For more information, you can visit my homepage here.
andrew [dot] piper [at] mcgill [dot] ca (e-mail)
(Associate Professor) (On sabbatical leave from September 1, 2011 to August 31, 2012)
Andrew Piper's work focuses on the intersection of literary and bibliographic communication from the eighteenth century to the present. His research follows three main lines of inquiry:
• the history of networks and literary topologies;
• practices of textual circulation, copying, and sharing;
• the relationship between media and translation, especially visuality and reading.
He is the author of Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (University of Chicago Press, 2009), which The New Republic named one of the best art books of 2009. It was awarded the MLA Prize for a First Book as well as honorable mention for the Harry Levin Prize for the American Comparative Literature Association. He is also the author of a number of articles on the creative and epistemological roles of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century book genres such as atlases, translations, miscellanies, diaries, ballads, note-books and gift-books.
Prof. Piper is the co-founder of the FQRSC-funded research group, Interacting with Print: Cultural Practices of Intermediality, 1700-1900, which explores through its annual “Interactions” conference how print shaped literary and visual form, individual identity, and social community through its interactions with other media, including handwriting, sculpture, music, theatre, and oral performance.
He is currently at work on two new research projects. The first is a book-length essay on the future of reading called, "Book Was There," which explores the nature of new reading interfaces and practices through an understanding of the book's past. The second is a larger research project on the interconnections between autobiography, the life sciences, and the medium of the book at the turn of the nineteenth century entitled, "Writing Life."
Recent Publications
Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 303 pp.
“Media and Metamorphosis: On Books and Notes.” The New Everyday. Special Issue: “Notes, Lists, and Everyday Inscriptions.” Ed. Shannon Mattern (October 2010).
Media and Metamorphosis: On Notes and Books
“Transitional Figures: Image, Translation and the Ballad, 1650-1850.” Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text. Ed. Christina Ionescu (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) 1-36.
"Paraphrasis: Goethe, the Novella, and Forms of Translational Knowledge.” Goethe Yearbook. Vol. 17. Ed. Daniel Purdy (Rochester: Camden House, 2010) 179-201.
“Mapping Vision: Goethe, Cartography and the Novel.” Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture. Eds. Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010) 27-51.
“The Art of Sharing: Reading in the Romantic Miscellany.” Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700-1900. Eds. Paul Keen and Ina Ferris (New York: Palgrave, 2009) 126-147.
“Korpus. Brentano, das Buch und die Mobilisierung eines literarischen und politischen Körpers.” Textbewegungen 1800/1900. Hg. Matthias Buschmeier u. Till Dembeck (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007) 266-286.
“The Making of Transnational Textual Communities: German Women Translators 1800-1850.” Women in German Yearbook. Vol. 22. Ed. Helga Kraft and Maggie McCarthy (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 2006) 119-144.
“Rethinking the Print Object: Goethe and the Book of Everything.” PMLA. Special Issue: “The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature.” Eds. Seth Lerer and Leah Price. 121.1 (January 2006): 124-138.
[Winner of the Goethe Society of North America’s Essay Prize 2006.]
J.W. Goethe, The Man of Fifty. Preface A.S. Byatt. Trans. and Intro. Andrew Piper (London: Hesperus, 2004).