This lecture we are fortunate to hear from both project managers of California Book School about their current research, Sean Pessin and Liza Mardoyan.

Examining Concentration and Amplification in The Best American Poetry, 1988–1997

Sean Pessin

Using a combination of close reading, archival methods, critical theory, and statistics, this paper models the flows of citations among poems as they were selected for publication by literary magazines, the annual The Best American Poetry Series and finally in the controversial 1998 The Best of the Best American Poetry anthology, edited by Harold Bloom. The paper concludes with several recommendations for practices that may help produce more representative poetry anthologies.

The Diasporan Book: Knowledge Production via Print Culture in the post-Genocide Armenian Community of Lebanon, 1915-2015

Liza Mardoyan

Following the Armenian Genocide of 1915, survivors displaced from their ancestral lands in the Ottoman Empire established new communities throughout the Middle East. In Lebanon, the reconstruction of communal life was accompanied by an extraordinary production of print. Books, newspapers, serialized novels, and textbooks became part of the cultural infrastructure through which a stateless diasporic community produced, circulated, and transmitted knowledge.

This lecture proposes The Diasporan Book as a way of understanding this print culture: the book not simply as a material object or repository of collective memory, but as a site of knowledge production and stateless cultural power. Drawing on archival and bibliographic research conducted in Lebanon, together with microhistories reconstructed through interviews, I examine how Armenian print was produced, circulated, and used within Lebanon and across the Armenian diaspora.

The microhistories of two Armenian publishing houses, Doniguian and Sevan, reveal the entrepreneurial and cultural commitments that sustained print in the diaspora. Their publications also lead to a curious question for the history of the book: what happens when books produced for everyday use become rare? Armenian-language textbooks, once printed and reprinted for generations of students, can today be remarkably difficult to locate, inviting us to rethink how rarity itself emerges through histories of use, loss, and survival.

Extending from book-form publication to serialized literature published in Armenian-language newspapers, the lecture ultimately situates The Diasporan Book within a wider ecosystem of production, circulation, and reading that helped make Lebanon a major center of Armenian intellectual and cultural life in exile after 1915.

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