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Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute Launches a Travelling Seminar on the Afro-Eurasian Origins of Print

The Research and Academic Program of the Clark Art Institute is sponsoring a travelling seminar on the global origins and transmission of print. The project has the ambitious goal of re-thinking the history of pre-modern print, offering a more unified and inclusive history of the transformative technology. While often Johannes Gutenberg is heralded as the inventor of printing with movable type in Mainz, Germany in the mid 1450s, printing had been practiced in Asia (movable type and woodblock) and North Africa (woodblock) for centuries prior. Indeed, this seminar maintains that early printing in Europe should be narrated as a late stage in an inter-connected, inter-continental, inter-faith course of development rather than as an exceptional moment of discovery driven by Christian European practitioners. This seminar will work to redress the dominant western narrative of print as a European invention and proffer in its place an inclusive Afro-Eurasian account of reproductive technologies. The investigation will encompass innovations in printing text and images from before 1500 across three continents, focusing on the use of mechanical reproduction to produce multiples impressions.