Programme

5.30pm: registration, reception drinks and exhibition viewing; talks begin at 6pm

6pm: ‘The Renaissance library and the worldview of John Dee’, Deborah Harkness, professor of history, University of Southern California

6.20pm: ‘Curating Dee: behind the scenes of ‘Scholar, courtier, magician’’, Katie Birkwood, RCP rare books and special collections librarian

6.40pm: ‘Back to the future with John Dee’, Bill Sherman, head of research, Victoria & Albert Museum

7pm: ‘In conversation’, followed by exhibition viewing

9pm: event closes

Talks will be in the Dorchester Library, with refreshments in the Lasdun Hall

Speakers

Deborah Harkness

Professor of history at the University of Southern California, her first book was John Dee’s conversations with angels. Her prize-winning book, The jewel house, led readers through the streets and alleys of Elizabethan London. Harkness has also written The Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling All Souls trilogy.

Bill Sherman

Head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum and professor of Renaissance studies at the University of York, Bill's work is driven by a love of archives and other collections, and an interest in how objects from the past (textual and otherwise) come down to us, what they pick up along the way and how they speak across periods. He has published widely on the history of books and readers, the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the interface between word and image and the relationship between knowledge and power. His books include Used books: marking readers in Renaissance England and John Dee: the politics of reading in the English Renaissance.

Katie Birkwood

Katie is the RCP rare books and special collections librarian and curator of the exhibition ‘Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost library of John Dee’. She contributes to the journal Library & Information History, and has published widely.