For over two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we work, study, live, and communicate with one another. Prolonged periods of national lockdowns caused the conflation of public and private workspace. We attended endless online meetings from home where our bookshelves were suddenly on public display, where once a few people could look at the books on our shelves. Much more than a Zoom background, the bookshelves displayed our cultural capital to the whole world. And because we are — literally — what we read, physical bookshelves broadcast on screen have become sites of self-promotion, contestation, erasure, self-censorship, moral judgement, mythmaking and trolling. If Amanda Hess has considered that the credibility bookcase was the "quarantine’s hottest accessory" (New York Times, 1 May 2020), John Quiggin has pointed out that this newly respectable flaunting of cultural capital could entrench existing socio-economic inequalities.
Drawing upon theoretical perspectives from anthropology, psychology and literary theory, Dr. Shafquat Towheed, senior lecturer at The Open University (Milton Keynes, UK) and specialist in book history, will critically examine the cultural phenomenon of the pandemic bookshelf.
This in-person conference is organized by Solenne Guyot and Sasha Richman, PhD students in literature from the Programme doctoral international (PDI) of the University of Strasbourg.
