-26 at the University of London.

Professor Alistair Black and doctoral candidate Henry Gabb have been honored by the American Library Association's Library Research Round Table (LRRT) with the 2017 Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research.

Doctoral student Steve Witt (MS '95) is the recipient of the 2016 Donald G. Davis Article Award given by the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association (ALA). The award will be presented on June 26 at the 2016 ALA Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida, at the Library History Round Table Research Forum.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem and Associate Professor Carol Tilley will speak at the 2016 Children’s Literature Association Conference, to be held June 9-11 at The Ohio State University. The theme of the conference is “Animation,” which reflects developments in aesthetic creation and critical analysis of children’s and young adult literature.

In their recent article, “The Value Proposition of the Corporate Library, Past and Present,” Professor Alistair Black and doctoral student Henry Gabb discuss findings from their survey of modern corporate librarians.

Professor Alistair Black addressed a gathering of historians in the Great Hall of historic Lambeth Palace in London on March 1. The event was held in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the publication of Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (CHLBI).

A new book by alumnus David Hunter (PhD '89), The Lives of George Frideric Handel, is part biography and part genre case study. The famous composer’s life has been documented in numerous biographies, which Hunter scrutinized to differentiate history from interpretation. His findings led to this new work, which was published recently by Boydell Press.

Associate Professor Bonnie Mak will travel to the United Arab Emirates in March to take part in a workshop at New York University’s Abu Dhabi Institute. “Charisma of the Book: Global Perspectives for the 21st Century,” will be held March 12-14.