Panizzi Lectures 2024: In Search of Black Readers

This event will take place in the British Library Knowledge Centre Pigott Theatre. It will be simultaneously live streamed on the British Library platform. Tickets may be booked either to attend in person (physical) or to watch on our platform (online) either live or within 48 hours on catch up. Viewing links for the online version will be sent out in the confirmation email you receive after booking. Captions are available for our online events and most in person events in the Pigott Theatre. If you have specific access requirements please email customer@bl.uk

In the first lecture of the series, McHenry offers the context of her own scholarship, past and present, as an invitation to think about what it means to work in the archives of the Black past and at the intersection of literary history, archival research and Black Print Culture Studies. Her lecture grapples with her own understanding of the “lostness” of Black history; but it emphasizes the ways that Black literary history can be made legible through the traces that remain, in ways that have made the study of Black readers, Black books and the cultures of Black print an exceptionally dynamic field.

Part of the Panizzi Lecture Series, 2024: ‘Black Bibliography, Here and Now’ 

What are the stakes and challenges of studying the history of Black print? What is Black bibliography, and how can renewed attention to it lead us to a better understanding of the ways Black writing has been produced, conceptualized and valued? This series of lectures by Elizabeth McHenry grapples with these questions by examining the work current scholarship in Black Bibliography is doing to expand our knowledge of Black print culture, and what it has the potential to do going forward. 

The Panizzi Lectures are a series of annual lectures given at the British Library by eminent scholars of the book and named after the librarian Anthony Panizzi (1797 – 1879).

The British Library wishes to thank Jonathan A. Hill Bookseller for their generous donation to this event.

Elizabeth McHenry is Professor of English at New York University. Her research and teaching are focused on African American literature intellectual history and the history of Black print culture, particularly in the nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries. She is the author of Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Duke 2002), which explores the long history of African Americans as readers in the context of their organized literary practices. Her most recent book, To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship (Duke, 2021), returns again to the archives of Black literature to examine a variety of projects and conditions of authorship that have been dismissed or gone largely unnoticed in traditional accounts of African American literary history. She is currently at work on a project that aims to uncover the work of early twentieth-century Black job printers in the production and distribution of African American literature and the extension of Black literary culture.

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If you’re attending in person, please arrive no later than 15 minutes before the start time of this event.

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Image credit: “Star Pupil, 82 years old, reading her lesson in adult class, Gee’s Bend, Alabama, May 1939. Marion Post, Wolcott Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Prints and Photographs Division, New York, NY. From The New York Public Library.