I am Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, where I teach early modern literature, poetry and poetics, book and media history, and Shakespeare. My research focuses on the relationship between literary form and the material history of 16th- and 17th-century England. In all my work, I aim to rethink how we understand past textual cultures. I frequently turn to poetry and poetic form as resources that can shed light on how archives have been made, used, and saved for centuries.
I am at work on a new study of the long history of book conservation and care, Resilient Books: Archival Science in an Age of Precarity. You can read about the origins of this work in my post, “Histories and Communities of Books.” With Anna Reynolds (York) and Adam Smyth (Oxford), I am building a database to trace printed waste now scattered across research libraries. In June 2019, we organized the conference, Waste Paper: Histories, Theories, and Uses, 1500–1750 at Oxford’s Balliol College. This work on waste was featured in Atlas Obscura. My research on book care has been funded by the Ransom Center, the Newberry Library, Oxford’s Bodleian Library, and the Huntington Library. In 2023-2024, I will be working on Resilient Books while on fellowship at Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study.
My first book, Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), argues for the poetics of early printed books that have traditionally been understood as disorganized because they mix the work of multiple poets. Yet I recover a largely unstudied and undertheorized archive of form in the material design of poetry compiled between 1557 and 1640. Making the Miscellany ultimately develops a new method for a formal history of the book.
Contact me: megan [dot] heffernan [at] depaul [dot] edu