This talk by Carleton University’s Sarah Brouillette, will establish the importance of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s role within the global history of the book. The focus will be the research on the book in the developing world that UNESCO sponsored in the 1960s and 1970s, and how that research supported claims that government should intervene in book and media industries in order to shift the disastrous imbalance in the global media system. The talk, the most recent instalment of the Department of English’s annual John Jacob Spector Lecture, will show how these claims were undermined by developed-world interests and sidelined by the emerging discipline of book history.
Sarah Brouillette is Associate Professor of English at Carleton University, where she teaches contemporary British, Irish, and postcolonial literatures, and topics in print culture and media studies. She is the author of Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Palgrave, 2007), and of Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford, forthcoming 2014). Brouillette’s essays have appeared in Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Criticism,Meditations, Critique, Third Text, The Irish Review, and elsewhere.
Tuesday, Oct. 29, 6 p.m.; Leacock 232. Free and open to the public