EARLY AMERICAN ARCHIVES
A book historian by training, I have worked on both sides of the reference desk in libraries and archives across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. I cut my teeth in special collections at the Harry Ransom Center, where I was a graduate intern during my PhD studies. After completing my dissertation on metaphors to describe political and cultural debates over literary property in the transatlantic Anglophone world of letters, I taught at universities for a few years before realizing that, for the time being, I preferred the reading room to the classroom. Calling in part on my time as the director of digital and book history initiatives at the American Antiquarian Society, I have published a number of articles on early American archives and the cultural politics of their digitization.
PUBLICATIONS
As Director of Digital and Book History Initiatives at the American Antiquarian Society, I wrote about early American collections and their remediation in digital environments on their blog, Past is Present.
“Location, Location, Location: Archives and Place in Moments of Memorialization” in “Reimagining 1620” issue of Early American Literature, 56.1 (2021): 173-182.
“Archives-based Digital Projects in Early America” in William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., no. 3 (July 2019): 451-476.
“Digitization” in “Keywords in Early American Material Texts” issue of Early American Studies 16 (2018): 637-642.
“Just Teach One: Early African American Print Culture and the Textual Encoding Initiative” Chapter co-authored with Eric Gardner and Nicole Aljoe for D19: Digital Pedagogies and Nineteenth Century American Literatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2018): 117-132.
“Bibliographic Enterprise and the Digital Age: Charles Evans and the Making of Early American Literature” in American Literary History 29:2 (Summer 2017):331-351.
“ ‘Black Printers’ on White Cards: Information Architecture in the Database of the Early American Book Trades” in Debates in Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2016): 377-383.
“Figures of Authorship in Mathew Carey’s Transatlantic Yellow Fever Pamphlets, 1793-1795.” Book History. 17(2014):221-249.
“Archival Triage: Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh’s Notebook at the Harry Ransom Center” in CR: The New Centennial Review 10:1 (Spring 2010): 31-48.
Optician Trade Card (1840-49). American Antiquarian Society.
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
“… if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue. Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order. Naturally, his existence is tied to many other things as well: to a very mysterious relationship to ownership … also, to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value—that is, their usefulness—but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.”