Modelwork: The Material Culture of Making and Knowing

by Martin Brückner (editor), Sandy Isenstadt (Editor), Sarah Wasserman (Editor)

How making models allows us to recall what was and to discover what still might be  Whether looking inward to the intricacies of human anatomy or outward to the furthest recesses of the universe, expanding the boundaries of human inquiry depends to a surprisingly large degree on the making of models. In this wide-ranging volume, scholars from diverse fields examine the interrelationships between a model’s material foundations and the otherwise invisible things it gestures toward, underscoring the pivotal role of models in understanding and shaping the world around us. Whether in the form of reproductions, interpretive processes, or constitutive tools, models may bridge the gap between the tangible and the abstract.

By focusing on the material aspects of models, including the digital ones that would seem to displace their analogue forebears, these insightful essays ground modeling as a tactile and emphatically humanistic endeavor. With contributions from scholars in the history of science and technology, visual studies, musicology, literary studies, and material culture, this book demonstrates that models serve as invaluable tools across every field of cultural development, both historically and in the present day.

Modelwork is unique in calling attention to modeling’s duality, a dynamic exchange between imagination and matter. This singular publication shows us how models shape our ability to ascertain the surrounding world and to find new ways to transform it. 

Hilary Bryon, Virginia Tech; Johanna Drucker, UCLA; Seher Erdoğan Ford, Temple U; Peter Galison, Harvard U; Lisa Gitelman, New York U; Reed Gochberg, Harvard U; Catherine Newman Howe, Williams College; Christopher J. Lukasik, Purdue U; Martin Scherzinger, New York U; Juliet S. Sperling, U of Washington; Annabel Jane Wharton, Duke U.

301 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 12, 2021

About the author

Martin Brückner is Professor at the University of Delaware where he teaches in the English Department and serves as the 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 as 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. Upon revising his forthcoming monograph The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 his next projects revolve around the spatial imagination, object narratives, and the role of literary things.

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....) 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).

Professor Brückner regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on American literature, material culture studies, literary geography, and the history of reading and print culture.