Next Thursday will be June 16, known by aficionados of James Joyce as Bloomsday. The events of Joyce’s renowned Ulysses unfold on June 16, 1904 (a date Joyce chose as a celebration of his first date with the woman he was later to marry, Nora Barnacle). Bloomsday is celebrated in Dublin and elsewhere annually: as Nola Tully writes, “From a breakfast of kidneys to a lunch of cheese and wine, to a funeral, to a brothel, Bloomsday entails much celebration for Joyce enthusiasts – as Ulysses maintains both intellectual and popular appeal” (yes I said yes I will Yes.: a Celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses and 100 Years of Bloomsday, p. 72).

Next Thursday the 16th, from 3 pm. – 5 p.m., the Rare Book and Manuscript Library will be hosting a celebration of Bloomsday, with readings, music and food to commemorate this famed day.

Check out our library’s Ulysses-related holdings, or visit the Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s page for the event!

Julia Miller, author of Books Will Speak Plain: a Handbook for Identifying and Describing Historical Bindings, will be speaking on “American Scaleboard Binding” this Wednesday, June 1. Ms. Miller’s talk will take place at 3:00 p.m. in Room 131 of the Library and Information Science Building (501 East Daniel Street). Ms. Miller’s talk will deal with scaleboard binding, a technique for binding books with wood, and its uses in the production of books in America.

Ms. Miller will also be available from 10 a.m – 12 p.m. in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library for conversation. Read more about Ms. Miller’s lecture at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s website.

The Illini Union Bookstore will hold its second annual Off the Page Summer Book Festival from Friday, June 3 through Saturday, June 11, 2011. The festival will feature readings and book signings by several authors of new works of fiction and nonfiction:

• Friday, June 3, from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m., Tayari Jones will read. Jones is most recently the author of Silver Sparrow, a novel taking place in the Atlanta of the 1980s, of which the Village Voice wrote: “Tayari Jones is fast defining black middle class Atlanta the way that Cheever did for Westchester.”

• Monday, June 6, from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., Maureen Holtz will discuss Allerton’s Paradises, co-authored with her husband Michael Holtz. Allerton’s Paradises, published by the News-Gazette, “showcases two extraordinary estates: Allerton park and Retreat Center near the town of Monticello, Illinois, and Lawai-Kai (also called Allerton Garden) on the southern end of the island of Kauai.”

• Tuesday, June 7, from noon to 1 p.m., Marianne Malone will present her first novel The Sixty-Eight Rooms, set in the real-life Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. Following Malone’s presentation, from 1:30 to 2:00 p.m., Graduate School of Library and Information Science student Lauren Chambers will give a presentation of summer reading recommendations for children.

• Thursday, June 9, from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., Adrian Burgos will discuss his new biography of Afro-Cuban-American baseball mogul Alex Pompez, Cuban Star: How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball. (You can also read an interview with Burgos, discussing Cuban Star, here.)

• The last author event of the festival will take place Friday, June 10, from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. Authors Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost will discuss their new book From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways, a history of the heritage of Jewish cooking in the Midwest which includes dozens of sample recipes.

The festival concludes with a Sidewalk Sale, Friday, June 10 through Saturday, June 11, during which general books in stock at the Illini Union Bookstore will be priced at 30% off regular list prices.

The book festival will also feature a “What Are You Reading?” banner, on which guests may write the titles of their own favorite summer reading picks, as well as a gift basket giveaway.

The Illini Union Bookstore is located at the corner of Wright Street and Daniel Street. For more information on the Off the Page Book Festival or to keep posted on other Illini Union Bookstore events, please visit the Bookstore’s web page or Facebook fan page.

The conference “Freedom and Its Discontents” will be held at Levis Faculty Center this Thursday and Friday. Apr. 28-29.

This conference is presented by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, The Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy Initiative, and The Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security.

Keynote speakers are Audrey Kobayashi of Queen’s University and Svetlana Boym of Harvard. There will also be a musical performance featuring percussionist Jason Finkelman and bassist Yosef Ben Israel.

Learn more about the conference here. (This page includes biographies of the speakers and more information on conference panels and sponsorship.)

ILLS 3, the third annual conference of the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society, will take place from this Friday, April 22, to Sunday, April 24. The conference will include a special session on “Multilingualism, Language Contact, and Globalization.”

ILLS’s page dedicated to the conference can be viewed at http://ills.linguistics.illinois.edu/current/index.html. This page includes information on registration (which is free for students and professors affiliated with UIUC) and a schedule of presentations for the conference. You can also view the schedule of presentations here (PDF format).

The Second Illinois Dante Marathon, sponsored by the Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, begins this Wednesday, April 6th, at 9:00 a.m.

This event will feature an all-day reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and will take place in Lucy Ellis Lounge, 1080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave. from 9:00 to approximately 7:00 p.m.

Fans of the Divine Comedy, or those simply curious about Dante, are welcome to stop by during the reading! For more information, contact Prof. Eleonora Stoppino (stoppino@illinois.edu).

The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities spring symposium takes place this Friday, April 1st from 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. at the I Hotel and Conference Center. The theme of the symposium is “Memory and the Visual.”

The symposium is free and open to the public, and will feature keynote addresses by Marita Sturken (NYU), Lisa Saltzman (Bryn Mawr), and Erika Doss (Notre Dame) as well as panels featuring UIUC scholars.

You can view the symposium schedule here (PDF file). You can also read abstracts of the presentations and biographies of the speakers.

“Performing Salvation in Dante’s Divine Comedy”

Prof. Albert Russell Ascoli UC Berkeley

Wednesday 3/30/11
3:30 p.m.
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library (346 Main Library)

Albert Russell Ascoli, Ph.D. Cornell University 1983, is Terrill Distinguished Professor.  His principal field of research and teaching is Medieval and Early Modern Italian culture from the 13th to the 16th centuries, with comparative interests in the classical Latin, English, and French traditions.

Teaching and research interests include the relations between literary form and history; intertwined configurations of authorship and readership; the construction of Italian national identity from the Renaissance to the Risorgimento; literary politics of gender; Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Ariosto, Shakespeare.  Methodologically, his point of departure is the close, historically and culturally informed, reading of texts, literary and other; these readings, however, frequently give rise to methodological and/or theoretical interrogation of critical practice.

He is the author of Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1987) and Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge 2008) and has edited Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature (with Victoria Kahn; Cornell 1993) and Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento (Berg, 2001).  A new study entitled, ‘A Local Habitation, and a Name’: The Historicity and Historiography of Italian Renaissance Literature is forthcoming from Fordham University Press.

He is also editing a special issue of “Renaissance Drama” entitled “Italy and the Drama of Europe” (to appear fall 2009) and the second issue of the new electronic journal “California Italian Studies” dedicated to the theme “Italian Futures” (Spring 2010).

Please join us for the talk!

Cosponsored by the School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics and by the Program in Medieval Studies
For information, please contact prof. Eleonora Stoppino (stoppino@illinois.edu) or prof. Javier Irigoyen-García (irigoyen@illinois.edu).