April 16th, 4-5 pm
Gerber Lounge, 304 English-Philosophy Building, University of Iowa

Digital Bridges is pleased to welcome Andrew Stauffer to University of Iowa. Stauffer is an Associate Professor of English at University of Virginia and the Director of NINES: Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online. In his talk, “Garden of Verse: Poems, Flowers, and Nineteenth-Century Readers,”  Stauffer will lead you down the garden path, towards a consideration of pressed botanicals in books of poems and their relationship to Anglo-American verse of the nineteenth century – as written, as published, and as read. We are all aware of the pervasive involvement of poetry with botanical material, particularly in this era of Forget-Me-Not anthologies, post-Romantic nature poetry, and the cultural language of flowers. Drawing on examples discovered via the Book Traces project (http://booktraces.org), Stauffer argues that flowers made their way into books of poems in complex and revealing ways. Poets like Felicia Hemans and Jean Ingelow wrote knowing that floral, botanical practices were part of the field of reception; publishers and illustrators designed books that called them forth and echoed them; and readers engaged in this layered scene of reception as they meaningfully inserted blossoms and buds between the leaves. Stauffer makes the case for the value of these individual copies and the histories of female readerships they contain, particularly in our current moment of print collections management and the downsizing of libraries.