Prof. Dr. Lothar Müller, born in Dortmund, Germany, in 1954, is editor of the cultural feuilleton in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Berlin edition) and honorary Professor for Modern German Literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His most recent publication is "Weisse Magie: Die Epoche des Papiers" (2012), brought out in English in 2015 as "White Magic: The Age of Paper". 

General Keynote

Jonathan M. Bloom shares both the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professorship of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College and the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair in Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University with his wife and colleague, Sheila S. Blair.  He is the author, co-author, or editor of seventeen books and hundreds of articles on many aspects of Islamic art, ranging from general surveys to specialized studies of the minaret and of the history of paper. His 2001 book, Paper before Print: the History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic lands, was awarded the Charles Rufus Morey Prize for a notable book in the history of art by the College Art Association; it has been translated into Turkish and is being translated into Arabic.  His 2007 book, Arts of the City Victorious:  Islamic Art and Architecture in Fatimid North Africa and Egypt, was published to celebrate the 50th jubilee of the Aga Khan.  The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture, which he co-edited with his wife, won the 2010 World Book of the Year Prize from the Islamic Republic of Iran.  He is currently writing a book about Islamic architecture in North Africa and Spain.

Plenary I: Paper as Material Artifact and Trade Commodity

Andrew Pettegree is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He is the author of over a dozen books in the fields of Reformation history and the history of communication including Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge University Press, 2005), The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010) and The Invention of News (Yale University Press, 2014).  His most recent book, Brand Luther: 1517, Print and the Making of the Reformation (Penguin USA) was published in October 2015. His new projects include a study of Newspaper Advertising in the Low Countries and ‘Preserving the World’s Rarest Books’, a collaborative project with libraries funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Plenary II: Paper in the Emergence of Epistolary, Post and News Networks

Jacob Soll’s first book, Publishing "The Prince" (2005)—winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize— examines how Machiavelli's work was popularized and influenced modern political thought.  In his second book, The Information Master (2009), Soll investigates how Louis XIV's famous finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert fused financial management and library sciences to create one of the first modern information states. 

His most recent book, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (2014), presents a sweeping history of accounting and politics, drawing on a wealth of examples from over a millennia of human history to reveal how accounting and the technology of keeping and archiving financial paperwork, can used to both build kingdoms, empires and entire civilizations, but also to undermine them, tracing a long cultural disconnect between human beings and their attempts to manage financial numbers.

He has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2011, the MacArthur "Genius" Grant. He was Fernand Braudel Visiting Professor at the EUI in 2007.

Soll was a correspondent for the Boston Globe, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, The New Republic, Politico, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Plenary III: Paper in Political Information Management and Governance

Plenary IV: Roundtable on Paper in Archives and Archival Practices