Dec 5 – Guest Lecture “Cyphering Books in the Archive” 🗓
Lukas Etter
(Universität Siegen)
“Cyphering Books in the Archive”
Dec 5, 2023, 4:15pm, 00-212 (Philo II)
Coupling documented artifacts and methodological reflection, this paper will center around cyphering books (alternative spelling ‘ciphering books’) from archives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North American education. It will present excerpts from these hand-written mathematical exercise books and reflect upon the productive paradox that the cultural historian faces when studying them. On the one hand, these books often testify to the idea of officialism and longevity; they may be several hundred pages long and exhibit rather rigid genre elements (verbatim noting what the schoolmasters read out; adhering to calligraphic precision). On the other, cyphering books may also document social history, as when the exercises of simple and advanced arithmetic are enriched with personal marginalia, including doodles, puns, poems, spontaneous penmanship exercises, and invectives against other individuals in the classroom.
The author of Distinctive Styles and Authorship in Alternative Comics (De Gruyter, 2021), Lukas Etter holds a postdoctoral position at the University of Siegen. Recent work has focused on the cultural aspects of mathematical word problems in antebellum America; the current project Clandestine Calculation will circle around similar phenomena in the archive of eighteenth-century North America.
You can download the poster for the event here.
Chad Seales is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Brian F. Bolton Distinguished Professor in Secular Studies. He taught at New College of Florida in Sarasota and George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia before arriving at The University of Texas at Austin. He earned a B.A from the University of Florida, an M.T.S. from Candler School of Theology at Emory University, and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research addresses the cultural relationship between religion and secularism in American life, as evident in the social expressions of evangelical Protestants, the moral prescriptions of workplace chaplains and corporate managers, and the salvific promises of neoliberal capitalism. He is the author of Religion Around Bono: Evangelical Enchantment and Neoliberal Capitalism (Penn State University Press, 2019), and The Secular Spectacle: Performing Religion in a Southern Town (Oxford University Press, 2013), and has published articles on industrial religion, corporate chaplaincy, religion and film, and secularism and secularization in the United States.
