AV研究所

Christy L. Pottroff teaches courses in early and nineteenth-century American literature, American studies, book history, and material culture.

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Her first book, Postal Hackers (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press), tells the stories of the nineteenth-century outsiders who hacked the U.S. Mail by creatively using postal tools and protocols in extraordinary ways. The project reveals how everyday infrastructure became a site of resistance, experimentation, and social change. Most recently, this project was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-term Fellowship at the . From 2019 to 2024, Pottroff collaborated with on an archaeological investigation of the home of 17th-century poet . Her next book project draws on that work to reinterpret Bradstreet and colonial New England through archaeology, wood, and the environmental histories of settler colonialism.

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As a teacher, Pottroff invites students to encounter literary history through archival research, hands-on experiences with bygone historical practices, and place-based explorations of Boston. Students in her classes study rare books and manuscripts in the , experiment with historical letterpress printing and bookmaking in the , and read Boston itself as a text in the study of American literary and cultural history.听

She is also collaborating with librarians and students to recover the library of abolitionists Robert and Catharine Morris, among Boston College's earliest supporters and major donors. Learn more about their and the in a podcast Pottroff co-created with AV研究所 PhD student Justin Brown-Ramsey.听

A founding member of the Boston College Printers Guild, she enjoys thinking, teaching, and creating with an interdisciplinary community dedicated to the history and practice of printing and bookmaking.