Join the Brown University Library and the Center for Middle East Studies for a workshop and conversation with Jana Dambrogio, conservator, author, and editor, on Tuesday, October 21 at 4 p.m. at the John Hay Library (321).

Free and open to the public. In-person event.

Letterlocking

Offering a glimpse into a new collaborative project on letterlocking from Ottoman Tunis in the early nineteenth century, this talk will reconstruct the intricate folds, tucks, and slits of letter packets secured shut with “letterlocking,” a practice that underpinned global communications security for centuries before modern envelopes.

The speaker Jana Dambrogio has pioneered the study of letterlocking using automated virtual unfolding of sealed documents imaged by X-ray microtomography and computational flattening algorithms. She has co-authored numerous studies on the subject with Daniel Starza Smith, including their latest book from MIT Press entitled, Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter. Dambrogio situates her findings from this case study of Ottoman Tunisian correspondence within a novel letterlocking categorization system based on a study of 250,000 historical letters. 

This event will delve into how the materiality of the paper lock itself acted as an antiforgery mechanism in the perilous waters of the Barbary Coast during the early period of diplomacy between the Ottoman regency of Tunis and the United States in the Mediterranean Sea. This session will be in conversation with Gwendolyn Collaço, Anne S.K. Brown Curator for Military & Society at the John Hay Library, who translated the 1817 letter from the Bey of Tunis to American President James Monroe (1817–1825) that Dambrogio analyzes in her work. In their dialogue, they will contextualize the unusual episode surrounding the dispatch of this letter, including American mercantile interests in the region, the response of the Bey of Tunis to violated ceremonial customs, and this dynamic period that transformed diplomatic correspondence between Tunis and its Mediterranean partners. This session features a hands-on demo of letterlocking techniques for audience members to try for themselves. 

Jana Dambrogio is the Thomas F. Peterson (1957) Conservator, Wunsch Conservation Laboratory, MIT Libraries. She is also the Director and Founder of Unlocking History Research Group, General Editor of Letterlocking.org and Dictionary of Letterlocking (DoLL). 

This event forms part of CMES Research Initiative: American-Islamic Exchanges in the Long 19th Century.