A. Knight Collection Research Forum Fall 2024

A research and lecture series, A. Knight at the Phoenix Public Library celebrates the contributions of book collector, businessman, and civic leader Alfred Knight to the Phoenix community. This session of the forum introduces participants to the Phoenix Public Library's copy of Holinshed's "Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland" — a copy once owned by John Milton!

Visiting scholars Claire Bourne and Aaron Pratt discuss the various types of evidence we can get from rare books and provide an opportunity for people to get up close with rare books. ASU Department of English faculty Brandi Adams and Jonathan Hope facilitate.

Scholars, students and those with interest in the history of the book are invited to attend in ASU's Ross-Blakley Hall on the Tempe campus. Public events in the fall 2024 series include a lecture and this informal research discussion.

About the collection

Alfred Knight willed his large collection of books and objects to “the people of Phoenix,” now housed in the Rare Books Room of Burton Barr Central Library in Phoenix. The collection is strong in Shakespeare, bibles, and Renaissance astronomy, but it also includes modern first editions (Dickens, Conrad, Kipling, Jane Austen, James Joyce), and a huge collection of individual leaves from various periods, cultures, and regions.

About the series

The Department of English at ASU, in association with the Phoenix Public Library, presents this research event aimed at further investigating the Alfred Knight collection and planning future research initiatives based around it. 

About our visiting scholars

Claire M. L. Bourne is Associate Professor of English and Helena Rubenstein University Endowed Fellow in the Humanities at The Pennsylvania State University. Bourne’s work pays close attention to the visual qualities of printed texts – especially typography: “Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England” (OUP: 2020). Punctuation marks come alive in her writing, and on her website. She is also the editor of “Shakespeare / Text” (Arden Shakespeare: 2021), and hit the headlines recently when she and Jason Scott-Warren (University of Cambridge) identified Milton’s copy of the Shakespeare First Folio.

Aaron T. Pratt is the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Pratt is the person who persuaded Yale Library to collect VHS horror videos (“Horror and Exploitation on VHS: The History of Home Video Comes to Yale,” Journal of Visual Culture, 2015, 14.3, 332-35) as well as selling (and buying Early Modern books for his own collection). He curated The Long Lives of Very Old Books – a major exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center in fall 2023, and has been looking at questionable practices in book-selling: “Through the First Folio, Darkly: When is a ‘Perfect’ Copy Perfect?” Shakespeare Quarterly, 2023, 74.4, 396-404. He is known as “the stab-stitching guy,” and to find out why, and what it is, you’ll need to read: “Stab-Stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks as Literature,” The Library, 7th series, 2015, 16.3, 304-28.

About our host scholars

Brandi Adams is an assistant professor of English at ASU and a member of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Responsible for the Hayden Library’s acquisition of The Roman Actor, Adams’ interests include book history, history of reading, early modern English drama, and premodern critical race and gender studies. After serving as an undergraduate program manager for MIT, she began researching the early history of artificial intelligence, early modern automata and how studying literature can have a significant and positive impact on computing to her interests. Her research and reviews appear in Shakespeare, Shakespeare Survey, The Cahiers Élisabéthains, and Early Theatre, and in volumes including Shakespeare/Text. In addition to hosting this series, she is researching and writing her first monograph entitled Representations of Books and Readers in Early Modern English drama (1580-1640).

Jonathan Hope is a Professor of English at ASU. His work lives at the intersection of language and literature, using techniques from linguistics to explore literary texts, and literary texts as evidence for the linguistic history of English. With publications like “Who Invented 'Gloomy'? Lies People Want to Believe about Shakespeare” (Memoria di Shakespeare), it’s clear that Hope means for his scholarship to lay-to-rest many misconceptions about the English language and its most famous users. At ASU Hope teaches graduate-level classes in digital humanities and British experimental writing, and undergraduate classes on Shakespeare, pre-1800 literature, and Restoration and eighteenth-century drama. He also facilitates a graduate poetry workshop. Recognized for his digital humanities work, Hope was director of the NEH-funded Early Modern Digital Agendas, a series of advanced summer institutes held at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Hope also recently authenticated a fragment of the Shakespeare Third Folio along with sharing his expertise on an unknown copy of “A Yorkshire Tragedy.”

Photo of spring 2024 A. Knight Research Forum by Ashley Sorensen/ASU.

Image of Alfred Knight bookplate courtesy of Phoenix Public Library.