Ezra Greenspan, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in Humanities, Southern Methodist University, will be the 2015 Holley Lecture speaker at the upcoming American Library Association Annual Conference in San Francisco. His presentation will address a key question in library history: Where do the lives of individuals, books and serials, archives, and libraries intersect?
The talk, The Lives of Persons, Printed Matter, and Institutions of Letters, will explore the intersections in the lives of nineteenth-century African Americans, a people for whom personhood, literacy, and access to institutions of letters was, on the one hand, contested by the white majority; and, on the other, essential for self- and community-formation.
When: June 28, 2015, 10:30-11:30am
Where: Moscone Center, San Francisco (Room TBA)
Ezra Greenspan is Edmund J. and Louis W. Kahn Chair in Humanities and Professor of English, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. A literary and cultural historian, he writes and teaches about the history of print and digital culture in the United States. He was co-founding editor of “Book History” (active 1997-2014) and is the editor or author of various books, including biographies of G. P. Putnam and William Wells Brown, a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle award for biography.