Humanities and Arts Interest Group (HAIG) Lecture
This talk is scheduled as part of the HAIG Lecture Series. Kirilka Stavreva, Professor of English and Director, Center for the Literary Arts, will present “So Many Instruments of Memory: Printing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 122 on the Iron Hand-Press as Public Remembrance.”
In January 2016, Stavreva responded to a call, issued by Oxford University’s Bodleian Library to small presses worldwide, to contribute to a new, hand-printed collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. For this initiative, commemorating Shakespeare’s 400-year legacy, she chose sonnet 122, “Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain” – a poem about memory and forgetfulness. Her illustrated talk will address the printing history of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as shaping the public memory of the poet, and the choices that she made in contributing to public memory while printing Sonnet 122 on Cornell College’s 1876 iron hand-press.
