Harvard Science Center • Room 469 • 1 Oxford Street • Cambridge, MA
This event will gather specialists—historians of science, furniture, labor, and politics, as well as horologists, and conservators—around the Pope Orrery (built 1776-1787 in Boston) to interpret it from their diverse vantage points. Together we will use the Pope Orrery as a mise-en-scène for an examination of Boston and the British world during the American Revolution, as witnessed by the labor, technology, economics, and politics of its production and sale, the social classes involved, and its use as a spectacle, prestige item, and model for teaching natural philosophy and religion. The...
IN-PERSON AT THE NAASR VARTAN GREGORIAN BUILDING, 395 CONCORD AVE., BELMONT, MA. ALSO LIVE ON ZOOM (REGISTRATION REQUIRED) AND YOUTUBE
Early Modernity and Mobility (Yale UP, 2023) explores the disparate yet connected histories of Armenian printing establishments in early modern Europe and Asia. From 1512, when the first Armenian printed codex appeared in Venice, to the end of the early modern period in 1800, Armenian presses operated in nineteen locations across the Armenian diaspora. Drawing on extensive archival research, Sebouh David Aslanian explores why certain books were published at certain times, how books were sold across the diaspora, who read them, and how the printed word...
Katherine Small Gallery, 108 Beacon Street, Somerville, Massachusetts 02143
Meghan Constantinou will talk about stenciled books—in which all (or most) of the textual and decorative elements are hand-stenciled—in the context of eighteenth-century French domestic printing.