The purpose of my thesis project, A View of Affect has been two fold: to engage closely with an early modern book, and to experiment with the idea that self-examination as a legitimate way to gain knowledge about the body. Working with Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, (1621) has opened to view the extensive constellation of ideas that were part of the philosophical universe of the time. I engaged with the Anatomy of Melancholy by immersing myself in the prose, responding to Burton's writing with my own writing. I also studied and made drawings from early modern anatomical illustrations, and I drew shapes found in nature that seemed analogous to shapes in the body. All the while, I relied firmly on my own observations. The shapes found in nature, and the line quality in the early modern prints influenced my drawings, but I only drew what I saw. A View of Affect is not a historical model, but I did fully embrace Burton's belief in the importance of direct observation. The purpose of my treatise on the how emotions exist and function in the body is not to specify what is there for others, but to encourage readers to look carefully at their own internal life.

Book reviews for: Foster, Morris W. Being Comanche: A Social History of an American Indian Community. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991. xvi + 230 pp. including references, bibliography, and index. $29.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. Nugent, Daniel. Spent Cartridges of Revolution: An Anthropological History of Namiquipa, Chihuahua. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. xvi + 225 pp. including references, bibliography, and index. $39.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.

In the last five years, Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) store has flourished, allowing entrepreneurs and authors to upload their works for sale to Amazon's worldwide audience. The self-published works that dominate the KDP store are fiction, but local histories and memoirs have also found their way to Amazon. Many of these books are non-traditional histories; they are amateur works on community and family stories, memoirs, and life writing. This new and egalitarian historical production has considerable implications for public historians, librarians, and archivists. How it will impact or change the creation of the historical record and influence the field of history remains to be seen. This research project and its accompanying dissertation will situate some of these histories in their greater historiographical field by conducting a close reading of each, and it will utilize microhistorical methodology and standpoint theory to analyze their significance. While there have been some initial quantitative analyses of self-publishing (Dilevko and Dali, 2006; Bradley et al, 2011), no studies have conducted close readings of these texts or explored their content and subject matter in an in-depth way. This study will ultimately argue that many of these self-published works have a place in the public sphere as useful pieces of intimate, personal, and sometimes firsthand knowledge of past events, and that they should be studied as important and new styles of historical production. As records of a uniquely 21st century outlook, they offer future generations insight into American experiences from ordinary people who were previously unable to publish their thoughts, stories, and ideas without considerable financial cost to themselves, and who have now taken advantage of new technological products and publication formats to share the histories they deemed important enough to write. Further, these new technologies and KDP have facilitated a kind of "People's" expression that has and will continue to change the History of the Book.

The story of Endless Ceaseless is drawn from my experience of a rural childhood in the Ohio River Valley, and the subsequent destruction of my family's home as part of the expansion of coal mining operations in the area. Rather than mourning the loss of our home as a personal indignity, I sue the difficulty and wonder of a child's perspective to contrast with the environmental degradation I witnessed then and now, which is ultimately the greatest loss, one that connects to the larger narrative of mass extinction. In some ways I see this project as a eulogy for the landbase and all the living things it supports. Of significance is the commonness of this story. This is a tale that has been unfolding all around the world throughout human history and with greater intensity since the dawn of the Industrial Age. The current mass extinction can be understood in waves. As Homo sapiens sapiens has traveled and settled around the globe beginning 90,000 years ago with the move from the African continent to the Middle East, minor extinction events have accumulated and accelerated into the sixth mass extinction event. There have been three distinct waves: the first came with the development of tools to hunt megafauna, the second with the agricultural revolution, and the third with the industrial revolution. This is the pattern of human activity on the planet.

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Beyond following historical techniques of papermaking, Siedler understands the gesture of the hand (to hollow out, to level, to add something) in her work as a practice transforming the materiality of paper into text. Text is not a feature added to the surface of a finished sheet but becomes rather integral to the material itself. Whether drawing or painting, she is, in the basest sense, always writing. Her marks of rage, tenderness and rigor are written upon paper in all its haptic sensuality: its sound, smell and feel.

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Using found imagery as a starting point For the past six years, I have focused my energies on printing broadsides in the literary fine press tradition. Each project began with an existing text, selected by an outside party, with all my design and production choices made in service to that text. For the thesis work, I will deviate from this practice and begin with an idea for a grouping of sequential images. I will build a hand-printed artist book around this set of images. Text and additional images will grow from the initial printed pages. The book will serve as a bridge between my previous fine press printing and a new direction in my studio practice. It is my goal to become less reliant on provided texts and commissions, and to use my own thoughts and images as starting points for works larger in scale. The new work will share with my earlier pieces an attention to detail and strong craft ethic. I will set formal constraints for this project. I will limit my materials to use only papers already on hand in my collection. For concept, I will navigate between three project ideas I have struggled to realize in past projects. The image component is based on a group of cropped leaf images. I will draw on the language found in tatting instructions, and in the definition of the word cleave to begin to construct a text to accompany the images. The images and text will evolve together as the book is built. Until now, I had conceived of these three elements: leaf images, cleave, and tatting instructions as three separate projects. I think one reason I have not been able to realize them fully on their own is that all three do not really exist independently of one another---in my mind at least. My project is to explore what it is about these three things that I find so compelling, to find how they are linked and describe one another, and then make an artist book expressing that connection. The edition size and book dimensions will be determined by the materials I have on hand. My goal is to produce an edition size of at least 15 copies, and no more than 30.

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