Keats-Shelley Journal+
Special Issue on Commonplacing and Commonplace Books
Co-Editors: Kacie L. Wills & Olivia Loksing Moy
Volume 1, August 2024
In Fall 2023, the K-SAA launched its inaugural public outreach initiative, lining up a programming series surrounding the theme of commonplacing. This special issue of KSJ+ highlights some of the scholarly, pedagogical, artistic, and activist work undertaken by our members and collaborators, implementing commonplacing methods in their research, teaching, and creative projects.
The short essays and interviews below showcase the endeavors of teachers, archivists, writers, artists, creators and students engaging with commonplace books across the globe. From archival discoveries in a family attic, to reflections from major scholars on commonplace books and scrapbooks, to collaborative redefinitions of the idea of a university, these essay contributions offer a preview of what is to come as we release the contents of the special issue throughout Summer 2024. Volume 1 includes essays and interviews by Mai-Lin Cheng (University of Oregon), Liz Bloodworth and Joanne Diaz (Illinois Wesleyan University), Abigail Droge (SUNY Cortland), Ellen Gruber Garvey (author of Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance), Jillian Hess (Bronx Community College (CUNY)), Roseanna Kettle (University of York), and Jessica Yood (CUNY Graduate Center & Lehman College). Stay tuned for the release of Volumes 2 and 3.
To learn more about the 2023-2025 public outreach initiative or to join us for upcoming events, please explore our K-SAA Commonplacing site and consider submitting an entry for the K-SAA Public Commonplace Book Vol.2—"Field Notes on Freedom”—now collecting observational snippets about literary travels and objects. You can also read Vol.1—on “Readings, Reading Habits” two centuries apart. Teaching materials and classroom assignments will be shared on the commonplacing website for those hoping to teach with commonplacing in Fall 2024 and Spring 2025.
K-SJ+ is the digital supplement to the K-SJ print journal.
The Commonplace Book of Edmund Pear (c. 1829-1834)
In 2021, I discovered the commonplace book of Edmund Pear, a young man writing in the Lincolnshire fens in the early 1830s, in my family home, where it had long been mistaken for a wartime diary. On closer inspection of its tell-tale crosswriting, however, and its selection of poetry, it became clear that this was a Romantic-era text.
College as Collage: Women’s Scrapbooks and Higher Education
To recover the creation process of a college through the pages of Miss Wilson’s scrapbook is also to recover the ability to see our institutions as constructable. Perhaps most importantly, the idea of a college as collage thus offers us an invitation to imagine what we would like our own added scraps to be.
“The Power to Write”: Commonplacing Curricula and the University We Need Now
I make the case for a “composition commons,” a social and intellectual collective generated by writing that happens in classrooms of diverse, non-prestige colleges and universities, the kind of institutions where most educators and students teach and learn.
An Interview with Ellen Gruber Garvey
An Interview with Ellen Gruber Garvey, author of Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance
From Oxford University Press to Substack: Translating Academic Writing for a General Audience
As the commonplace-book tradition teaches us, knowledge is most sustained when it is shared.
Book Love and Reading Commonplaces
Making their own commonplace books helps today’s students understand what is distinctive in their own reading practices. It shows them how to at once release and shape their affective reading and suggests how some creative borrowing from old practices can enhance their reading skills.
“A Salad of Many Herbs”: The Use of Commonplace Books with Undergraduates
The goal was to relate their coursework to historical artifacts in order to tell a meaningful story about the practice of commonplacing. Students made connections by curating pairs of an archival item and a class-made commonplace book.
Part of a page from Thomazine Leigh “Extracts from Various Authors,” Vol. 2, 1815 K/MS/01/047
Transcribed letter from “R B” marked “copy” on the top left, opposite the transcribed title page to Pauline. William Allingham commonplace book. Courtesy of the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library.