Areas of Interest: Colonial and Early U.S. Literatures, The History of the Book, Periodical Studies, African American Literature and Print Culture, Nineteenth-Century Religious Movements
Contact Information
Email: dicuirci@umbc.edu
Office location: PAHB 406
Office phone: 410-455-2585
Education
Ph.D., Ohio State University
Biography
Lindsay DiCuirci is an associate professor of English and affiliate faculty in Language, Literacy, and Culture at UMBC, specializing in early American literature and the history of the book. She also currently serves as the Graduate Program Director. Her book, Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) examines the politics of collecting, preserving, and reprinting colonial books and manuscripts in the nineteenth-century U.S. Colonial Revivals is the recipient of the Bibliographical Society of America’s St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize, the Library Company of Philadelphia’s First Book Award, and the Early American Literature Book Prize. Other work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Reception, Early American Literature and the edited collection, Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2020).
She is the current director of the English Honors program at UMBC and the director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities’ Humanities Teaching Labs. Dr. DiCuirci is also an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, one of the nation’s oldest learned societies and independent research libraries.
Books
Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018
In the long nineteenth century, the specter of lost manuscripts loomed in the imagination of antiquarians, historians, and writers. Whether by war, fire, neglect, or the ravages of time itself, the colonial history of the United States was perceived as a vanishing record, its archive a hoard of materially unsound, temporally fragmented, politically fraught, and endangered documents.
Colonial Revivals traces the labors of a nineteenth-century cultural network of antiquarians, bibliophiles, amateur historians, and writers as they dug through the nation’s attics and private libraries to assemble early American archives. The collection of colonial materials they thought themselves to be rescuing from oblivion were often reprinted to stave off future loss and shore up a sense of national permanence. Yet this archive proved as disorderly and incongruous as the collection of young states themselves. Instead of revealing a shared origin story, historical reprints testified to the inveterate regional, racial, doctrinal, and political fault lines in the American historical landscape.
Even as old books embodied a receding past, historical reprints reflected the antebellum period’s most pressing ideological crises, from religious schisms to sectionalism to territorial expansion. Organized around four colonial regional cultures that loomed large in nineteenth-century literary history—Puritan New England, Cavalier Virginia, Quaker Pennsylvania, and the Spanish Caribbean—Colonial Revivals examines the reprinted works that enshrined these historical narratives in American archives and minds for decades to come. Revived through reprinting, the obscure texts of colonial history became new again, deployed as harbingers, models, reminders, and warnings to a nineteenth-century readership increasingly fixated on the uncertain future of the nation and its material past.