Biography for Joseph Viscomi

I am the James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Guggenheim and NEH Fellow, and a co-creator and co-editor of the William Blake Archive <blakearchive.org>, a hypermedia digital database that has published over 150 digital editions of Blake’s works since 1995. I am the author of Prints by Blake and his Followers (1983) William Blake’s Printed Paintings (2021), and Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993), which is deeply indebted to Todd’s photographs of the various stages of my studio recreations of Blake’s illuminated plates. I moved to NYC in 1973, where I met Todd, a fellow Detroiter and with whom I performed on the Staten Island Ferry in David Patrick Kelley’s “Banana Company.” Todd has been supportive of my scholarly and artistic endeavors for almost fifty years and for which I am eternally grateful. I am presenting an impression of Blake’s “The Lamb,” from Songs of Innocence (1789), printed from a relief line block cast from the electrotype made from Blake’s original plate for Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of Blake: Pictor Ignotus, the first biography of Blake, published in 1863. I printed the impression on the same press that I used to recreate Blake’s illuminated plates and which Todd documented in great detail.