MLA CSE (Committee on Scholarly Editions)-SHARP (Society for the HIstory of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) Collaborative Session, Open Topic: Editions/Author/Readers/Publishers at the 2017 MLA Convention

This collaborative session seeks to engage the scholarly editing community with the wider community of authors and readers (and scholars of authorship, reading, and publishing). Possible topics might include, but not be limited to:

• what readers want and need in a scholarly edition
• how scholarly editors imagine a readership and its needs, either today or in the past
• tactics of editions that construct readerships
• how to assess and value the work of scholarly editing in promotion and tenure decisions
• the affordances of print and digital editions
• challenges of sustainability in scholarly editions
• relations between editors and authors; the traces of editor-author relations in editions
• creative apparatus, or reader-friendly paratexts
• canon-formation and the scholarly editor
• when is a new edition warranted?
• the editor’s power to shape how we know what we know
• the editor’s role in handling information overload
• after accidentals and substantives: editing and the new textuality
• collaborative and interactive editions: when readers intervene
• the turn to social editions (from crowd-sourcing annotations and resistant original materials to more ambitious forms)
• translated editions, bilingual formats, and the culture-crossing power of editions

Please send 250-word abstracts (or full papers, if you prefer) to acoldiron@fsu.edu by March 11, 2016.