I am a Ph.D. student in Literary Studies at the University of Guelph, returning to Guelph after completing my M.A. in Book History and Print Culture at the University of Toronto.
My academic interests include eBibliography, digital humanities, gender studies, late-Victorian book history, and small letterpress culture in Canada. I also like to play with nineteenth century wood type in the Bibliography Room at Massey College.
My current project investigates how bookobjects make bookmakers feel and the ways in which bookmakers work to make us feel about and as a result of bookobjects in turn. I pay particular attention to the ways in which aesthetics-driven modes of production have historically been used to politically mobilize bookmakers (“you are what you make”) and imagined readers (“you are what you read”) alike.
I examine bookmaking as a redemptive act that invests both small presswork itself and the fruits of small press labour as politically reparative and ask: what kinds of promises are contemporary bookobjects and bookmaking invested with? How are these promises shifted when considered crossmedially? And how might tracing the affective affordances of bookobjects and bookmaking help us better imagine and design future forms of the book?
Beyond thinking through the topics signalled above, this is a space for general musings and works-in-progress. It’s also a space that welcomes dialogue.
For a quick-ish response, ping me via the twittersphere @abilemak.
stuck on the web 