Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

LACS Weekly Seminar

This talk explores the practical negotiations, discursive contests, and social aspirations surrounding print over a century of political transformation, from the late colonial era to the Mexican Revolution. Centering on the diverse communities that worked behind the scenes at urban presses, the talk considers how printer interactions with state and religious authorities shaped broader debates about press freedom and authorship, identifying printing shops as unexplored spaces of democratic practice where the boundaries between manual and intellectual labor blurred.

About the Speaker

Corinna Zeltsman is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. She is the author of Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (the University of California Press, 2021), which received the Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association. Trained as a letterpress printer, she is a senior fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School.