Associate Director of the Center for Material Culture Studies
Professor
English Department
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716
(302) 831-1971
mcb@udel.edu
Martin Brückner is Professor at the University of Delaware where he teaches in the English Department and serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Material Culture Studies. He is the author of The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill, 2006), which received the 2006-2007 Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies. He is editor of two volumes, Early American Cartographies (Chapel Hill, 2011) and American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900 (UDP, 2007). His published essays have appeared in journals such different as American Quarterly, English Literary History, Winterthur Portfolio, and American Art, as well as in numerous essay collections that explore early American literature and culture. After completing the new monograph The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 (Chapel Hill, forthcoming) his next projects explore the American cartoral arts and the place of literary things in early American culture.
Professor Brückner earned his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Mainz in American Literature and Cultural Geography in his native Germany, and his doctorate in English and American Literature from Brandeis University in the U.S. Working recently as Visiting Curator at the Winterthur Museum, he prepared the 2013 exhibition Common Destinations: Maps in the American Experience (available at http://commondestinations.winterthur.org/) which documents how American maps informed material culture and the decorative arts between 1750 and 1876. A recipient of the Francis Alison Younger Scholar Award (2002) and the Society of Early Americanists Essay Prize (2007), he has held grants and post-doctoral fellowships from various institutions, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2001-2002), the National Endowment for the Humanities (Spring 2009), and the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia (Spring 2010). He regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on American literature, material culture studies, literary geography, and the history of reading and print culture.
