Julie Park

Professional Bio

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Julie Park is an award-winning scholar of eighteenth-century England working at the crossroads of literary studies, material and visual culture, and textual materiality. The author and editor of several books, collections, essays and articles, and recipient of many fellowships and awards, she reveals the unexpected ways in which human subjects are inseparable from the material things, environments and devices of daily life in historical contexts. In researching such historical artifacts and spaces as automata, quill pens, notebooks and grottoes, she explores their ability to shape, channel and model the innermost experiences of the embodied self in everyday life.

Her most recent monograph, My Dark Room: Spaces of the Inner Self in Eighteenth-Century England (University of Chicago Press, 2023), examines the spaces of inner life in eighteenth-century England. It posits the camera obscura, a visual device, as a historical paradigm for understanding how spatial environments of daily life, from grottoes, writing closets, country houses and landscape follies to detachable pockets, served as interactive media for the experience of interiority. My Dark Room received honorable mention for the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.

She is also the author of The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford University Press, 2010), a study of how the eighteenth-century novel as a “new” literary form, in turning the experience of life into a curiously lifelike object of psychological and circumstantial plausibility, shared a vital relationship with other novel objects of eighteenth-century consumer culture positing human subjectivity: dolls, puppets and automata.

Her current book project, Writing’s Maker (under contract, University of Chicago Press), examines the history of writing as a practice of making and marking lives in mixed-media formats in eighteenth-century England. Broadening the conception of writing to encompass materials beyond words alone, it shows that for literate subjects, writing operated as a consequence of being alive. In contrast with traditional views of life writing as a literary genre that narrates lives already lived, Writing’s Maker reveals its material history as an embodied process of inscribing lives in the making. Four major “inscriptional maneuvers” organize the book's argument: flourish, grid, interleave and composition. Excerpts on the graphic designs of commonplace books and pocket diaries have appeared as articles respectively in The Manuscript Book in the Long Eighteenth Century, a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life, and Containers, a special issue of Inscription: The Journal of Material Text--Theory, Practice, History.

The editor of several cross-disciplinary collections, including the prize-winning War for Eighteenth-Century Fiction (recipient of a runner-up award for best special issue by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals), she most recently edited the special issue Getting Perspective (2021) for Word and Image and co-edited Organic Supplements: Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580–1790 (UVA Press, 2020). She is now co-editing with Adam Smyth Extra Extra! (under contract, Penn State University Press), a collection drawing together practitioners and scholars in the visual arts and the histories of art, literature, religion, and science on the material history of the visually altered book. She and Smyth co-organized in fall 2024 a conference at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens on the topic.

Her writing for general audiences has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Public Domain Review.

Among her major research awards are long-term fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Huntington Library, and Clark Library-UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, and grants from the Howard Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Other awards include short-term fellowships from the Houghton Library of Harvard University, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Bibliographical Society of America, Bodleian Library, Getty Research Institute Library, Lewis Walpole Library of Yale University, and Dumbarton Oaks of Harvard University.

She has lectured widely as a guest or keynote speaker at such institutions as the University of Oxford, Freie Universität Berlin, University of Sydney, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Center for Book Arts, Columbia University, and Yale Center for British Art. This year, she delivered the Annual Fales Lecture in book history at New York University.

She serves as series editor of the Penn State Series in the History of the Book at Penn State University Press.

Exhibitions she has curated include The Interactive Book and Portable Devices at the Special Collections Center of New York University Libraries. She enjoys organizing exhibitions, such as Lives Written by Hand, with graduate students in her seminars.

Students interested in material and visual culture, book history and material texts, and architectural and landscape history are encouraged to connect with and find ways of working with her.