Steffi Dippold
Steffi Dippold is Associate Professor at Montclair State University, where she teaches Early and Native American literatures, material culture and archive studies as well as book history. Steffi loves working hands-on with students in local museums and repositories to explore how regional and non-textual literacies give voice to everyday overlooked people and their extraordinary stories. Steffi has published on materials ranging from seventeenth-century print ornaments, the cultural logic of actual and textual keys, to early Native American bookbinding and the first North American Indigenous grammar. Her current project explores colonial book formats and bindings and their often unusual (according to European standard) materialities.
I am absolutely thrilled about my library fellowship! The award will allow me to research the extraordinary cache of colonial American imprints sent by Cotton and Increase Mather to the Glasgow University Principal John Stirling. These volumes represent an imminently important material archive because the books still live in their original humble and undecorated bindings made from local leathers. I want to understand how colonial flora and fauna entered and altered the material makeup of early modern bookmaking.
