The Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC) is pleased to announce that Jay Ritchiehas been awarded the Emerging Scholar Prize for 2025.
Jay is a PhD Candidate in English at McGill University and a Wolfe Fellow in Scientific and Technological Literacy. His research, funded by a SSHRC CGS Doctoral Scholarship and the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, has been published in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. His creative work has appeared in Maisonneuve, SAND, and The Malahat Review, as well as on CBC and at the PHI Centre. He is the author of the poetry collection “Listening in Many Publics” (Invisible Publishing, 2024), a finalist for the QWF’s A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry.
The Awards Committee was particularly impressed with his research project, “Sustaining Sociality: Towards a Digital Ethnography of Metatron Press (2014–),” which carries out a digital ethnography of Metatron Press, a Montreal-based publisher committed to experimental literature. Through the analysis of digital traces of events and interactions, Jay shows how
Metatron’s decade of activity proves that the press’s “sensibilities” are grounded in maintaining social relations.Jaywill be invited to publish a revised, article-length version of his research in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, subject to peer review. The prize also includes a grant of $500.
The Emerging Scholar Prize promotes the work of a researcher who is beginning a career in the fields of book history and bibliography broadly defined, including study of the creation, production, publication, distribution, transmission, history, and uses of printed books, manuscripts, or electronic texts.
Congratulations, Jay!