We are pleased to invite you to our Focus on the Book program featuring The Peripheral Manuscripts Project.  This project is funded by CLIR and is a multi-institution collaboration that will digitize and describe medieval manuscript books and fragments in the collections of twenty-two Midwest institutions, including Loyola University Chicago Archives and Special Collections. In this presentation, our panelists will describe their process and approach to this work and will share some of their adventures and discoveries in special collections libraries.

Ian Cornelius is an Associate Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of "Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter" and of essays on the language, form, and textual transmission of medieval English literature. His current projects include two collaborations: a digital edition of the text of "Piers Plowman" in New Haven, Beinecke Library, Takamiya MS 23; and the Peripheral Manuscripts Project, a digital online archive of medieval manuscript materials held in smaller institutional collections in the American Midwest.

Liz Hebbard is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at Indiana University; founding co-director, along with Patty Ingham, of the IU Book Lab. She is currently acting as the Primary Principal Investigator on the Peripheral Manuscripts Project. She is a specialist of literature from medieval France, particularly lyric poetry and music, and of medieval manuscripts and is currently finishing a book on the manuscript tradition of troubadour song.

Sarah Noonan is an Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, where she specializes in medieval English literature and manuscript studies. She is the founding principal investigator and Co-PI of “Peripheral Manuscripts: Digitizing Medieval Manuscript Collections in the Midwest” and has published on medieval reading practices, early devotional literature, book history, and pedagogy. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Beinecke Library, the Huntington Library in coordination with Lincoln College, Oxford, and the American Philosophical Society.