Madeline Zehnder
Kurzvita
2021 Ph.D. English Language & Literature, University of Virginia
2017 M.A. English Language & Literature, University of Virginia
2013 B.A. English Language & Literature, Music, Smith College
Publikationen (Auswahl)
“Adapted to the Soldier’s Pocket: Religious Publishing and the Biopolitics of Print Format during the US Civil War”, Book History (2024) [forthcoming].
“Historical Shelfmarks as Sources for Institutional Provenance Research: Reconstructing the University of Virginia’s Rotunda Library,” co-authored with Neal D. Curtis and Samuel V. Lemley, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 118, no. 1 (2024): 79-101, https://doi.org/10.1086/728989.
“Subterranean Worlds and Liberatory Futures”, Public Books (2024), https://www.publicbooks.org/subterranean-worlds-and-liberatory-futures/.
Review: Gordon Fraser, “Star Territory: Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America”, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (2024) [forthcoming].
“A Documentary History of the University of Virginia’s First Library and its Jeffersonian Catalogs”, co-authored with Neal D. Curtis and Samuel V. Lemley, Studies in Bibliography (2023) [forthcoming].
Review: “Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature”, edited by Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin, H-Material-Culture (2023), https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=59393.
“Strategic Imitations,” College Literature 50, no. 1 (2023): 146-53, https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.0006.
“Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Media Theorist,” Commonplace: the journal of early American life, December 2021, http://commonplace.online/article/frances-ellen-watkins-harper-media-theorist/.
“Colonial Relations in Miniature: Affective Networks, Race, and the Portrait in Victor Séjour’s ‘Le Mulâtre,’” American Literature 93, no. 2 (2021): 167-94, https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9003540.
“A Radical Pocket Book: A miniature Emancipation Proclamation helped to recruit Black soldiers during the Civil War,” History Today 71, no. 4 (April 2021), https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/radical-pocket-book.
“Plantation Gothic: The first published short story by an African American author and its roots in 19th-century Louisiana,” 64 Parishes, the quarterly magazine of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (Summer 2021), https://64parishes.org/plantation-gothic.
“Companion,” New Literary History 50, no. 3 (2019): 487-91, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/740087.
“Revolutions of Taste: Mon Odyssée and the Aesthetic Inheritance of Saint-Domingue,” American Literary History 31, no. 1 (2019): 1-23, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajy042.
Collaborative Projects
Co-curator, with Neal D. Curtis and Samuel V. Lemley. Exhibition: “Rotunda Planetarium: Science & Learning in the University of Virginia’s First Library” (http://www.rotundaplanetarium.org/). November 2019 to February 2020.
Co-editor, with Neal D. Curtis and Samuel V. Lemley. Digital Database: “Rotunda Library Online” (http://www.rotundalibrary.online/). 2018 to present.
Vorträge (Auswahl)
Freedom in ‘Tiny Book Form’, Broadside Day. Street Literature and Cheap Print, Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London, 11.02.2023.
The Power of the Pocketed Word. Small-Format Children’s Literature and the Pedagogy of Habit, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, Amsterdam, 12.07.2022.
Lessons of Scale in the ‘Afric-American Picture Gallery’ and the ‘Anglo-African Magazine’, The Magazine and the Miscellany, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 08.07.2022.
Inseparable Companions. Sunday School Literature and the Pocket-Sized Book, Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Miami, 01.04.2022.
Lehre / organisierte Workshops & Konferenzen
WiSe 2022/2023
Print and Protest in Early Black America, Seminar
Institut für Amerikanistik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Made to Move: Pocket-Sized Print and its Uses in Nineteenth-Century America
This project places texts ranging from handbooks to it-narratives in conversation with archival materials to examine how nineteenth-century American audiences understood the affordances of pocket-sized books and other textual artifacts that elicit special comment about their portability. Items of pocket-sized print anchored nineteenth-century American fantasies about intimate social and physical encounter across distance: these works were made to move, in multiple senses of the word. Small and lightweight, pocket print was well-suited to rapid circulation. Yet with its ability to be carried in close proximity to the body, pocket print also led many nineteenth-century commentators to suggest that small-format texts possessed unique ability to move readers emotionally and otherwise instrument specific forms of audience response.
Made to Move takes a new approach to the study of material texts that accounts for the inherent interactivity of format. While book historians and bibliographers typically understand “format” to mean a printed work’s shape, size, and general physical design, I propose that formats are also social agreements that structure reader performances by fostering certain patterns of use. By investigating how nineteenth-century audiences react to books, pamphlets, and other print artifacts that advertise their “pocket” size, I examine how print formats produce meaning through their scripting of reader experience, or the ways in which they invite users to think, act, and feel.