This collaboration originated at the annual meeting of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (SoFCB) held at Rare Book School (RBS), University of Virginia in 2019. Megan Robb and Pranav Prakash were inducted as Junior Fellows of the SoFCB, an organization committed to promoting scholarship on the history of the book and critical bibliography. The idea of a collaboration emerged on the margins of the conference and they began holding weekly workshops in summer 2019. In fall 2019 they organized a symposium to be held at the 49th Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 conference; they held the symposium virtually in fall 2021.
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Patvārīyon ke hisāv (sic) kī pustak hindī bhāshā mein
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Sundari Tilak [Beautiful mark], edited by
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The online symposium culminated in a hybrid keynote by Yasmeen Khan, head of paper conservation at the Library of Congress. Despite pandemic-era challenges, the collaboration has attracted funding from the SoFCB; RBS; the Department of Religious Studies, Department of South Asian Studies, and the South Asia Center at the University of Pennsylvania; and Christ Church, University of Oxford. The results of the 2021 symposium are forthcoming as a special issue in Modern Asian Studies. The collaboration hosted a calligraphy (nasta‘līq) workshop at the 2023 Annual Meeting of SoFCB. The next symposium will take place at the 51st Annual Conference on South Asia (August 18-21, 2023). The collaboration is committed to organizing biannual symposia and to publishing the results of each symposium in peer-reviewed venues. Currently the collaboration is developing accessible digital resources illuminating the history of the book in South Asia and planning courses and summer programs on the history of typography in South Asia.
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