Martin Brückner

Biography

Martin Brückner is Professor in the English Department and serves as the Director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (WPAMC). He is the former Co-Director of the Center for Material Culture Studies (CMCS) and the Delaware Public Humanities Institute (DELPHI). He earned his M.A. in American Literature and Cultural Geography from the Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in his native Germany, and his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis University in the United States. His teaching and research interests include: American material culture; history of cartography; early American literature (C17 to C19); literary geography of the Atlantic World; print culture and the visual arts; and digital humanities.

Dr. Brückner is the author of two award-winning books, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 (2017; Fred B. Kniffen Book Award, International Society for Landscape, Place, & Material Culture, 2018) and The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (2006; Louis Gottschalk Book Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2007), and editor of four volumes: Modelwork: Material Culture and Modeling in the Humanities (forthcoming; with Sandy Isenstadt and Sarah Wasserman); Elusive Archives: Material Culture Studies in Formation (forthcoming; with Sandy Isenstadt); Early American Cartographies (2011); and American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900 (2007; with Hsuan L. Hsu). His over thirty essays on American literary, visual, and material culture have appeared in journals such as American Quarterly, American Art, American Literary History, English Literary History, and numerous essay collections. Working as Visiting Curator at the Winterthur Museum, he prepared the exhibition Common Destinations: Maps in the American Experience (2013-2014).

A recipient of numerous grants and post-doctoral fellowships 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, his work has been recognized by the Excellence in Scholarship Award from the College of Arts and Science (2018), the American Antiquarian Society (elected member, 2007), the Society of Early Americanists Essay Prize (2007), and the Francis Alison Young Scholar Award (2002). His most recent essays discuss the role of objects in the age of thing theory, the literary geographies of the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, and methods for researching material culture. Working as the Principal Investigator of the digital humanities project, ThingStor: A Material Culture Database for Finding Objects in Literature and Visual Art (launched 2019), his next research project revolves around object studies and early American literature.

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