Brandi Adams

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Representations of Books and Readers

This book project answers scholarly calls to reexamine the ways that book historians and bibliographers quantify and qualify material that comprises our research by raising questions about what counts as evidence and what constitutes an “archive.” Precepts of premodern critical race theory guide my argument that, despite a sotto voce opposition between books and theater underlying scholarly conceptions of the period, historical evidence of a wonderful variety of books and readers may be located in early modern English printed drama. This book ultimately encourages historians of reading to reimagine what scholars may identify as historical evidence and practices of reading, which often comprise examinations of typography, marginalia, book lists, and complex provenance records.