Whitney Trettien researches the history of the book and other text technologies from print to digital. Her work is invested in exploring the past to better understand our present media environment.
Her forthcoming book Cut/Copy/Paste — being staged on the Manifold Scholarship platform through University of Minnesota Press — identifies three fringe communities that assembled books from fragments of paper media in the seventeenth century. Using digital methods, Trettien’s work places these seemingly idiosyncratic textual practices and their materialist poetics within a broader field of literary production. She has published on textile metaphors in the poetry of Isabella Whitney, print-on-demand publishing and Milton’s Areopagitica, and digital humanities, and has co-edited Provoke!, a web-based collection of sonic scholarship. A print companion, Digital Sound Studies, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is also the co-editor and co-designer of thresholds, an occasional digital zine for creative/critical interventions.
Trettien received her PhD from Duke University and has an MS in Comparative Media Studies from MIT.