Margaret Simon

Bio

Maggie Simon’s research focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, material cultures, history of the emotions, and the history and literary representation of early modern writing practices. She received an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and her PhD in English Language and Literatures from the University of Virginia. She subsequently taught early modern literature and book history in the English department and the interdisciplinary History of Text Technologies program at Florida State University. She joined NC State’s English department as an assistant professor in 2013.

Maggie’s most recent research concerns materiality and comparative media studies, looking to how early modern printed texts rendered objects in language and graphic technologies, as well as their resonance with today’s digital, and particularly three-dimensional, archives. In pursuing these relations, she also works across a range of scholarly communications formats, from print to digital to fabricated forms. At NC State, Maggie teaches courses including early modern literature, women’s writing, and the contemporary graphic novel. She also directs the department’s Honors Program.

Extension and Community Engagement

Together with colleagues in the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC), I help to organize transcription events which bring manuscript recipe books and their contents both to researchers and to the general public. Most recently in November 2023  EMROC collaborated with the Royal College of Physicians and Wellcome Collection to host “Beauty by the Book” which invited academics, students, and the general public to transcribe two recipe books penned by women living in seventeenth-century England.

Publications

Recent and Forthcoming Peer-Reviewed Articles and Projects

“Early Modern Leaven in Bread, Bodies, and Spirit,” In the Kitchen 1550-1800. Theories and English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary Nunn. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. 108-132.

With Jennifer Munroe, Hillary Nunn, and Lisa Smith. “Reconstructing Recipes, Recovering Losses, Telling Stories.” Early Modern Studies Journal. Vol. 8 (November 2022).

With Tania Allen. “Negotiating the page: Digital annotation and graphic literature,” in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June – 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.259

“The Experience of Scholarly Labor: Recording Affect in Transcription.” Early Modern Studies Journal (2021).

“Access, Touch, and Human Infrastructures in Digital Pedagogy,” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Anne McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier. University of Minnesota Press (forthcoming 2021).

“Rest and Rhyme in Thomas Campion’s Poetry.” Forming Sleep: Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance, edited by Margaret Simon and Nancy L. Simpson-Younger. Penn State University Press 2020.

With Helen Burgess. ” Intimate Fields: A Kit for E-Literature.” MatLit- Materialities of Literature. Vol. 6 No. 2 (2018): 203-216.

“Re-Reading Mary Wroth’s Aubade.” Sidney Journal. 36.1(2018): 53-68.

“Glossing Authorship: Printed Marginalia in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” Renaissance Papers 2017: 125-137.

“Collaborative Writing and Lyric Interchange in Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia.” Early Modern Literary Studies. 19.2 (Fall 2017).

“Intimate Fields.” Installation co-created with Helen Burgess. Kits for Cultural History. Vol. 4. University of Victoria: Maker Lab in the Humanities (July 2017).

“Collective Reading and Communities of Practice: Teaching Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Transformations: A Journal of Inclusive Pedagogy. 26.2 (2016): 139-156.

“The Posy as Poetical Fugitive.” thresholds: a digital journal for criticism  (May 2017).

“Mary Wroth’s Ephemeral Epitaph.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. 56.1 (Winter 2016): 45-69.

Book-Length Projects

Forming Sleep: Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance, edited by Margaret Simon and Nancy L. Simpson-Younger. Penn State University Press 2020.

Reviewed in Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 75, Issue 1, March 2022. doi:10.1017/rqx.2022.89

Reviewed in Social History of Medicine, Volume 34, Issue 4, November 2021: 1369–1370, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkab009

Reviewed in Journal of British Studies , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 971 – 973 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2021.83

The Multimaterial Imagination in Early Modern Books (monograph in process)

Presentations

Recent and Upcoming Conference Presentations 

“Intimate Fields: Reading and Remaking Early Modern Posies,” Reading In the Digital Age, Copenhagen, Denmark. June 2024.

“Archiving and Transcribing:  Theorizing the Lady Sedley’s Recipe Book,” Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference. San Juan, Puerto Rico. March 2023.

Co-organizer with Hillary Nunn and Whitney Sperazza. Feminist Digital Thinking I and II. Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference. San Juan, Puerto Rico. March 2023.

With Tania Allen, Negotiating the page: Digital annotation and graphic literature, SECAC Arts Studies Conference. Baltimore, MD. October 2022.

With Tania Allen, Negotiating the page: Digital annotation and graphic literature, Design Research Society Annual Conference, Bilbao, Spain. July 2022.

Out of the Archive, Folger Weekend Seminar, co-convened with Chris Warren. North Carolina State University (March 2022).

Transatlantic Commodity Metaphors and Agricultural Woodcuts in Gervase Markham’s Farewell to Husbandry. Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting (April 2021).

Host Committee Co-Chair, Southeastern Renaissance Conference. North Carolina State University (October 2019).

Rountable Participant, Teaching and Researching the Early Modern with Digital Tools. Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Toronto, Canda (March 2019).

“Sleep Cycles and Writing Cycles in Thomas Campion’s Poetry.” Renaissance Society of America America Annual Meeting, Toronto, Canada (March 2019).

“Changing the Focus of Transcription.” Transcribing and Interpreting Digital Recipe Manuscripts. Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting. Los Angeles, CA (March 2018).

“Early Modern 3D: Woodcuts as Models for Today’s 3D Archives,” Imagined Forms: Models and Material Culture. University of Delaware Center for Material Culture Studies, Wilmington, DE (November 2017).

“Intimate Fields,” presented by Helen Burgess (PI). Printable Pedagogy and 3D Theses. Modern Language Association Annual Convention. New York, NY (January 2018)

“Glossing Authorship: Printed Marginalia in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.” Southeastern Renaissance Conference. Columbia, SC (October 2017)

“Teaching, Touching, and Transcribing Digitized Manuscripts.” The Present and Future of Digital Manuscript Studies. UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Cenury Studies. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Los Angeles, CA (October 2017)

“The Phenomenality of Digital Transcription.” Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL (March 2017)

Seminar Participant. “Material Texts and Digital Interfaces.” Shakespeare  Association of America Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA (April 2017)

Seminar Organizer, with Nancy Simpson-Younger (Luther College). “Sleeping Through the Renaissance.” Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (March 2016)