American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History will be released on August 15, 2024, with the Material Text Series at the University of Pennsylvania Press. The book originated as a conference focusing on the use of material texts and objects in cross-cultural encounters in the Americas. The conference, held in April 2020, explored how texts—broadly defined to include not only books but visual art, musical scores, and various kinds of handwork—have facilitated communication across cultural divides, the creation and transmission of knowledge, the performance of both colonization and resistance, and the creation of alphabetic and alternative literacies from the eras of contact, conquest, and colonization through the twentieth century in both North and South America.
Following this initial conference, American Contact has expanded into a series of workshops, an edited volume, and an online resource for educators.
Founders
Rhae Lynn Barnes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University and the leading expert on the history of amateur blackface minstrelsy and its role in the history and legacy of racism. She is a historian, public speaker, writer, editor, documentarian, and onscreen commenter specializing in the globalization of American popular culture. Her research and teaching focus on the histories of racism, the history of white supremacy, racial formation, gender, sexuality, book history, and cultural representation, especially in the American West. She was the President of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.
Glenda Goodman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in American music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her avenues of inquiry include the material culture of music and book history, amateur music-making and gender, and soundscapes of colonialism. Her book, Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic, brings together the history of gender, books, and labor to explore the little-known world of amateur music-making by women and men in the first generation after the American Revolution.
Community & Support
Princeton University’s Humanities Council has generously funded this project through its Global Initiatives and the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Grants for innovation.
Princeton University
- Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding
- Center for Collaborative History
- Department of English
- Office of the Vice President for Campus Life
- Program in American Studies
- Program in Latin American Studies
- Princeton University Library
University of Pennsylvania
- School of Arts and Sciences
- University of Pennsylvania Libraries
- Vice Provost University Research Foundation
Additional Sponsors
- Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography – Rare Book School (University of Virginia)
- Bibliographical Society for America