Arizona Book History Group

A collaborative research group

Creative encounters with special collections

The Arizona Book History Group (AZBHG) aims to understand, publicize, and make accessible, books and other materials held in collections and libraries in Arizona. Based in the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at ASU, we share the Center’s commitment to open-access to scholarship, and the materials of history.

AZBHG works collaboratively with scholars, book historians, bibliographers, book artists, writers, librarians, and anyone interested in studying (or just enjoying!) materials from any period held in special collections in Arizona. We have particularly strong relationships with the libraries of Arizona State University and the Phoenix Public Library.

We are committed to collaborating with undergraduate and graduate students to further their studies in all aspects of book history, bibliography, library science, archival research, and creative projects.

Founded by Brandi K. Adams and Jonathan Hope, AZBHG also aims to create opportunities for visiting scholars, artists, and writers (AZBHG Fellows) to work with special collections material without a specific agenda as they think along with books, manuscripts and other materials. As part of their work, AZBHG Fellows will share their ideas, findings, or creative work at public events and in classrooms at the Phoenix Public Library and ASU.

AZBHG founders and leaders

Brandi K. Adams is an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University and a member of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Her essays and reviews have been published in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Survey, Cahiers Élisabéthains, and Early Theatre, and in collections including Shakespeare/Text, The Oxford Handbook for the History of the Book, Arden of Faversham: A Critical Reader, and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race. She is currently editing Merry Wives of Windsor with Jonathan Hope for Cambridge Shakespeare Editions, and she is working on her first monograph entitled Representations of Books and Readers in Early Modern English drama (1580-1640).

Jonathan Hope is the Publisher and Managing Editor of ACMRS Press at Arizona State University, where he is also a professor in the Department of English. He previously worked in the UK, at Newcastle, Leeds, Middlesex, and Strathclyde Universities. Hope’s research lies at the intersection of literature and linguistics, with a focus on Shakespeare, Early Modern texts, and computational text analysis. He has a strong side interest in modern experimental writing and explorations of the book as a physical object. Hope has published widely on Shakespeare’s language and the history of the English language: his book, Shakespeare and Language: reason, eloquence and artifice in the Renaissance (2010), seeks to reconstruct the linguistic world of Shakespeare’s England and measure its distance from our own. Hope’s recent work addresses the false, but persistent, myth that Shakespeare invented thousands of words, and the question of Shakespeare’s response to the revolutionary astronomical theories of his time.