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STS 2025: Textual Remediations (Proposals Due by Feb. 1)

May 28, 2025 8:00 am May 30, 2025 5:00 pm EDT

It has been a quarter of a century since Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin released Remediation: Understanding New Media. In it, they introduced the term “remediation” as a way of naming the friction generated by material forms as they shape content. Although remediation was originally conceived as “a defining characteristic of new digital media,” the term’s influence has been felt not only in digital studies but across a network of related fields, from book history and textual scholarship to media history and digital humanities. 

Within textual scholarship, widening our definition of what a text is has encouraged us to explore the deeper implications of a term like remediation. Pushing beyond traditional written and printed materials has opened the door to modes of expression that, in the past, textual scholars have neglected or devalued. Working in an expanded field of inquiry, remediation has become a means not only for translating, sharing, and comparatively analyzing diverse cultures but also for recognizing and healing communities traditionally deprived of the means to make their claims heard and read. By engaging with diverse formats, media technologies, languages, and meanings, this conference aims to bring new voices into dialogue and present innovative approaches for expressing cultural heritage, communal knowledge, and historical memory.

In 2025, we invite scholars working in diverse disciplinary and linguistic traditions to bend, stretch, twist, defend, challenge, or otherwise reimagine the concept of remediation, as it relates to the field of textual scholarship. We are particularly interested in receiving proposals from scholars working with texts in languages other than English and whose analyses reflect the broad implications of textual remediation in diverse geographical and cultural contexts.

Topics may include:

  • Editing and/as remediation 
  • Overlaps and divisions between book history, media studies, and textual scholarship
  • Objects that speak to a history of textual remediation
  • Exciting uses and abuses of media studies in textual scholarship, and vice versa
  • Considerations of texts as or in relation to media technologies
  • The politics of textual remediation
  • Mediation vs “remediation”
  • The role of technology in textual scholarship, historically and methodologically
  • Textual remediation across different linguistic and national contexts

Proposed session formats may include panels, roundtables, individual papers, or lightning talks. All talks will be in person, but keynotes and awards will be streamed for remote access.

STS is an interdisciplinary organization, and we have a tradition of offering papers from diverse disciplines, including literature, history, musicology, classical and biblical studies, theology, philosophy, art history, legal history, the history of science and technology, computer science, library and information science, lexicography, epigraphy, paleography, codicology, cinema studies, new media studies, game studies, theater and performance studies, linguistics, gender and sexuality studies, race and ethnicity studies, indigenous studies, and textual and literary theory. We share an interest in the recovery and analysis of the material traces of the textual past broadly defined, and the creation of a community of interpreters sharing knowledge and methods to that end. 

The conference will take place May 28-30 in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In addition to having access to the diverse and exciting collections held at Penn, participants will be near some of the country’s most eminent research libraries and archives, including the Rosenbach Museum and Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the American Philosophical Society. Attendees would also be welcome to come early to attend DreamLab, Penn’s four-day training course in digital humanities skills (May 20-23, 2025) or stay later to attend one of several popular Rare Book School courses held in Kislak during the two weeks after STS.

Please send 200-word proposals to societyfortextualscholarship@gmail.com by February 1.


Event Format

In Person

University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
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