My research interests center on the history of print culture as well as contemporary developments in the book arts and book-themed works from a diverse range of media including installation, performance, film and new media.
In the last few years, I have published on the French poet and theorist Stéphane Mallarmé and his expansive ideals on the book as both artistic medium and democratic tool.
A book-length study The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist's Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture, University of Chicago Press, 2011: www.bookasinstrument.com
Essay on Mallarmé and Marshall McLuhan in Du LIVRE de Mallarmé au livre mal armé published by Gravitons (Paris): blog.gravitons-editions.com/fr/2010/12/du-livre-de-mallarme-au-livre-mal-arme/
Essay in Generali Foundation (Vienna) 2010 exhibition catalogue 'Un Coup de Dés': Writing Turned Image, an Alphabet of Pensive Language, edited by Sabine Folie with additional essays by Jacques Rancière, Michael Newman and others: www.artbook.com/9783865605436.html
"‘A modern popular poem’: Stéphane Mallarmé on the visual, rhetorical and democratic potentials of the fin-de-siècle newspaper,” in Word & Image (Vol. 22, 4, October 2006: 304-26).
Other essays on print culture include:
An essay for the Smart Museum Exhibition The "Writing" of Modern Life: the Etching Revival in France, Britain, and the U.S., 1850-1940, edited by Elizabeth Helsinger, University of Chicago Press, 2008: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/W/bo6166647.html
An essay in The European print and cultural transfer in the 18th and 19th centuries, edited by Philippe Kaenel, Rolf Reichardt, Hildesheim: Olms, 2007.
My current work in progress is titled "Social Spaces of the Book". It examines the intersection of books and the spaces they inhabit—literarally and figuratively. I am especially interested in the cultural practices and symbolic values of book culture that emerge at this intersection. As such, I am not just examining individual physical objects but a whole range of questions that opens up as books engage the social sphere.
This project analyzes contemporary works by artists from diverse cultural backgrounds practicing in a wide range of media as a way of underscoring the truly global nature of book culture even as it transforms in the age of new media and international economic developments.
