Erika Boeckeler
Associate Professor of English
Erika Boeckeler’s work spans multiple genres and disciplines: Shakespeare, early modern poetry, History of the Book, sixteenth century German art history, early Slavic print culture. Her book, Playful Letters: A Study in Early Modern Alphabetics (University of Iowa Press, 2017), argues that artistic experimentation with the alphabet had a sweeping impact on the intellectual and social history of the early modern period. The linking of letters and typography with bodies produced a new kind of literacy in audiences, which in turn expanded narrative possibilities.
Dr. Boeckeler has published on widows and their printers’ devices, the poetic typography of the first printed Hamlet, painted writing in German portraiture, on the first architectural alphabet, on teaching in the archives, among other topics. Her current book project, Writing on Things, considers how literary forms influence material forms and vice versa, a chiasmus that foregrounds this inquiry into how writing and its media collide in such a way as to alter them both. A parallel book project shaped by feminist and anti-racist bibliography examines the poetics of typography and the visual features –such as printers’ devices and pictorial type—of early modern books. She is also the editor of Shakespeare’s poem, “A Louers Complaint,” at Internet Shakespeare Editions. Her research has received numerous national and international awards.
Digital Projects:
http://pandemicshakespeare.com/ (international collaborative annotation of the plays)
http://cacodemonshakespeare.com (early print playtexts edited by students)
https://dragonprayerbook.northeastern.edu/ (on Northeastern’s medieval manuscript)
2017-18
Northeastern University Humanities Center Faculty Fellow
2014
Harvard Dept. of Comparative Lit. First Book Publication Subsidy
ACLA First Book Subvention Funds
2012-13
Wellesley Newhouse Center for the Humanities Fellow
2010-11
Huntington Library Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellowship
2009-10
Folger Shakespeare Library Short-Term Fellowship
2007
NEH Summer Seminar Participant, “The Reformation of the Book”
2006
Whiting Dissertation Completion Fellowship
Harvard University English Department, Winthrop Sargent Prize in Shakespeare
Harvard University English Department, William Harris Arnold and Gertrude Arnold Weld Prize in Book History
Monograph
• Playful Letters: A Study in Early Modern Alphabetics, University of Iowa Press, 2017. Series “Impressions: Studies in the Art, Culture, and Future of Books” https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609384746/playful-letters
Articles & Book Chapters
• “Left to Their Own Devices: Sixteenth-century Widows and Their Printers’ Devices” in Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, ed Valerie Wayne; Bloomsbury Press, Arden Shakespeare Series, 2020.
• “Alphabets” Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World, subject ed. Wendy Beth Hyman, Routledge, forthcoming Fall 2020.
• “Comb Poems” in Dynamic Matter: Renaissance Travelling Objects, ed Jennifer Linhart Wood; Pennsylvania State University Press, Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies Series, in press, forthcoming 2021
• “The Hamlet First Quarto (1603) & the Play of Typography” Early Theatre, v21.1 (2018): 59-86. https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/38585 (awarded Honorable Mention for 2019 Best Interpretive Essay, Vols 20-2; will be reprinted in Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface, eds. Paul Budra, Clifford Werier)
• “Staging the Alphabet in Shakespeare’s Comedies” in Journal of the Wooden O, 14-15(2015): 21-42
• “The Big and the Small of It: Engaging Large Groups with Hands-On Details” in Using Primary Sources: Hands-On Instructional Exercises, eds Anne Bahde, Heather Smedberg Mattie Taormina; Libraries Unlimited, March, 2014. *Co-authored with Northeastern University Assistant Head for Arts and Humanities Librarian Amanda Rust & former Assistant Archivist Michelle Romero
• “Painting Writing in Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait of 1500” Word & Image, 28.1 (2012): 30-56. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2011.651262
• “Building Meaning: The First Architectural Alphabet” in Push Me, Pull You: Art and Devotional Interaction in Late Medieval & Early Modern Europe, eds S. Blick & L. Gelfand; E.J. Brill, May 2011. 149-195. http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/books/b9789004215139_006
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Education
PhD in Comparative Literature, Harvard University
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Contact
(617) 373-7047 e.boeckeler@northeastern.edu -
Address
427 Holmes Hall
360 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115 -
Office Hours
Tuesdays 1:30pm-3:00pm and by appointment
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Associations
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Introduction to Literary Studies
ENGL 1400
Offers a foundational course designed for English majors. Introduces the methods and topics of English literary and textual studies, including allied media (e.g., film, graphic narrative). Explores strategies for reading, interpreting, and theorizing about texts; for conducting research; for developing skills in thinking analytically and writing clearly about complex ideas; and for entering into written dialogue with scholarship in the diverse fields that comprise literary studies.
Introduction to Shakespeare
ENGL 1600
Introduces students to a selection of Shakespeare’s major plays in each of the principle genres of comedy, tragedy, history, and romance.
