2019 Gorgias Book Grant

Win $500 of Gorgias Press titles through the 2019 Gorgias Book Grant

The Gorgias Book Grant is an important part of our efforts to support young scholars in the humanities. Every year, Gorgias chooses two graduate students to receive an award of $500 worth of Gorgias titles (each) for demonstrating excellence in their fields.

2019 Grant Field: Any field within the scope of Gorgias Publications
Application Deadline: May 31, 2019

Eligibility

1. Candidate must be enrolled in a graduate program (Master's or Ph.D.) in an accredited university or an institution of learning in the field of the grant.
2. Candidate must be a student in good standing.

Application Process

To apply, please email the following to Gemma Tully (gemma@gorgiaspress.com)

1. A letter indicating your interests in your field and plans for the future.
2. A two-page description of your thesis, or a one-page description of your course work in the case of course-based programs.
   Send the following items by mail to: Gorgias Press LLC, Book Grants Program, 954 River Rd., Piscataway, NJ 08854.
3. Official transcripts of the previous 2 years of university education. If the institutions you come from do not give out transcripts, please contact us to make alternative arrangements to satisfy this requirement.
4. Two letters of recommendations from professors familiar with your work (one must be your current supervisor in the field of the grant).

Please bear in mind that all documents, except for official transcripts, should be in English.

In order to be considered for the grant, please submit all documents by May 31, 2019 (snail-mail documents should be postmarked by the due date). We’ll announce the lucky winners in July 2019.

How Present Technology Changes Our View of Past Technology

I’ve been thinking more recently about the significance we attach to technological developments. Think, for instance of the shift from scroll to codex or the change from handwritten books to books printed with movable type. Most readers here will be familiar with some of the significance found in these changes. Did the codex form reinforce the canon for instance? Was it a way that early Christians distinguished their sacred from non-sacred writings? Did Christians become more concerned with textual accuracy with the invention of the printing press? Etc.

These are good questions and it is worth reflecting on the ways new technologies affect or, alternatively, reflect Christian beliefs and practice. But I confess that I sometimes feel skeptical about how much significance is ascribed to them. One reason is because of something Alan Jacobs has written about, which he calls the tendency to “fetishize” past technologies. Here he is in 2015 reflecting on this tendency in Books & Culture (sadly defunct now):

Any given technology changes its meaning when alternatives to it arise: candles began to mean something different when gas lighting appeared; gas lighting began to mean something different when electrical light appeared. Associations form in the public mind with particular times, places, social groups—mental links that would have been impossible to forge without the clarifying power of contrast. This is not to say that technologies have no meaning until alternatives turn up: but the more universal they are, the less likely we are to reflect on them. The comment (I have heard it attributed to Huston Smith) that the only thing the world’s religions have in common is that they all use candles is something that no one would have thought of before the advent of other forms of lighting.

Thus when digital technologies of reading and writing arose, soon thereafter people became intensely reflective about what had preceded them: books, paper, pens and pencils. E-readers make the distinctive features, the characteristic conformation, of books stand forth vividly; a world in which everyone types becomes a world in which pens can be fetishized.

The attention vector of any particular technology goes something like this: from ubiquitous and largely unreflective use to the subject of specialized scholarly research to the topic of personal and idiosyncratic reflections. So the history of the book became a serious scholarly subdiscipline starting in the second half of the 20th century, and emerged onto the general public scene near the end of that century: Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading (1996) marked, more clearly than any other single book, that emergence... [the rest is pay-walled, sadly.]

I think Jacobs is right and the point is important because we may be tempted to see more in the shifts mentioned above than is deserved. In the case of early Christians and their “bookishness,” for example, I would like to know whether or not they thought of this as distinguishing them from other contemporary groups. If not, then might this be something we are reading into the past because of what Jacobs calls a fetishizing of previous technologies?

Well, I need to keep thinking about it. But it’s something to be aware of at least.