The Nature of Paper: An Environmental Retelling of Media History

Histories of media have tended to imagine humans as the points of textual origination, as if the materials used to make paper, ink, and bindings simply existed in abundance, waiting to be harvested. In reality, ecological availability and scarcity make certain kinds of human records possible. Focusing on the history of Western papermaking, Calhoun reveals a more ecologically deterministic, but also a more poetic story of books as sites of active environmental negotiation.

Presented by: Joshua Calhoun