Letters & Printing
Does love have a history? ‘Letters and Love in Colonial Spanish America’ examined the salutations and closings used in hundreds of letters sent across the Atlantic by husbands and wives between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, to explore how married couples expressed their feelings for each other.
I also edited a collection of essays on letters of all sorts, from Emily Dickinson’s poetic missives to the anguished letters sent by German wives to their soldier husbands during World War One.
Other work studied the spread of printing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish America, to assess the impact of the printing press on the spread of revolutionary ideas.
Johannes Vermeer, ‘Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid’, c1670-71, National Gallery of Ireland.
Books
All Relevant Publications
| Year | Category | Publication Type | Title | Publisher | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | Scholarship | Journal Article | Letters and Love in Colonial Spanish America | The Americas 62:1 | Link |
| 2002 | Scholarship | Book Chapter | The Role of Print in the Spanish-American Wars of Independence in The Political Power of the Word | University of London/Institute of Latin American Studies | Link |
| 1999 | Scholarship | Edited Volume | Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600-1945 | Ashgate | Link |
| 1997 | Scholarship | Journal Article | Information and Disinformation in Late Colonial New Granada | The Americas 54:2 | Link |
Relevant Blog Posts
Rare Insights from 18th-Century Love Letters
I spoke to Jenny Gross of the New York Times about a remarkable collection of letters discovered in Britain’s National Archives