Sarah Pelletier

RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Print History and Culture, Labour in Literary and Material Production, Material Culture, Authorship, Periodical Studies, Books about Books.

CURRENT INTERESTS:
My research focuses on the transnational typographical trade of the mid-to-late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Northeastern North America, with specific attention to the newspaper industry and its compositors. I engage with printers’ and compositors’ own cultures of print, namely the trade’s typographical journals, and I approach these periodicals through a feminist and transnational book historical lens that is attentive to the dynamics of race making. I examine the ways in which definitions and conceptualizations of “skill” are constructed by white male printers and compositors in Canada and the United States (and, to an extent, in Britain) at the end of the century, both in union policies/documents and in the trade’s journals. Expanding upon scholarship that has tended to focus on the relationship of “skill” to gender/sex, I consider the ways that the continued re-definition of “skill” in the North American trade during the period excluded those folks who were often deemed “unskilled” and threats or outsiders to the white, male-dominated trade’s masculine craft identity, such as white women, other white men (i.e.: apprentices), immigrants, and racialized minorities. Additionally, my work considers the important contributions these excluded groups made to fin-de-siècle print culture to de-center the white male as the protagonist of nineteenth-century print culture in North America.

CONFERENCES:
– Jody Mason and Sarah Pelletier. “‘Singular Plurality’: Settler Colonial Transcendence and Canada’s 2021 Guest-of-Honour Campaign at the Frankfurt Book Fair.” Paper presented on the panel “(Re)Presenting Indigenous Literatures in Canada and Quebec: Defining, Publishing, Promoting” at the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) Annual Conference, Power of the Written Word. 11-15 July 2022. Amsterdam/Online Hybrid. Forthcoming. https://sharp2022.nl/programme/.
– Sarah Pelletier. “Printing and Pedagogy.” Presentation delivered at the panel and showcase “Cultures of the Small Press in Canada: Broadsides in the BAL” at the EGSS Carleton Annual – Conference, The Literary Ordinary: Normality, Banality, and the Cultural Production of the Everyday. 01 May 2022. Ottawa, Ontario.
– Sarah Pelletier. “‘Composed, I only give the hint, / Of multifarious small things’: The Everyday Work Behind Letterpress-Printed Objects.” Presentation delivered at: The EGSS Carleton Annual Conference, The Literary Ordinary: Normality, Banality, and the Cultural Production of the Everyday. 30 April 2022. Online Conference.
– Sarah Pelletier. “‘Neither boy nor man’: Historicizing the Ironic Gendering of the Canadian Modernist Little Magazine.” Paper presented at: The Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL), ACQL Annual Conference. 29-31 May 2021. Online Conference.
– Sarah Pelletier and Julia Warren. “The Tragicomedy of Saturday Night and the Exploration of the Narrative of Archives.” Panelists at the Book History and Print Culture Graduate Student Colloquium, Books Beyond Reading. 10 March 2018. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON. https://bhpccolloquium2018.wordpress.com/confirmed-papers/.

PUBLICATIONS:
Jody Mason and Sarah Pelletier. Review of The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business, by Beth Driscoll and Claire Squires, Publishing History. Forthcoming.

RESEARCH AND RELATED EXPERIENCE:
– Book Arts Lab Assistant, MacOdrum Library, Carleton University. Jan 2022 – Present.
– Research Assistant for Jody Mason, Department of English, Carleton University. Sept 2020 – May 2022.

AWARDS:
– SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship (2022-2025)
– 2018 Printing Apprentice, Robertson Davies Library Printing Fellowship Program (Massey College, University of Toronto)