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 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 Letters to Jargon: The Correspondence Between Larry Eigner and Jonathan Williams — the first book to collect the correspondence of poet Larry Eigner. This book collects all extant correspondence between Eigner and his first major publisher, the poet-editor Jonathan Williams, of the Jargon Society Press, and also includes several important unpublished essays by Eigner. I’m currently at work, with a team of co-editors, on a second volume of Eigner’s correspondence.
In addition to my critical practice, I am also a poet and letterpress printer. I am particularly interested in how analog modes of production and limited modes of distribution impact the meanings of literary texts. When I came to Davidson in 2018, I founded the Davidson College Letterpress Lab as a space for experiential learning, faculty collaboration, and aesthetic production; as founder-director of the Lab, I frequently bring these manual and experiential elements of literary making into my own teaching, and numerous collaborations with colleagues.
Contact:
Andrew Rippeon, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of the Practice, Writing and English
Davidson College
Rm. 3136 Chambers Hall
(704) 894-3059
anrippeon@davidson.edu
he / him / his
