Madeline Zehnder

I teach, research, and write about 18th- and 19th-century American literature and culture, with a focus on the ways that material form affects textual meaning and use. I hold degrees from Smith College (BA) and the University of Virginia (MA & PhD). Currently, I am a postdoctoral fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where I am a member of the DFG-supported research group Kleine Formen/Small Forms. I also co-organize the Berlin Book Studies Network.

My writing on topics including American print and material cultures, early African American literature, biopolitics, form, and scale has appeared in American Literature, New Literary History, American Literary History, Book History, Legacy, and elsewhere, as well as in public-facing venues such as Public Books, Commonplace, and Slate.

My first book, Print for the Pocket: Circulation, Scale, and Nineteenth-Century Imaginaries of the Book (under contract with Oxford University Press), takes up smallness as a lens on life in a vast and growing United States. Focusing on the small, portable books ubiquitous to early American publishing landscapes, I demonstrate how nineteenth-century understandings of “portable form” and the material properties of pocket-sized books structured cultural fantasies and practices of spatial and population management across critical sites ranging from the frontier to the Civil War battlefield. This project has been supported by research fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the William L. Clements Library, and Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. Parts of this project have appeared as a podcast episode and as an article in Book History.