2025 RGME Autumn Colloquium on Fragments
June 27, 2025 in Announcements, Koller-Collins Center for English Studies, Manuscript Studies, Princeton Bibliophiles & Collectors, Rossell Hope Robbins Library at the University of Rochester, Visits to Collections
2025 RGME Autumn Colloquium
on Fragments
“Break-Up Books
and Make-Up Books:
Encountering and Reconstructing
the Legacy of Otto F. Ege
and Other Biblioclasts“
Friday to Sunday 21–23 November 2025
Hybrid and partly Online
Hybrid: In Person at Princeton and Online (Friday and Saturday)
Online: Zoom (Sunday)
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Colloquium Sponsors, Co-Sponsors, and Affiliates
Research Group on Manuscript Evidence
Princeton University Special Collections
The Friends of the Princeton University Library
Student Friends of the Princeton University Library
Princeton Bibliophiles & Collectors
Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University
Rossell Hope Robbins Library
and Koller-Collins Center for English Studies
at the University of Rochester
Bibliographical Society of America
Celia M. Chazelle
Barbara Hanselman
Barbara A. Shailor
[Your Name Here]
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[First posted on 5 January 2025, with updates. Now revised on 20 June 2025, 20 August 2025, 5 September 2025, and 29 October 2025, with changes in plan, co-sponsorship, host, and venues.]
Venue: In-Person, Hybrid, and Online
After an imposed change in venue from our initial plans, the Colloquium goes forward in online format, as planned from the beginning, with an in-person/hybrid component. Its dates remain the same, from Friday to Sunday 21–23 November. The changes allow us to turn to a new host, for which we give thanks. For the earlier version, see
Online sessions will take place on Friday to Sunday. Sessions and Workshops will be hybrid on Friday and Saturday, with venues in different locations at Princeton University and nearby.
On Friday afternoon, our Associate Eric White, Curator of Rare Books, will hold a special set of Workshops on Fragments at Princeton in Special Collections at Firestone Library of the Princeton University Library. These workshops and reports on original materials return to a tradition of the RGME with Symposia and other events at Princeton University, before the Covid Pandemic. For example:
- 2014 Seminar on Manuscripts and Their Photographs
- 2019 Anniversary Symposium Program
- 2020 Spring Symposium: Save the Date
For the 2025 Colloquium, searching for an appropriate location for other parts of the Colloquium beside the Workshops at Special Collections on the Friday afternoon, we explored collaboration with colleagues and organizations for other venues in Princeton to enable a Friday morning session and the Saturday sessions, all in hybrid format. Step by step, with assistance from the Friends of the Princeton University Library and the Department of Art & Archaeology, which had co-sponsored many of our Symposia before the Covid Pandemic. We give thanks for the generous responses to foster the plan for a ‘home’ for this Colloquium.
In such a way, people who travel to Princeton for the Friday workshops and related celebrations might also participate in other in-person sessions on both Friday and Saturday, leaving one session on Sunday to take place in online format only. With this news, some participants and attendees prepared to come to Princeton for the event IN PERSON.
With help of many kinds, we are able to report a collaborative event worthy of the initial plan to which many participants responded so enthusiastically (albeit for a different host which changed its mind). Reviving and transforming the plan has, we hope, been worthy of the complex, multi-faceted subject of fragments which reaches widely into very many aspects of manuscript and related studies, the history of collecting, and the recovery and transmission of written sources from the past. For this collaboration, we give thanks.