Miller Center | The Materiality and Politics of Information in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: The Printing Shop and the Paper Mill | Corinna Zeltsman
Miller Center | The Materiality and Politics of Information in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: The Printing Shop and the Paper Mill | Corinna Zeltsman
During the independence era in Mexico, individuals and factions of all stripes embraced the printing press as a key weapon in the struggle for political power, even though most Mexicans could not read. To tame a boisterous field of debate while promoting local publishing industries and development initiatives, new national governments attempted to regulate print at the source: they defined press freedom in relation to printers’ activities and invested in paper-making technology to ensure the viability of a public sphere.
By exploring the practical and discursive contests that surrounded these strategies over a century of political transformation, Zeltsman’s talk considers how material and social struggles shaped broader debates about press freedom, authorship, and the politics of information.
Corinna Zeltsman is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. She is the author of Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (University of California Press, 2021), which received the 2022 Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association. Trained as a letterpress printer, she is a senior fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School, University of Virginia.