Footprints:Jewish Books Through Time and Place is a project dedicated to collecting information about individual copies of Jewish books printed between 1450 and 1800. Based on a range of material sources and through a wide network of collaborators and contributors, Footprints collects and aggregates information about the movement of copies of Jewish books printed in the long early modern period (roughly corresponding to the hand-press era), and follows evidence of their movement into the twenty-first century. In this presentation we will explore how Footprints derives its information, how its data is linked to other authorities, and how it represents its findings to offer exciting opportunities to encounter big questions about the ownership of books and the transit of knowledge about Judaic topics in a global view from the early modern period to the present.

Presenters:

Michelle Margolis Chesner is the Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies at Columbia University and a co-director of Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place. Michelle is also the Vice President/President-Elect of the Association for Jewish Libraries, and she works at the intersection of Jewish book history and digital humanities.

Joshua Teplitsky is an associate professor in the Department of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY), where he researches and teaches about Jewish about Jewish life in Central Europe in the early modern period. His book, Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History’s Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library was published in 2019 and was named the winner of the Salo Baron Prize of the AAJR for best first book in Jewish Studies in 2019, the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is currently at work on a book reconstructing a plague epidemic in eighteenth-century Prague and its impact on the lives of Jews and Christians. He has been interviewed for his research on epidemics and Jewish life in Times Higher Education and Time Magazine. He is one of the co-directors of the Digital Humanities project: Footprints: Jewish Books through Time and Place.

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