As part of Week of Writing (WOW), Special Collections invites you to join us and Dr. Emily Friedman (Auburn University) for an exciting event about playful objects!
- Date: October 22
- Time: 2–3 PM
- Place: 114A Ellis Library
How are the Bronte’s tiny manuscripts connected to roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons and modern comic books? In this interactive introduction to playful objects, games, and comics held in Special Collections, Dr. Emily Friedman shows how researchers recover the hidden history of play, and how items and ideas from the past are inspiring new games today.
Dr. Emily Friedman is Jean Wickstrom Liles Associate Professor of English at Auburn University and 2026–27 Public Humanities Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She teaches courses on British literature, book history, games, and playful media. Trained as a book historian, narratologist, and digital humanist, her work examines the history of cultural production outside of commercial mass media from the eighteenth century to today, from never-published manuscript fiction to analog games.
The Week Of Writing is a weeklong celebration of writing in all of its forms, stages, uses, functions, approaches, and levels of joy (and challenge), organized by MU’s Writing Center. The theme for 2026 is writing “above the table”.