The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture has named Jonathan Senchyne its new director.
Senchyne, who joined the School of Library & Information Studies as an assistant professor in 2012, succeeds Greg Downey, who had led the center since 2012 and became associate dean of the social sciences in the College of Letters & Science last year.
Senchyne's research area is the history of books and print culture in early and 19th-century America, with special emphasis on the material culture of books and African American print. He has published essays in Early African American Print Culture, Book History, and Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Senchyne's work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the New York Public Library.
"I am delighted to direct the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture," Senchyne says, "especially as we approach its 25th anniversary, take stock of the ways that the University of Wisconsin has been a crucial site in the development of print culture history and its ties to digital culture, and plan for new opportunities in the next 25 years."
Founded in 1992, the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture is a collaboration of the School of Library and Information Studies, the Wisconsin Historical Society, and the University of Wisconsin Libraries. Its mission is to promote interdisciplinary scholarship on the authorship, reading, publication, and distribution of print — and now digital — materials, produced by those at both the center and periphery of power.
The center offers colloquia, a biennial conference, a Ph.D. minor in print culture studies, a book series with the University of Wisconsin Press, and the James P. Danky Fellowship for original research in the Wisconsin Historical Society archives.