The Society for Textual Scholarship is an international organization of scholars working in textual studies, editing and editorial theory, electronic textualities, and issues of textual culture within and across a wide range of disciplines.

The annual conference and biannual journal, Textual Cultures, bring together scholars from disciplines such as literature (in all languages), history, musicology, classical and biblical studies, ethnic studies, women’s/gender/LGBTQ+ studies, philosophy, art history, legal history, history of science and technology, computer science, book history, bibliography, media studies, library science, lexicography, epigraphy, paleography, codicology, cinema studies, theater, linguistics, and textual and literary theory.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, perhaps more than any other American city, invites us to consider the deep roots and long legacies of cultural conflict. Set in the middle of “Indian Territory” carved out for indigenous tribes forcibly displaced from the southeast, it became a supply depot for new railroads, a ranching capital, an oil boomtown, a Western Art Deco mecca, and the home of “Black Wall Street,” the vibrant African American community leveled by a brutal massacre in 1921. In the city’s current incarnation, the stresses of history are sometimes visible and sometimes glimpsed in transformation: Tulsa flaunts its vintage neon signage and riverfront parks, celebrates counter-culture heroes Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, and hosts several museums within the former paper plant that supplied newsprint to area newspapers.
In this setting, steeped in many varieties of cultural encounter and collision, marked by repression, assertion, protest, and celebration, it is fitting that we explore the textuality of pressure. Pressure flattens, coerces, contains, and restrains–forces that can precipitate paradoxical responses: collapse, transformation, resistance, liberation. Texts manifest many varieties of creative, social, and political pressure in their expressive content and form. But text is also often a matter of technological pressure: printing techniques rely on the pressure of a platen, roller, or squeegee; other recording and playback processes require the pressure of a stylus, a chisel, a nib, or the gentle pulse of a wifi wave. Such pressurized circumstances, symbolic and material, reveal core issues of textual production, circulation, reception, and contestation.