Microliteratures

ICLS Columbia University

Celebration of Jesús Velasco's 'Microliteratures' Panel discussion celebrating the English release of Jesús Velasco’s Microliteratures: The Production of the Margin in Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Books (Cornell UP, 2025), with discussants Hannah Weaver, Stathis Gourgouris, and Bernard Harcourt.

• Do you write in the margins of books? Do you talk to the past that way, transforming past into present and present into future, passing secret notes to readers still to come? In this panel, Jesús R. Velasco will discuss his new book, Microliteratures, which explores the thinking—legal, political, theological, philosophical, and literary—that medieval and early modern readers did in the margins, those affective spaces where we too think with others. Not as formal as glosses, often in tiny handwriting on pages too small for their largesse, sometimes feverish and abbreviated, such microscripts emerge not as end-product but as process, not as linear knowledge but as thought-in-orbit, encircling and challenging the central text, connecting the points of light, resisting cloistered hermeticism, demanding ethical and political engagement with the world. Julie Stone Peters will Chair. Hannah Weaver, Stathis Gourgouris, and Bernard Harcourt will serve as discussants.