Research Keywords

• typography
• letterpress printing
• digital humanities
• book history
• Early Modern book production
• Creative Writing/Poetry

Grants, Contracts & Research Gifts

• Landscape, Land art, and the American West. PI: Alberta Comer, Gretchen Dietrich. Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Matching University Funds, 01/01/2018 - 12/31/2021. Total project budget to date: $750,000.00

Presentations

• American Printing History Association conference (held jointly with the Friends of Dard Hunter), Matrices: the Social Life of Paper, Print, and Art. I presented “Imperfect Iterations: Duplicate Iconography in Wood Engraving Blocks.” October 26, 2018. Conference Paper, Refereed, Presented, 10/26/2018.
• Academic Art Museums and Libraries Summit, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Oberlin College. Together with collaborator Gretchen Dietrich, I presented the University of Utah’s grant project, “Landscape, Land art, and the American West” in the Constructing Narratives through Object-Based Teaching panel. June 13-15, 2018. Invited Talk/Keynote, Presented, 06/14/2018.
• American Printing History Association conference, The Black Art & Printers’ Devils: The Magic, Mysticism, and Wonder of Printing History, October 7-9, 2016, The Huntington Library. Presenting “The Alchemy of Erasure: Book Waste as Evidence” in the “Dark Corners” panel. Conference Paper, Refereed, Presented, 10/08/2016.
• “The Year of Shakespeare: Historical Context as Biography in the Writings of James Shapiro,” a presentation and discussion prior to Jim Shapiro’s lecture as the closing event for First Folio! The Book That Gave us Shakespeare. I was flown in to lead this discussion with the Early Modern Working Group, Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, Texas A&M University, March 30, 2016. Invited Talk/Keynote, Presented, 03/30/2016.

Publications

• Mandell, Laura, Todd Samuelson, Jacob Heil, Matthew Christy & Elizabeth Grumbach (2017). Navigating the Storm: IMPACT, eMOP, and Agile Steering Standards. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Vol. 321, 189-94. Published, 12/2017.
• Samuelson, Todd and Christopher Morrow. "Empirical Bibliography: A Decade of Book History at Texas A&M." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 109.1 (2015): 83-109. This 11,000 word article begins by positing a new element in the taxonomy of bibliography, invoking the suggestion by R. B. McKerrow that students, scholars, and editors experience the processes of early modern book production. It concludes as an examination of the Book History Workshop, a week-long intensive which for over a decade has sought to carry out McKerrow’s call. Published, 01/2015.
• Samuelson, Todd. “Still Life.” Printing History ns 16 (July 2014): 42-50. This 3,500 word discussion of anthropodermic bindings explores the taboo about the use of human skin as a binding material, connected with the relative commonness of the practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article is not only an exploration of the literature and of the examples of bindings I’ve examined, but of the human response to handling (or the reluctance to handle) these artifacts. Published, 07/2014.
• Samuelson, Todd, and Catherine Coker. “Mind the Gap: Integrating Special Collections Teaching.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 14.1 (2014): 51-66. This 7,000 word article documents the challenges special collections librarians face in integrating their teaching program into that of general library instruction, and details several approaches we have taken to achieve effective collaboration. Published, 01/2014.
• Heil, Jacob, and Todd Samuelson. “Book History in the Early Modern OCR Project, or, Bringing Balance to the Force.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13.4 (2013): 90-103. This 5,700 word article is being published in a special issue entitled “The Digital Turn.” This investigation discusses the eMOP project in both its book history and digital humanities contexts. It argues that our project represents one of the first large-scale digital humanities projects to utilize book history as a solution to a digital problem. Published, 12/2013.
• Samuelson, Todd, Laura Sare, and Catherine Coker. “Unusual Suspects: the Case of Insider Theft in Research Libraries and Special Collections.” College & Research Libraries 73.6 (November 2012): 556-68. This quantitative examination of publicized information about cases of library theft attempts to provide a more accurate account than has previously been given of the identity and motives of library thieves. Specifically, we sought to answer the question of whether most are instigated by insiders or by unaffiliated thieves. Published, 11/2012.
• Clark, Dennis T., Susan P. Goodwin, Todd Samuelson, and Catherine Coker. “A Qualitative Assessment of the Kindle e-book Reader: Results from Initial Focus Groups.” Performance Measurement and Metrics 9.2 (2008): 118-29. Published, 01/2008.
• Samuelson, Todd. “Creating the Incommensurate God: Art and Belief in O’Connor’s ‘Parker’s Back’ and Harold Bloom’s The Book of J.” Flannery O’Connor and the Christian Mystery, Literature and Belief 17 (1997): 47-59. An essay chosen by outside referees to appear with the best-received of the papers presented at this international conference, together with its plenary addresses which included talks by Sally Fitzgerald, John Desmond, Richard Giannone, and W. A. Sessions. Published, 01/1997.