Over Troubled Waters
Martin Brückner
Resources and Links
Biography
Martin Brückner, who currently serves as the Director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (WPAMC), specializes in early American literature, material culture, and historical cartography. The former Co-Director of the Center for Material Culture Studies (CMCS) and the Delaware Public Humanities Institute (DELPHI), he also serves as co-editor of the book series, Material Culture Perspectives, published by the University of Delaware Press.
The author of two award-winning books, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 (2017; Fred B. Kniffen Book Award) and The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (2006; Louis Gottschalk Book Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies), his edited volumes include Modelwork: Material Culture and Modeling in the Humanities (2021; with Sandy Isenstadt and Sarah Wasserman); Elusive Archives: Material Culture Studies in Formation (2021; with Sandy Isenstadt); Early American Cartographies (2011); and American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900 (2007; with Hsuan L. Hsu). His over forty additional essays appeared in journals such as American Art, American Quarterly, Early American Literature, English Literary History, or Imago Mundi. Working as Visiting Curator at the Winterthur Museum, DE, he prepared the exhibition Common Destinations: Maps in the American Experience (2013-2014); at UD, he was Principal Investigator of the digital humanities project, ThingStor: A Material Culture Database for Finding Objects in Literature and Visual Art (2019-2023).
Grants and post-doctoral fellowships supporting his work hail from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. A recent Visiting Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University (2023), his scholarship has been recognized by UD’s Excellence in Scholarship Award (2018), the American Antiquarian Society (elected member 2007), the Society of Early Americanists Essay Prize (2007), and UD’s Francis Alison Young Scholar Award (2002). Generous support from the larger UD community allowed him to lead a joint UD and Winterthur team on a recovery mission to aid German museums after the catastrophic flooding of 2021.
Professor Brückner is currently researching two book projects exploring the relationship of literature and material culture: the first examines the relationship between ceramics and the novel during the long eighteenth century; the second traces the concept of the object in early American literature and culture. Other ongoing projects include editing a special issue commissioned by Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography on the subject of maps and the imagination.
Recent Publications
“Common Objects: Literary Materialism and the Early American Novel,” Early American Literature 60, 3 (Fall 2025): 445-483.
“Selling Virginia: Herman Böye, State Maps, and the Nineteenth-Century Marketplace,” The Portolan: Journal of the Washington Map Society (Winter 2025): 9-22.
“Varnished Maps and Social Chemistry in Early America: A Material History,” Book and Paper Group Annual 43 (Washington DC: American Institute of Conservation, 2024): 21-38.
“Maps at an Exhibition: Minding the Material Gap,” Imago Mundi 76, 1 (2024): 60-67.
“Map, Paper, Prints: A Conversation about Mark Catesby’s Natural History and Material Culture,” Winterthur Portfolio 56, 4 (2022): 185-202.
For a full list of publications, see academia.edu/MartinBrückner
