The members of the Fellowships Committee are very pleased to announce that Manuel Medrano has been awarded the Bernard Amtmann Fellowship for 2023 for his project, “Book History beyond the Page: An Andean Khipu in the McGill University Library.”
Manuel is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Harvard University. With the support of the Amtmann Fellowship, Manuel plans to will examine a khipu – a knotted-string recording device used as an alternative to writing in the South American Inka Empire (c. 1400–1532 CE) – conserved in the McGill University Library. His project will trace the khipu’s path to McGill, as well as test the bounds of Western analytical bibliography by adopting its terminology in a technical and material description of the khipu. Manuel’s research will result in an assessment of the place of nonwestern “books” in the view of McGill’s twentieth century librarians as well as a new entry for the Open Khipu Repository (OKR) database.
The Bernard Amtmann Fellowship is offered in memory of Bernard Amtmann (1907-1979), the noted bookseller and specialist in Canadiana. The Fellowship was instituted in 1992 and is offered to support the work of a scholar engaged in one of Bernard Amtmann’s principal areas of interest: Canadiana, book collecting, bookselling and bibliography.