NEWS

Pauline Reid

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2015

Pauline Reid, a recent doctoral graduate in English, conducts highly original research that integrates and extends scholarship on early modern vision, book history and early modern rhetoric. Her dissertation argued that cultural crises of perception – the relationships between sight and knowledge — manifest in the visual rhetorical qualities of print, and that analyzing such qualities brings out epistemological problems that underpin each page of an early modern book. She consulted rhetorical manuals, almanacs, print maps, emblem poems, and handbooks published over a 150-year timespan in order to argue that visual style in these books, far from being merely “ornamental,” not only displayed the perceptual problems of early modern culture, but also provided a “popular pedagogy” that helped readers navigate the opposing demands of the new “plain style” and ornamentation. She is currently a Lecturer at the University of Denver’s nationally recognized Writing Program.