Video
“Type, Paper, Glass, and Screws: Reading Surfaces and the Materialities of Communication”
Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, New York, NY.
March 2018.
“Vibrant Material Textuality: New Materialism, Book History, and the Archive in Paper”
American Antiquarian Society Regional Academic Seminar & 2014 Summer Seminar in the History of the Book: “Books in the Larger World of Objects.” June 2014.
New Media in American Literary History Symposium #nmalh
NULab, Northeastern University, December 2013.
Quoted or Featured in Press
- Jacob Brogran, “Mapping the Archives: The Osher Map Library’s digital collections are beautiful and complex.” Slate, July 18, 2016.
“When all that context drops out, you’re left with the mere content of the map, which can make it harder to understand in truly historical terms. Jonathan Senchyne, director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (and a graduate school colleague of mine), says that this can sand down the historical texture of an object. “There’s always a temptation to think about something that’s been [digitized] in presentist terms,” Senchyne told me. In other words, it’s challenging to break free from our own ways of understanding and moving through space when we only access the past through a digital lens.”
- Jacob Brogan, “Dispatches From the Future’s Past: How a collection of sci-fi fanzines helps us understand the prehistory of the Internet.” Slate, September 22, 2015.
In many ways the culture of early science-fiction fandom prefigures the ways that information circulates online today. Jonathan Senchyne, director of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture (and a former grad school classmate of mine), made a keen observation when I spoke to him about the Hevelin Collection: Many of the cultural developments we most closely associate with the Internet actually precede its emergence. “One of the things I really admire about digitization projects like this one is that they remind us fan fiction and other elements of fan culture don’t originate online,” he said.
“Center for the Humanities’ First Book Award supports junior faculty” College of Letters and Science News. December 4, 2015.
Senchyne illuminates new dimensions of material culture, media studies, and the American literary public sphere by examining the literary, visual, and material cultures of rag paper in the late 18th and 19th centuries in his project “Intimate Paper and the Materiality of Early American Literature.”
“Senchyne Named CHPDC Director.” College of Letters and Science News. October 22, 2015.
“I am delighted to direct the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture,” Senchyne says, “especially as we approach its 25th anniversary, take stock of the ways that the University of Wisconsin has been a crucial site in the development of print culture history and its ties to digital culture, and plan for new opportunities in the next 25 years.”
“Group unearths 19th-century ghost stories for fall meeting” Cornell Chronicle, September 29, 2010.
“’Power of the Page’ writing seminar explores print and American literature” Cornell Chronicle, October 1, 2008. Reprinted: “Writing seminar explores early American literature through the original word – and typeface” Ezra Magazine 1.2 (Winter 2009).
Senchyne took his class of 12 to the print shop in Risley Hall Sept. 5, where students composed metal type into a familiar phrase about a fox and a dog, and ran impressions of it off a press.”This print shop resembles more or less what you would have seen in the 19th or late 18th century,” he said. “The technology remained static for centuries.”