Print and Other Media, Books and Other Formats

As scholars and students of literatures in English, we study the ways that the linguistic meanings of writing are supplemented by culturally, historically, and materially specific contexts. Some contexts have to do with ideas about literacy and the ways that writing differs from speech as well as from other forms of expression like gesture and the graphic arts. Additional contexts have to do with bibliographic meanings, with the ways that readers have learned to experience the variable size, layout, design, and format of texts as they use them. Still more contexts have to do with the different ways that media—including print—have been developed and mobilized.

Our research, writing, teaching, and learning center variously on inquiries in book history and media theory, including Medieval manuscript culture and Renaissance writing arts; eighteenth-century theories of orality and literacy; reading and readers in the nineteenth-century U.S. and the British Empire; African-American readers and authorship; nineteenth-century British radical print, serialization, and periodical formats; the history, present, and future of digital media; intersections of words and images; the role of genre in shaping rhetorical action; the organization of knowledge and theories and histories of writing and literacy across places and periods.

Thomas Augst, The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in the Nineteenth-Century America; The Social Life of Libraries in the United States; NewYorkScapes
Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter; Reading Children: LIteracy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America; and "How the Virgin Lost Her Book"
Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England; Cultural Graphology: Writing After Derrida
Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture; Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents; and "Emoji Dick and the Eponymous Whale, An Essay in Four Parts"
John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation; "The Memo and Modernity"; "Genesis of the Media Concept"
David Hoover, Modes of Composition and the Durability of Style in Literature; Digital Literary Studies: Corpus Approaches to Poetry, Prose, and Drama
Paula McDowell, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain; The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730; "Elsie McLuhan's Vocal Science"
Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies; To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship
Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry; "British Romantic Homer" (with L. Slatkin); "Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, 1769-1830"; "The Medium of Romantic Poetry" (with C. Langan)
Dara Rossman Regaignon, Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre
Martha Rust, Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix; The Role of the Scribe: Genius of the Book”; https://listology.blog/
Greg Vargo, An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel

African American literature in/and black print culture studies, Elizabeth McHenry
Derrida’s Glas, Juliet Fleming and Mark Sanders
Digital Literary Studies, David Hoover
Literacy Panics and Higher Education: A History of Composition Studies, Dara Regaignon
The Medium is the Message, Paula McDowell
Papyrus to PDF: An Introduction to Book History Now, Paula McDowell
Readers and Reading in Early America, Patricia Crain
Renaissance Mediologies, Juliet Fleming and John Guillory
Social Life of Paper, Lisa Gitelman and Juliet Fleming
Word and Image, Pat Crain

Tim Cassedy, Figures of Speech: Six Histories of Language and Identity in the Age of Revolutions
Michael Cohen, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America
Laura Fisher, Reading for Reform: The Social Work of Literature in the Progressive Era
Yohei Igarashi, The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication
Rachel Scarborough King, Writing the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres

Faculty and students work closely with the Libraries in support of scholarship and research. The holdings of the Special Collections at NYU include the Fales Library of English & American Literature; the Downtown Collection, documenting SoHo and Lower East Side arts, 1970s-1990s; and the radical political focus of the Tamiment collections. Special Collections curators and librarians organize a robust series of events, exhibitions and lectures related to these materials. The annual Fales Lecture, co-sponsored by the English Department and the Fales Special Collections Library, brings to campus distinguished specialists in Book History and related fields, who offer workshops for graduate students during their visit.

Amanda Watson, the Librarian for English and Comparative Literature, and Charlotte Priddle, Director of NYU Special Collections, have compiled a research guide for the history of the book with links to many of the Library’s resources and some recommended books from the main collection. With research interests in print culture and book history, both can speak to students about how the Libraries can support their research at undergraduate and graduate levels.

Publications

Priddle, Charlotte. “Eliza Giffard and Her Books, 1797-2015: The Legacies of a Regency Library.” Libraries: Culture, History and Society, vol. 1, no. 2, 2017, pp.153-180.

Watson, Amanda. “‘Each Woman’s Own Piece-Bag’: Patchwork Formats and the Circulation of Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America.” Nineteenth Century Studies, vol. 30, Penn State University Press, 2018, pp. 7–24.

Watson, Amanda. “Shared Reading at a Distance: The Commonplace Books of the Stockton Family, 1812–40.” Book History, vol. 18, no. 1, 2015, pp. 103–33.