Carnegie Mellon University

The Center for Print, Networks, and Performance (CPNP)

A locus for early modern researchers from CMU and the greater Pittsburgh area.

The Center for Print, Networks, and Performance (CPNP) is a research hub collectively organized by CMU scholars whose work focuses on the art, culture, and politics of early modernity (c. 1500-1800). In addition to fostering a robust environment for early modern studies on campus, the Center also serves as key hub for early modernists based in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area. A key initiative in this respect is our speaker series, which typically entails four talks per term from a combination of local and out-of-town presenters. 

To join the CPNP email list, or to make enquiries about CPNP activities, please contact Dr. Stephen Wittek (swittek@andrew.cmu.edu)


Upcoming Events

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PATRICIA AKHIMIE (Folger Shakespeare Library)
“The Goodness of the Night: Editing Othello”
Thursday, February 29, 1:00 to 2:30
Baker Hall 254Q 

Through a close look at versions of and emendations to Othello, this talk brings the practice and theory of textual editing into conversation with premodern critical race studies and explores the role of textual editing in the production and perpetuation of racial stereotypes. Beyond the homegenizing work that textual editors’ own homogenous demographics have and continue to effect, as a practice, textual editing employs strategic omissions and emendations, constructing a bibliographic architecture designed to preserve editorial thought and occlude the lived experience of readers. This practice privileges a long record of internal conversations amongst editors that gestures continually backward toward a (nonexistent) original moment when editors, texts, and authors were one, knowing each other fully. At the same time, it preserves the function and may redouble the effect of racist words, phrases, and ideas that appear in the text and editorial apparatus, words that function to “know” and identify others as different and lesser in the text, on the stage, and in the world. In this talk I seek to demonstrate the race-making work of textual emendation and omission with the goal of empowering a more diverse set of readers and thinkers to engage with the text by engaging with the theory and practice of textual editing.

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TALIA PERRY (CMU)
"Rooftop Fancy and Folly: Tudor Chimney Stack as Device and Discourse"
Wednesday, March 27, 4:30 to 6:30
Posner Hall 234 (CMU)

Emerging by the mid-fifteenth century as the product of technological and material innovation, the “Tudor” chimney stack was also bound to a medieval tradition of craft and design. Over the long sixteenth century, these architectural elements — from undulating brick geometries to triumphant classical colonnades— were increasingly entangled with displays of opulence and grandeur: By the pen of poets and pamphleteers, chimneys served as metonymic substitutes for power itself, implicated in anxieties of class hierarchy and national identity, and bound up in the expectations of early modern English society.
Talia Perry is the Digital Projects and Publishing Specialist at CMU Libraries. Her research focuses on architecture, design, and the impact of technological change on social experience.

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ED SIMON
“Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian bargain”
Tuesday, April 23, 4:30-6:00 PM
Posner Hall 234 (CMU)

From ancient times to the modern world, the idea of the Faustian bargain has exerted a magnetic pull upon our collective imaginations. Dr. Ed Simon’s Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain takes us on a historical tour of the Faustian bargain, from biblical themes to the Manhattan Project, and illustrates how the instinct for sacrificing our principles in exchange for power models all kinds of social ills. Dr. Simon is the editor in chief of Belt Magazine and a staff writer for LitHub. His essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The New Republic, and The Washington Post. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance’s Radicalism.