In November 2010, Johanna Skibsrud’s novel The Sentimentalists was announced as the winner of the Giller Prize, which promptly embroiled the work, its author, and its publishers in a clash between different modes of book publishing.

“The novel’s publication as a limited-run book from a small press, then as an e-book, then as a mass-market paperback sparked public interest in the kinds of questions usually asked by bibliographers,” says Alan Galey.

The University of Toronto professor will use the controversy as a case study to explore the digital humanities in his free public lecture, “E-books in the Bibliographical Imagination: The Case of The Sentimentalists and the Giller Prize,” Thursday, March 8, at 7 p.m. in Assumption University’s Freed-Orman Centre.

Galey is an assistant professor in Toronto’s Faculty of Information, where he also teaches in the collaborative program in book history and print culture. His lecture is part of the Humanities Research Group’s Distinguished Speakers Series.