Fisher Summer Seminar Series
The Fisher Library summer seminar series began in 2017 as an outreach initiative aiming to provide continuing education in the fields of book history and bibliography for librarians, archivists, curators, scholars, antiquarian booksellers, and graduate students in Canada and elsewhere. Since then, the seminar has welcomed expert instructors and dozens of participants to learn about a range of topics using the collections of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. Listed below is information on this year’s offerings.
Upcoming Summer Seminars
The Fisher Library, in cooperation with the Footprints: Jewish Books through Time and Place project, invites applicants to participate in a two-day workshop in Toronto devoted to the study of early modern Hebrew paleography, especially as it appears in the margins of early printed books. It will be held June 9-10, 2025.
Bringing together artists, bibliographers, book historians, librarians, and printmakers, this seminar will explore the interdisciplinary field of queer book arts by examining books and printed works through the lens of research creation. It will be held June 24-26, 2025.
Past Summer Seminars
This course, the Fisher's third summer seminar, provided an intensive introduction to manuscript culture during Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, as well as the methods and terminology used in the description and cataloguing of manuscripts.
In this seminar, participants were introduced to the many genres of material that are part of culinary collections held at the Fisher Library. They learned about the flow of culinary information through the international book trade and the first cookbooks published in Canada.
This seminar explored the field of bibliographical studies in Latin America from the sixteenth century to the present.
This 3-day seminar trains participants in low-barrier, non-invasive scientific imaging and analytic techniques appropriate for the study of manuscripts and printed books from a variety of global book traditions.
This seminar will explore the role of community and institutional archives and libraries in the making, preservation, and dissemination of Black histories from multidisciplinary practices.