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Professor Piper’s work focuses on the intersections of literature and the medium of the book in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His book, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (University of Chicago Press, 2009), chronicles literature's role in facilitating the deep social investment made in books, both materially and imaginatively, that occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century. Dreaming in Books is a study of how we became bookish and how literature shaped and lent meaning to this new media reality. Professor Piper is also a founding member of the research group, Interacting with Print: Cultural Practices of Intermediality, 1700-1830, which is funded by the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture and which hosts an annual workshop on a variety of topics related to the history of print culture. The aim of the group is to develop an innovative approach to the study of print culture that situates print within a larger eighteenth-century media environment, including handwritten texts, printed images, oral conversation, and theatrical performance. Finally, as part of his ongoing research into the history of communications technologies and literary creativity, Piper has recently been awarded a standard research grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for his project, "Goethe, Print, and the Medium of the Self." This project seeks to understand the history of how media have impacted representations of the self by examining the autobiographical writings of one of the most prolific authors about himself from the nineteenth century. It will ask how an emergent notion of “life” was increasingly inseparable from the evolution of available technologies of writing after 1800, technologies that also included an important visual dimension. How did the graphics of life writing come to entail a fundamental intermedial literacy? Research on the iconographic aspect of the project will be supported by a grant from the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture. Other areas of interest include translation theory, the history of communications media, and the visuality of the printed book. Professor Piper's previous graduate courses include, “Writing and Enlightenment," “Origins of World Literature: Translation around 1800,” and "Goethe and the Novel." This winter he will be teaching a course on the History of Text Technologies in conjunction with the Department of Art History and Communication Studies. |
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