Ink and Electricity: Advancing Liberal Learning in the Digital Age

This annual lecture series brings top scholars in the fields of digital humanities, media studies, the history of the book, print culture, and children’s literature to Monmouth University every fall. Guest scholars deliver papers to members of the University and surrounding communities that teach us about relations between readers, reading, and old and new media, exploring the ways we learn about our national past and try to imagine our digital future. These scholars appeal to anyone interested in the arts because they help us think in new ways about literacy, words, and pictures by taking the apparently simple materials of common life and revealing them to be fascinating and meaningful. Past speakers on American book culture include Pat Crain on “Imagining the Child Reader, Then and Now,” Ellen Gruber Garvey on “Activists Repurpose Media: Nineteenth-Century American Scrapbooks,” and Jonathan Rose on “Up from Middlebrow.”

Ink and Electricity and Lowbrow, Middlebrow, Highbrow are sponsored by the Wayne D. McMurray-Helen Bennett Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Monmouth University, Dr. Kristin Bluemel, professor of English. She can be reached at kbluemel@monmouth.edu or 732-571-3622.