New Mexico Museum of Art to host Shakespeare exhibition in 2016

The New Mexico Museum of Art has been selected as the one New Mexico venue to host an exhibition of First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare in 2016.

Spring 2016 may be far away, but this upcoming exhibition will be of interest to those teaching early English literature, theater history and performance, and Southwest literature.

First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare will feature a copy of the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare's plays. A series of events will explore the Folio's significance in terms of Shakespeare, theater, and our state. Sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library, Cincinnati Museum Center, American Libraries Association, and National Endowment for the Humanities, the exhibition comes to NMMoA after a competitive application process to select one host institution in each of the fifty states, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico. 

Assistant Professor Marissa Greenberg will be speaking on local Shakespeare, as part of her ongoing work on the history and performance of Shakespearean adaptation in New Mexico. First Folio! will be on display February 5th through 28th, 2016.

Anita Obermeier's "Witches and the Myth of the Medieval ‘Burning Times’” cited on one of the 500 most visited websites on the internet

Anita Obermeier's research, "Witches and the Myth of the Medieval ‘Burning Times’” received a citation by the folks at io9.com, the Gawker fantasy/sci-fi blog, one of the 500 most visited websites on the internet:  http://io9.com/10-worst-misconceptions-about-medieval-life-youd-get-fr-1686799982  (See section 5)

10 Worst Misconceptions About Medieval Life You'd Get From Fantasy Books

Some tropes are so ingrained in Medieval-inspired fantasy stories that it's tempting to think that they represent real aspects of Medieval life. But often these stories are just reinforcing myths and misconceptions about life in the Middle Ages.

Read more...

Of Interest: The Written Word and Intellectual History

BBC Radio 4 is producing a series on the written word and how it shaped and changed human intellectual history. The series, hosted by Melvyn Bragg, can be heard in its entirety here.

To promote the series a short video is available on BBC News here, featuring beautiful images from the Gutenberg Bible, as well as a fascinating look at Sir Isaac Newton's student notes.

Of Interest: Charlotte Bronte Manuscript Up for Auction

Issue Two of the Young Men's Magazine, a six edition work hand-written by Charlotte Bronte at the age of 14 and containing stories set in the imaginary world of Glass Town which she and her siblings had created, is up for auction at Sotheby's. The edition is under 2 1/2 inches tall and contains over 4,000 words, including an early version of a scene from Jane Eyre.

Read more here.

Of Interest: The Library Phantom

An anonymous artist in Edinburgh has left a number of beautiful sculptures, made from and inspired by books, in literary locations around the city. The sculptures were accompanied by small notes expressing support for books, stories and creativity:

"A gift in support of libraries, books, works, ideas... Once upon a time there was a book and in the book was a nest and in the nest was an egg and in the egg was a dragon and in the dragon was a story..."


Read the news article and admire the sculptures here.

Of Interest: Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration

CAPTCHA inventor Louis von Ahn has been putting his invention to good use. Take a look at his TED.com presentation to see how online forms are helping to digitize out-of-print books, and how his approach to large-scale online collaboration could bring the internet to non-English speakers across the world:

Analyzing Culture Through Digital Books: TED.com Presentation

Google Books has now scanned over 12 million books and a group of mathematicians and statisticians at Harvard are using that information to produce graphs of word and phrase frequencies through time. Here's their presentation at TedX:



Interested in the project? Google has made the analytical tool publicly available on their online lab site here.

eWords: Should Writers Have Their Own Domains?

How should a writer go about promoting their work? Read this article about writers on the internet.

ePublishing for Academia: Adobe Online Event

On June 9th at 9:00 AM Adobe is presenting an online seminar titled, "Adobe ePublishing for Academia." From the seminar description:

"Join John Schuman, Adobe Higher Education expert, as he covers how Case Western Reserve and Indiana University use Adobe Digital Publishing Suite for publishing scholarly information to the next generation of tablet devices."


You can register for this free seminar here.

eWords: Adam Hochschild

Read a fascinating article (part one of four) by Adam Hochschild on academic versus popular writing.

Read Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch, part 1 at Nieman Storyboard here.

Oliver Broudy Interview

Writers might be interested in this fascinating interview with Oliver Broudy where he discusses his work The Saint and his experience with releasing it as an E-Book through Amazon.

Read the article at the Neiman Storyboard here.

Database of Victorian Magazines

Victorian lit researchers, students and aficionados should take a look at this database of Victorian Magazines: The 1890's Online.

From their site description:

"The 1890s Online is an electronic resource dedicated to the study of fin-de-siècle literature and culture from the perspective of the period’s innovative magazines. We publish facsimile editions of selected periodicals, together with paratexts of production and reception. This material is enhanced by two kinds of peer-reviewed commentary: biographies of the periodicals’ contributors and associates and critical essays on the material by experts in the field. The 1890s Online is a digital initiative supported by the Ryerson University Library."

Resources on the site includes facsimiles of The Yellow Book, as well as reviews from the 1890's, scholarly commentary and a bibliography.

eWords: Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker - The Information

"A series of books explaining why books no longer matter is a paradox that Chesterton would have found implausible, yet there they are, and they come in the typical flavors: the eulogistic, the alarmed, the sober, and the gleeful."

Adam Gopnik writes about books and the information age

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/02/14/110214crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1EjGwAcUR

Of Interest: Liz Coleman on a Liberal Arts Revolution

"Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education -- one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day."

This 2009 TED talk proposes dramatic and controversial changes to not only the structure but the purpose of a Liberal Arts education

eWords: Sir Ken Robinson on TED

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson gave a presentation at a May, 2010 TED conference calling for a revolution in education:



You can learn more about TED here.

eWords posts will crop up now and then with links to blog posts, editorials, online articles etc. that might be of interest to our UNM English community. If you'd like to suggest something for Ewords please send me an email at mlva@unm.edu. 

eWords: Sweet Juniper

A blogger in Detroit has been documenting the city in words and pictures over the last several years. Among his most striking images are what he terms "feral houses." He has posted a new set of photos here, but you might want to check out a few earlier posts as well:

Feral Houses (first post)

Seed Bombs with the Kids of the Georgia Street Neighborhood

I Scrapper (rescuing abandoned books from a school library)

eWords posts will crop up now and then with links to blog posts, editorials, online articles etc. that might be of interest to our UNM English community. If you'd like to suggest something for Ewords please send me an email at mlva@unm.edu.

Nobel winning author Jose Saramago dies

Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, has died at the age of 87, his publisher has announced.

Read the article here.

Queen Eadgyth's remains found

Scientists have revealed that they think bones found in a German cathedral are those of one of the earliest members of the English royal family. Read the BBC news article here. Find more details here.

Universal Grammar - Challenging Noam Chomsky

May 2010 New Scientist has a fascinating article on a new linguistic theory put forward by linguists Nicholas Evans (Australian National University) and Stephen Levinson (Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics) which states that language diversity is the "crucial fact for understanding the place of language in human cognition."

Read the entire article, in PDF format, here.

Anglo Saxon Manuscripts Digitized

The Parker Library, held at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, has been digitized and can now be seen on the internet. The collection of over 550 manuscripts includes the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, the earliest written history in English.

Visit the Parker Library website here.