Andrew Rippeon Assistant Professor of the Practice in Writing

My research focuses on American literature, especially poetry and poetics from the 19th century to the present. I make occasional forays into print and material culture and sound-studies; I am especially interested in the intersections between poetics and materiality (including sound, typography, and artists' books), and I rely heavily upon digital and material archives of printed and acoustic record. 

I have work published, forthcoming, or in progress on radio and jazz in the anti-colonial Caribbean context, early public television and mid-century American poetics, and typographic poetic practices from the typewriter to Twitter. I am also the editor of Letters to Jargon: The Correspondence Between Larry Eigner and Jonathan Williams—a book-length edition of letters between poet Larry Eigner and his first major publisher, the poet-editor Jonathan Williams, of the Jargon Society Press, and the first of its kind. During the early years of my doctoral research I was lucky to discover a cache of uncatalogued letters between the two men; ever since that discovery I've had a profound respect for both the serendipitous process of archival research and the vast wealth of information possessed by archival and special collections librarians. 

In addition to my critical practice, I am also a poet and letterpress printer, and in these capacities my work considers the relationship between text and materiality—especially in the increasingly digital 21st century. I am particularly interested in how analog modes of production and limited modes of distribution impact the meanings of literary texts. As in my research, I am interested to bring these manual and experiential elements into my teaching, and when I arrived at Davidson in 2018 I founded and began developing the Davidson College Letterpress Lab as a space for experiential learning, faculty collaboration, and aesthetic production.   

At Davidson, I teach Writing courses in topics ranging from sound-studies to print culture, and I teach English courses in poetry and poetics and book-studies.  I also frequently collaborate in the teaching space of the Letterpress Lab, with colleagues in Writing, Humanities, English, Religious Studies, Theatre, and other disciplines.    

Teaching 

• WRI 101: Voice, Noise, Sound, Sense 
• WRI 101: Print: Noun...Verb...Adjective? 
• WRI 101: Bad Art 
• ENG 245: Book History, Arts, Culture 
• ENG 309: Forms of Poetry