Mark Edwin Peterson

Mark Edwin Peterson

Mark Edwin Peterson

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Medievalism, Academia as Culture, The Significance of Library Collections.

I was raised in Minnesota and attended college in Oregon. After finishing a PhD in History at the University of Wisconsin, I returned to Oregon to spend several years teaching as an adjunct. I then worked as a rare book librarian at the Medical School for Washington University in St. Louis, James Madison University, and then the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum.

Along the way I have studied twice in Germany, worked once in Hungary, and taught on Semester at Sea for a trip around the world.

My graduate student struggles are documented here.

Current Research

This past year I have been working with the urban renewal team at Dr. Myeong Lee's Community Informatics Lab on applying computational archival science to records from Asheville, NC. I am scheduled to present on this project at the AAAD conference at JMU and the iConference in Beijing.

I am also working on a project on Twitter, Sarajevo, and special collections that I did not manage to finish for class.

 

Selected Publications

     “Reading as Spiritual Journey: St. Bridget of Sweden.” Soul Travel: Spiritual Journeys in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

     “Footnotes and Dictators.” Lincoln Humanities Journal 5 (2017).

     “Two Brass Mites of the Widow: Saint Bridget of Sweden and the Terrors of Hell.” The Hermeneutics of Hell: Visions and Representations of the Devil in World Literature.

Expanded Publication List

     “German Readers and the Formation of the Henkel Press in Virginia.” Yearbook of German- American Studies 51 (2016).

     “Pulp in the Ivory Tower: One University Library’s Development of a Pulp Magazine Collection from Scratch.” With Brian Flota and Julia Merkel. College & Research Libraries News 77, no. 8 (2016).

     “Drinking in the Streets: The Street as a Public Space for the Sale and Consumption of Alcohol.” Die Strasse: zur Funktion und Perzeption öffentlichen Raums im späten Mittelalter.

     “Hanseatic League.” ORB: Online Encyclopedia. 1998.

Grants and Fellowships

Open Society Institute Fellow, 1999-2000

DAAD sponsored fellowship for the European Summer University in Digital Humanities, 2018

Education

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

     2008 Master of Library Science

University of Wisconsin-Madison

     2000 PhD in History

Recent Presentations

    "Four Presidents: Libraries & Power." September 2019. Association of Library & Information Science Education Annual Conference. Knoxville, TN.

    “Understanding the US Presidential Archives Online.” October 2018. Teaching and Learning with Technology. James Madison University.

     “Reading as Spiritual Journey - St. Bridget of Sweden.” September 2017. Soul Travel: Spiritual Journeys and Sacred Voyages in Early Modern Europe. De Montfort University, Leicester, England.

     “Brewers’ Beast: Traditional Symbols for Marketing US Beer.” April 2017. PCA/ACA Annual Pop Culture Conference. San Diego.

     “Experience the World Without Buying the World: Teaching the History of Island Exploration Literature on a Budget.” April 2017. Islands: College English Association 48th Annual Conference. Hilton Head Island, SC.

In the Media

     “Pandemic 1918.” America’s Hidden Stories. Lone Wolf Media for Smithsonian Networks, 2019.

     “History and Romance: Love Stories of Five Virginia Presidents.The Free Lance-Star (February 8, 2017).

     “Every Breeze Issue Digitized in Scholarly Commons Archive.” The Breeze (September 18, 2014).

     “De Humani Corporis Fabrica: On the Fabric of the Human Body.” Outlook: Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine (April 2011).