Print culture historian Jonathan Rose to lecture

Print culture historian Jonathan Rose of Drew University will lecture Friday, Oct. 24, at 4 p.m. in the auditorium of the Wisconsin Historical Society. Print culture history examines how people produce and use printed materials.

Founder of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Rose will give the annual lecture for Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America, a multidisciplinary research center sponsored in a partnership between UW–Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

In his lecture, “Classic Books and Common Readers,” Rose will argue that the “great books” – the literary canon long touted as the tomes with which the educated elites must be familiar – always have had a broad, popular audience. Rose is the author of “The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.”

Understanding the traditional canon and how it has changed is one aspect of print culture studies, says James P. Danky, the center’s director, noting that what is read in high schools today is very different from what he read in American literature class more than 30 years ago.

Now the curricula have diversified, and “print culture illuminates our understanding of these changes,” Danky says. “We hear women’s voices differently today, for example.”

Rose’s appearance, which is also part of the Wisconsin Book Festival, is sponsored by the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America, the history, English and educational policy studies departments, and the School of Library and Information Studies, the center’s administrative home.