
Martin Brückner
Professor
Director, Winterthur Program in American Material Culture
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; http://commondestinati​ons.winterthur.org/).
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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