Author: Craig Robertson & Deidre Lynch

Craig Robertson is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. He is the author of The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (2021) and The Passport in America: The History of a Document (2010). In these books and his other writings, he uses media and cultural theory to explore historically specific relationships between paper, information, and labor from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Deidre Lynch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature at Harvard, where she teaches courses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and print culture and co-convenes the Mahindra Humanities Center seminar on the History of the Book. She is the author, most recently, of Loving Literature: A Cultural History (2015), and the co-editor, with Alexandra Gillespie, of The Unfinished Book (2020). Her recent writing has centred on album-making, scrapbooking, and various other ways of using blank books to disassemble printed ones.