- Assistant Professor
- Email: wsperrazza@tamu.edu
- Office: LAAH 421
- Document: CV
- Twitter: @wsperrazza
Biography
My work sits at the intersections of early modern literary studies, histories of science, book history, and intersectional feminist theory. I take a highly interdisciplinary approach to both my research and teaching, always interested in the questions that form in disciplinary contact zones.
My forthcoming book, Anatomical Forms (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), argues for poetry as a tool for scientific work, wielded by early modern women writers to explore and challenge rapid developments in anatomy and physiology. Through close formal analysis and original research into the hands-on techniques of early modern anatomy, the book challenges readers to rethink what counts as science and, in the process, brings into focus a feminist history of poetic form centered on material practice.
I am drawn to texts that refuse to obscure the materials out of which they were made: commonplace books, anatomical fugitive sheets, and the messy extant archive of Hester Pulter's romance. These are texts that body forth as dimensional technologies, and both my writing and my classroom are consistently enlivened by the material and tactile histories such objects hold. In my teaching in particular, I often draw on the fields of media archaeology and critical digital humanities to shape students' interactions with premodern texts.
Recent and forthcoming publications include an article on logocentric computational methods and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (Shakespeare Quarterly), a state-of-the-field essay on women's writing and formalism (Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing), and a chapter on Robert Hooke's rigorous attention to ink in Micrographia (Literary Form After Matter, edited collection).
My forthcoming book, Anatomical Forms (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), argues for poetry as a tool for scientific work, wielded by early modern women writers to explore and challenge rapid developments in anatomy and physiology. Through close formal analysis and original research into the hands-on techniques of early modern anatomy, the book challenges readers to rethink what counts as science and, in the process, brings into focus a feminist history of poetic form centered on material practice.
I am drawn to texts that refuse to obscure the materials out of which they were made: commonplace books, anatomical fugitive sheets, and the messy extant archive of Hester Pulter's romance. These are texts that body forth as dimensional technologies, and both my writing and my classroom are consistently enlivened by the material and tactile histories such objects hold. In my teaching in particular, I often draw on the fields of media archaeology and critical digital humanities to shape students' interactions with premodern texts.
Recent and forthcoming publications include an article on logocentric computational methods and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (Shakespeare Quarterly), a state-of-the-field essay on women's writing and formalism (Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing), and a chapter on Robert Hooke's rigorous attention to ink in Micrographia (Literary Form After Matter, edited collection).
Educational Background
- PhD English, Indiana University Bloomington
- MA Humanities, University of Chicago
- BA English, SUNY University at Albany