Panizzi Lectures 2025: Insects, Colonial Archives and Postcolonial Book History

Описание: This event took place on 30 October 2025, as part of the 2025 Panizzi Lectures – Books in their Elements: Print Culture in the Age of Climate Change. The information below is correct as of the publication date.

Lecture 2: Insects, colonial archives and postcolonial book history

Traditionally a ‘dry’ discipline little concerned with ecocritical themes, book history has started to engage with environmental humanities. This lecture joined this trend by tracking books and documents in the damp air of colonial archives – along with the insects which inhabited them, and the fumigants which followed.

In this lecture, Isabel Hofmeyr looked at how the intersection of insect, paper and chemicals relates to literary form and questions of book history. Hofmeyr explored these themes in three steps: first by tracking how colonial states undertook fumigation in archives and then by reading two ‘texts’. The first is a South African short story by Herman Charles Bosman, ‘White Ant’; the second arises from pieces of worm-eaten and fumigated wood from Westminster Hall that were distributed to museums across the dominions in the early twentieth century.

This lecture was presented by Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

About the Panizzi Lectures:

The Panizzi Lectures are a series of annual lectures based on original research by an eminent scholar of the book. The lecture series is named after Anthony Panizzi, former Principal Librarian of the British Museum. They have been delivered annually since 1985.

Thumbnail image credit: H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, a few months after being ‘planted’ in a Johannesburg garden. Photograph by Isabel Hofmeyr.

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About the Speaker:

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand and was Global Distinguished Professor at New York University from 2013 to 2022. She has worked extensively on print culture and book history and has combined these with environmental and oceanic themes. Recent publications include Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (2022) and a coedited special issue on “Reading for Water” in Interventions 24 (3) 2022.

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