My academic expertise is in the influence of politics, culture, and media on poetry and poetics from the advent of the printing press through the modern period. As a lover of archives, I have always been fascinated by the promise and problems associated with new technologies, primary sources, and the exchange of ideas. One of my favorite academic projects, was an exhibition I curated for the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which was later preserved as a digital exhibition: Creating Germany’s National Myth. The Nibelungenlied and its Homerian Context. The digital project makes it possible for scholars and students to access commented facsimiles of essential texts related to the reception history of the Nibelungenlied, many of which had not previously been available online. In my dissertation, “Collecting Tradition: Modernity, Material Culture, and German Poetry Anthologies, 1765-1795,” I applied book and reception history methodologies to examine the rise of the anthology as we know it in the 18th century and explored its use as a testing ground for innovations in poetics as well as a litmus test for cultural and literary change. At Yale, I also organized the Yale Working Group in Book History, a lecture and discussion series supported by the Beinecke Library and collaborated with university employees to create a guide to rare book handling for photographers (link to guide).
