ASECS Member Crystal B. Lake has been awarded an ACLS Project Development Grant. Her project, “Reading/Making: Handcrafting Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century,” recovers the surprising range of crafts, customized commodities, and designed environments that early readers created between 1650 and 1850 that directly reference published poems, plays, novels, and works of nonfiction. These “literary objects” include needlepoint samplers stitched with lines from popular poems, board games inspired by bestsellers, waxwork renditions of fictional characters, magic lantern show based on trending plots, pinprick portraits of favorite authors, and much more. “Reading/Making” documents these objects systematically and contends that they ask us to reconsider our contemporary notion that reading is primarily a mental activity. Literary objects insist that we understand reading instead as a deeply embodied practice that engages not only our minds but also our hands—and that the literature we often find most compelling is that which provokes us to engage in material acts of worldmaking and personalized forms of storytelling.
Project Development Grants are competitive and awarded as a component of the ACLS Fellowship Program. The program is funded by the ACLS endowment, which has benefited from the generous support of esteemed funders, institutional members, and individual donors since our founding in 1919.