Julie Park

Julie Park is a scholar of eighteenth-century England working at the crossroads of literary studies, material and visual culture, and textual materiality. The author and editor of several books, collections, essays and articles, and recipient of numerous fellowship awards, her scholarship reveals the unexpected ways in which human subjects are inseparable from the material things, environments and devices of everyday life in historical contexts. In researching such historical artifacts and spaces as automata, quill pens, notebooks and grottoes, she explores their ability to shape, channel and model the innermost experiences of the embodied self in everyday life. 

She holds the positions of Paterno Family Librarian for Literature and Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She is also the editor of the Penn State History of the Book Series at Penn State University Press.

She received her BA from Bryn Mawr College, PhD from Princeton University, and MLIS from the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Her recently published monograph, My Dark Room (University of Chicago Press, 2023), received the James Russell Lowell Prize honorable mention award from the Modern Language Association of America. Examining spaces of inner life in eighteenth-century England, grottoes, from writing closets, country houses and landscape follies to detachable pockets, it posits the camera obscura as a paradigm for understanding how spatial environments of daily life served as interactive media for experiences of interiority.

She is also the author of The Self and It (Stanford University Press, 2010), a study of how the eighteenth-century novel as a “new” literary form, in turning the experience of life into a curiously lifelike object of psychological and circumstantial plausibility, shared a vital relationship with other novel objects of eighteenth-century consumer culture positing human subjectivity: dolls, puppets and automata.

The editor of several collections, her most recent include the special issue Getting Perspective (2021) for Word and Image, and the co-edited Organic Supplements: Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580-1790 (UVA Press, 2020). She is now co-editing with Adam Smyth Extra Extra!, a collection on the material history of the visually altered book. They convened a conference on the same topic at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, with international and cross-disciplinary speakers, on September 27-28, 2024.

Her current book project, Writing’s Maker (under advance contract, University of Chicago Press) draws on her scholarly and curatorial work in archives and special collections to examine the materiality of self-inscription formats (commonplace books, pocket diaries, extra-illustrated books and penmanship copy books) as intermedial channels of documenting, making, and marking the lives of writers in the long eighteenth century. An excerpt from the book on the graphic design of the 18th-century commonplace book as a form of life writing has recently appeared in The Manuscript Book in the Long Eighteenth Century, a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life. Her research for this project as well as earlier monographs have been supported by several fellowship awards and grants.

She has been awarded long-term fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Huntington Library, and Clark Library-UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, and major grants from the Howard Foundation, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Other awards include short-term fellowships from Houghton Library, the Paul Mellon Centre of British Art, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Bodleian Library, the Getty Research Institute Library, the Lewis Walpole Library of Yale University, and Dumbarton Oaks.

She has lectured widely as an invited or keynote speaker at such institutions as the Freie Universität Berlin, University of Sydney, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, University of Edinburgh, Center for Book Arts of New York City, and Columbia University.

An active member of the Bibliographical Society of America, Julie Park serves on its publications committee as well as the advisory board for its journal, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America.

Exhibitions she has curated include The Interactive Book and Portable Devices at the Special Collections Center of New York University Libraries.

You may contact her at julie8park@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter, Instagram and Academia.