Boeckeler, Erika

Assistant Professor

Erika Boeckeler’s work spans multiple genres and disciplines: Shakespearean drama and English Renaissance poetry, History of the Book studies, language theory, sixteenth century German art history, early Slavic print culture. Her book, Playfull 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 produces a new kind of literacy in audiences, which in turn expands narrative possibilities. She has published chapters and articles on painting and writing in sixteenth century German portraiture, on the first architectural alphabet, on teaching in the archives, among others. A new 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 bibliographic practices 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.

Professor Boeckeler’s research has received numerous national and international awards, including year-long fellowships at the Huntington Library and at Wellesley College, a short-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and substantial publication subsidy grants from the American Comparative Literature Association and Harvard University’s Department of Comparative Literature. In 2007 Professor Boeckeler was selected to participate in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, “The Reformation of the Book” in Antwerp and Oxford. She was recently a fellow at Northeastern University’s Humanities Center during 2018-19.