Jonathan Senchyn

Candidate statement

Jonathan Senchyn, Associate Professor of book history and print culture and Director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My book, The Intimacy of Paper was published by UMass Press and I co-edited a volume of essays on African American print culture: Against a Sharp White Background (Wisconsin). My formal participation in SHARP includes publishing in Book History and taking part in SHARP-sponsored panels at affiliate conferences like MLA and AHA. As a scholar who is institutionally located at the intersections of literature, history, African American studies, and library science, I am interested in organizational work that builds broad communities with diverse scholarly and professional interests, and in working to continue to bring more librarians, archivists, curators, and collectors into the organization through conversations about the relevance of book and print scholarship and programming in those fields. I am also keen to have discussions about how book historical methods are developed and used by scholars, in fields like African American studies, who do not identify themselves with our field and organization, perhaps for historically exclusionary reasons, and how SHARP can become stronger through inclusion and diversity in the future. My organizational work in these areas has been as Director of UW-Madison’s Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, on the MLA organizations committee for print culture and bibliography, and as editorial board member of the Library History Roundtable’s journal and the journal of the American Print History Association.