Office: 364 EPB
Phone: 319-335-2365
E-Mail: Matthew-P-Brown@uiowa.edu

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Early American Literature
& Book Studies

I hold a joint appointment with the Center for the Book, where I am also currently Director. Offering a graduate Certificate, the Center combines the study of book history with the production of book art. My particular research interest is in the history of readership, as reflected in my book The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). The Pilgrim and the Bee coordinates book studies with performance theory to rethink the literary history of early America. Focusing on a neglected canon of New England literature, I discuss devotional "steady sellers" within the rituals of church, home, fast, funeral, and mission. Using archival research, I argue that seventeenth-century readers are both pilgrims - treating texts as continuous narratives of redemptive journeying - and bees - treating texts as flowers or hives, as spatial objects where information is extracted and deposited discontinuously. Along with book studies and early American literature, current teaching and scholarly interests include cultural studies and theory, gender studies, reader-oriented criticism, visual culture, and media studies.