Alan Galey

Alan Galey is a Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to the Department of English, and former director of the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture. His research and teaching are located at the intersection of media studies, the history of books and reading, and digital textual scholarship. His current research focuses on methods for the bibliographical study of digital texts and artifacts, from ebooks to videogames to digital recordings of musical performances.

Professor Galey’s first monograph book, The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity, was published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press. He has published articles in journals including Book History, Shakespeare Quarterly, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Archivaria, and Archival Science. He has also contributed chapters to several scholarly edited collections, and co-edited Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures (with Travis DeCook; Routledge, 2011). His article “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination,” published in Book History in 2012, was awarded the Fredson Bowers Prize by the Society for Textual Scholarship. In 2016 he co-curated, with Scott Schofield, Peter Blayney, and Marjorie Rubright, an exhibition at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library titled “‘So Long Lives This’: Celebrating Shakespeare 1616-2016,” whose catalogue won the 2017 Leab Exhibition Award from the Association of Research and College Libraries.

His more recent work has focused on intersections between textual studies and videogame studies, including a special issue of Games and Culture on the topic “Video Games and Paratextuality,” a chapter (co-authored with Ellen Forget) titled “Video Games with Footnotes: Understanding In-Game Developer Commentary” in (Not) In the Game: History, Paratexts, and Games (edited by Ed Vollans and Regina Seiwald; De Gruyter, 2023), and ApertureScience.com: A Critical Edition (co-edited with Ellen Forget and Brendan Allen), published in Scholarly Editing. He presently holds an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a project titled “The Black Boxes of Born-Digital Culture: Recovering Complex Histories from Resistant Artifacts.”

• Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab Exhibition Award – Division One, 2017. Awarded by the Association of College and Research Libraries. Shared with co-curators.
• Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize, 2013. Awarded by the Society for Textual Scholarship.
• Outstanding Instructor Award, 2013-14. Awarded by the Master of Information Student Council, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto