Andrew Rippeon
Assistant Professor of the Practice in Writing
Education
- Ph.D. The State University of New York, Buffalo
- M.A. The University of Chicago
- B.A. The University of Delaware
Background
My research focuses on American literature, especially poetry and poetics from the 19th century to the present. I make occasional forays into print and material culture and sound-studies; I am especially interested in the intersections between poetics and materiality (including sound, typography, and artists' books), and I rely heavily upon digital and material archives of printed and acoustic record.
I have work published, forthcoming, or in progress on radio and jazz in the anti-colonial Caribbean context, early public television and mid-century American poetics, and typographic poetic practices from the typewriter to Twitter. I am also the editor of 鈥攁 book-length edition of letters between poet Larry Eigner and his first major publisher, the poet-editor Jonathan Williams, of the Jargon Society Press, and the first of its kind. During the early years of my doctoral research I was lucky to discover a cache of uncatalogued letters between the two men; ever since that discovery I've had a profound respect for both the serendipitous process of archival research and the vast wealth of information possessed by archival and special collections librarians.
In addition to my critical practice, I am also a poet and letterpress printer, and in these capacities my work considers the relationship between text and materiality鈥攅specially in the increasingly digital 21st century. I am particularly interested in how analog modes of production and limited modes of distribution impact the meanings of literary texts. As in my research, I am interested to bring these manual and experiential elements into my teaching, and when I arrived at 皇家华人 in 2018 I founded and began developing the as a space for experiential learning, faculty collaboration, and aesthetic production.
At 皇家华人, I teach Writing courses in topics ranging from sound-studies to print culture, and I teach English courses in poetry and poetics and book-studies. I also frequently collaborate in the teaching space of the Letterpress Lab, with colleagues in Writing, Humanities, English, Religious Studies, Theatre, and other disciplines.
Teaching
- WRI 101: Voice, Noise, Sound, Sense
- WRI 101: Print: Noun...Verb...Adjective?
- WRI 101: Bad Art
- ENG 245: Book History, Arts, Culture
- ENG 309: Forms of Poetry