Kathryn A. Schwartz
Harvard University
The Role of the Commissioner in Canonizing the Printed Canon
During the nineteenth century, Cairenes became the first people within the Ottoman Empire to develop an urban print culture. Their choice of incorporating print technology into their handwritten output has subsequently impacted scholars’ access and approach to the past. Yet the process by which Cairenes remediated manuscripts to print remains understudied.
Kathryn A. Schwartz explores the work of the commissioner, or the person who ordered and paid for a text to be printed. It will be argued that the commissioner played a crucial role in stabilizing, forging, and subverting the Arabic literary canon, despite the fact that commissioners are often overlooked in studies of texts and textual practices.
Kathryn A. Schwartz is the Postdoctoral Fellow for the Digital Library of the Eastern Mediterranean at Harvard University (2015-2017), and Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (2017-2018). Her research interests revolve around the social, technological, and book history of the modern Middle East, and she is currently completing her first book manuscript entitled Print and the People of Cairo, 19th c. Kathryn Schwartz's publications on the topic of printing include “The Political Economy of Private Printing in Cairo As Told From A Commissioning Deal Turned Sour, 1871”, International Journal of Middle East Studies (2017) and “Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?”, Book History (forthcoming).