Over Troubled Waters
Martin Brückner
Resources and Links
Biography
Martin Brückner, who serves as the Director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (WPAMC), specializes in American literature, history, and culture before 1900. The former Co-Director of the Center for Material Culture Studies (CMCS) and the Delaware Public Humanities Institute (DELPHI), he also serves as co-editor of the book series, Material Culture Perspectives, published by the University of Delaware Press.
Professor Brückner is the author of two award-winning books, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 (2017; Fred B. Kniffen Book Award) and The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (2006; Louis Gottschalk Book Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies). His edited volumes include Modelwork: Material Culture and Modeling in the Humanities (2021; with Sandy Isenstadt and Sarah Wasserman); Elusive Archives: Material Culture Studies in Formation (2021; with Sandy Isenstadt); Early American Cartographies (2011); and American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900 (2007; with Hsuan L. Hsu). Author of over thirty additional essays, published in journals such as American Art, American Literary History, American Quarterly, or English Literary History, he was Visiting Curator at the Winterthur Museum, DE, where he prepared the exhibition Common Destinations: Maps in the American Experience (2013-2014); at UD, he is Principal Investigator of the digital humanities project, ThingStor: A Material Culture Database for Finding Objects in Literature and Visual Art (launched 2019).
Grants and post-doctoral fellowships supporting his work hail from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. A Visiting Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University (2023), his work has been further recognized by UD’s Excellence in Scholarship Award (2018), the American Antiquarian Society (elected member, 2007), the Society of Early Americanists Essay Prize (2007), and UD’s Francis Alison Young Scholar Award (2002).
His teaching and research interests include American literature and material culture (C17 to C19); American maps and history of cartography; literary materialism; literary cartography in the Atlantic World; print culture and the visual arts; and digital humanities.
Recent Publications
“Varnished Maps and Social Chemistry in Early America: A Material History,” Book and Paper
Group Annual 43 (Washington DC: American Institute of Conservation, 2024): 21-38.
“Maps at an Exhibition: Minding the Material Gap,” Imago Mundi 76, 1 (2024): 60-67.
“Map, Paper, Prints: A Conversation about Mark Catesby’s Natural History and Material Culture,”
Winterthur Portfolio 56, 4 (2022): 185-202.
“Colonial Counter-Mappings and the Cartographic Reformation in Eighteenth-Century America.”
XVII-XVIII: Revue de la Societe d’Etudes Anglo-Americaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles 78 (2021): 1-27.
“How to Research Material Culture.” In Research Methods for Primary Sources. Marlborough: Adam
Matthew Digital, 2021. 1-41.
For a full list of publications, see academia.edu/MartinBrückner
