About

Margaret Simon is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at NC State University, with a focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, material cultures, the history of the emotions, and early modern writing practices. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a PhD in English Language and Literatures from the University of Virginia. Her academic career includes teaching early modern literature and book history at Florida State University before joining NC State in 2013. Her recent research explores materiality and comparative media studies, examining how early modern printed texts rendered objects through language and graphic technologies, and their resonance with today’s digital and three-dimensional archives. She teaches courses on early modern literature, women’s writing, and the contemporary graphic novel, and directs the department's Honors Program. Additionally, she actively engages in community outreach through transcription events and collaborative projects with the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective, aiming to bring manuscript recipe books to researchers and the public.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• History
• Linguistics
• Art history
• Computer Science
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Visual arts
• Literature
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive science
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Frontmatter

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Philosophy
  DOI

• NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory—75 Years of Research Linking Earth and Sky: A Historical Perspective

  Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society · 2023-10-26 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract For over 75 years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Air Resources Laboratory (NOAA ARL) has been at the forefront of federal meteorological and climate research. As the Special Projects Section (SPS) of the U.S. Weather Bureau (USWB), the laboratory pioneered the development of atmospheric trajectory modeling, initially used in studies related to nuclear weapons following World War II. Model development was guided by observations following weapons tests, assisted by later experiments using a wide variety of atmospheric tracers. Today’s familiar Gaussian plume dispersion model, previously in nascent form, was developed and promoted with ARL research, as was the much later and widely used HYSPLIT model. Much of ARL’s early research was focused on the challenges presented by the complex terrain surrounding nuclear installations, often addressed with high-spatial-resolution meteorological measurements, atmospheric tracers, and site-specific models. ARL has since extended boundary layer research to increasingly complex landscapes, such as forests, agricultural lands, and urban areas, and has expanded its research scope to air quality, weather, and climate applications based on the knowledge and experience developed throughout its long history. Examples of these research endeavors include the establishment of the U.S. Climate Reference Network, fundamental contributions to the development of the National Air Quality Forecast Capability, and foundational participation in the National Atmospheric Deposition Program. ARL looks forward to continuing to refine scientific understanding from field experiments, including coupling ground-based experimentation with modeling, and sustained observations, in order to facilitate the transfer of knowledge into practical applications of societal relevance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork

  Modern Language Quarterly · 2023 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  • Aesthetics

  At once lively and deeply contextualized, Whitney Trettien’s Cut/Copy/Paste weaves together provocative examples of creative intention and material entropy in the literary archive of the English Renaissance. The study is essential reading for understanding the vibrancy of Renaissance textuality and its legacies. In three lengthy chapters Trettien follows the cycles of decay, fragmentation, repair, and re-collection that shape early modern books and assesses how this recursive “bookwork” can inform our own use of texts across today’s media landscape. Cut/Copy/Paste lingers on objects that are “densely intermedial” (9). From the integrative harmonies of Little Gidding to the accretive Theophila, or Loves Sacrifice, these texts complicate histories of the book that have tended to focus on homogeneous categories of texts (manuscripts, printed materials, engravings) or on the shifts in technologies from which they derive. Rejecting the inherited essentialisms, Trettien examines the conceptual, historical, and material processes that inform these literary experiments to argue for Renaissance texts as technologies that can help us consider how we mediate our own histories, stories, and objects in a fragmented present.Each chapter in Cut/Copy/Paste centers on a particular book, process, and conceptual framework. In the first chapter Trettien delves into the processes of cutting by which the women of Little Gidding made publishing tools of their sewing scissors. While some of the history of these women is well known, Trettien brings these texts out of literary isolation and carefully traces how the practices of bookbinding, cutting, pasting, and establishing layout influenced women creators well into the late twentieth century, including Trettien herself. In this sense, the book encourages metamedia thinking: the physical copy of Cut/Copy/Paste functions as another cut, pasted, and bound iteration of the texts she discusses.The second chapter moves from Little Gidding’s subtle feminist practices to what Trettien calls the queer productions of the poet Edward Benlowes. This chapter rehabilitates Benlowes, not so much for his verse as for the environment he established to create Theophila, a text that was profoundly homosocial and that brought together people working across a number of craft and creative specialties. Following the intermedial throughline, Trettien argues that Benlowes’s group experiments with engraving constituted “scribal publishing with plates” (108), a queer analogue to the literary practices at Little Gidding. The book’s final chapter explores print and manuscript scraps compiled into volumes by the antiquarian John Bagford. Bagford’s fortunes, and so the fortunes of his fragments, were shaped by nineteenth-century ideas about both social class and waste. Trettien uses material evidence from Bagford’s compilations to rehabilitate the general integrity of his collecting practices and to demonstrate how his antiquarian impulse marks a distinct shift in the history of the book fragment. The chapter connects his individual program with a more public interest in rarities and collecting that surfaces with the rise of coffeehouses, which became prominent spaces in the marketplace for old books. Trettien thus traces the emergence of a book history focused not just on texts but on specific material forms of texts; in a post-Bagford milieu, even fragments and waste scraps could contribute to this new mode of historical collecting and compiling.Trettien explores bookwork as a temporally and materially expansive process that extends to the media forms of Cut/Copy/Paste itself, as the reader is invited to move from the printed codex to its digital analog and to navigate from the reproduced photos, engravings, manuscripts, and formatted pages assembled in the printed text to the capacious digital surrogates available in the project’s bank of online assets. These resources support and extend the book’s arguments in several ways. High-resolution zoomable scans let the reader explore Bagford’s writing on the history of print, for example, offering an interactive version of the images in the printed version of Trettien’s text. An interactive visualization of the network of Humphrey Moseley, who sold Benlowes’s books, somewhat ironically highlights the collaborative networks involved in textual dissemination for a bookseller whose primary contribution to book history was to reify the concept of a singular author in print. Other digital elements, like pie charts that show the source texts for the Little Gidding affiliate Susanna Collet’s commonplace book, help clarify the structure and contents of complex texts under discussion.Each chapter of Cut/Copy/Paste also includes bespoke digital assets that emerge from the project’s feminist commitments. The codex version is marked with what I came to think of as customized manicules, guiding the reader to interact with the relevant digital tool or digitized archival object. The online edition has linked boxes that bring in a variety of contextual materials. In neither case are these elements disruptive; rather, they are reminiscent of the paraph marks of a medieval manuscript, guiding the reader’s physical and intellectual movement through the text. Toggling between the printed copy and the screen can be cumbersome, but it reveals the limitations of our own media forms and supports the integrative ethos of Trettien’s primary texts. To engage with Cut/Copy/Paste is not just to learn about underrecognized methods of early modern bookwork but to materially experience the author’s own experiments in assembling media.Trettien’s text urges attention to text creation as a cultural practice. The Little Gidding harmonies reveal their makers’ spiritual reading practices. Demonstrating how publishing could work in close-knit circles, the collaborations traced in Benlowes’s Theophila forged a network model that became an alternative to mainstream publisher routines and ideologies. Bagford’s collections of book waste exemplify the first rumblings of material exploration in what we now know as book history. Cut/Copy/Paste brings sustained attention to figures and practices marginalized by literary and sometimes book history; at the same time, it argues for amplifying the collectivity of feminist scholarly projects. Each time Trettien points to a digital edition of the primary sources she attends to, she mentions her collaborators, Zoe Braccia and Penny Bee. This is not just scholarly professionalism but also a reminder that Trettien is recuperating (or bringing back for reuse) not only marginalized texts from the past but the queer, feminist working methods that often produced them. She uses the team’s collaborative praxis to intervene in academic assumptions about authorship and monographs as much as in the academic field of Renaissance bookwork.A text focused on three case studies risks overreliance on microhistories or insufficient context for the period’s prominent figures and concerns. Cut/Copy/Paste is careful to explain how its examples relate to larger literary and historical formations. The text provides much that will be useful to those working on the period’s more recognized figures and histories. Joining Adam Smyth’s (2012) work on cutting in George Herbert’s poetry, Trettien connects Little Gidding’s bookwork, and its reception by King Charles, to Herbert’s claims for scriptural authority. Sometimes these perspectival shifts bring into focus the larger implications of, for example, collecting and organizing book waste, which not only contributes to the material history of the book but helps clarify the role of printing technologies in the increasing bureaucratic paperwork of a post-Restoration, capitalist, and consumer society. While the selective networks and bespoke processes that constitute Trettien’s signal examples are meticulously investigated, the larger formations to which they contribute are always in view. When Benlowes donated his collection of books and other materials to St. John’s College, Cambridge, he prompted a change in the ethos of the scholarly library. Bagford’s compilation of scraps helps unlock a broader exploration of seventeenth-century book markets. Moments like these are abundant in the text, pointing outward to canonical early modern writers while clarifying how the creation and dissemination of physical texts can help us better understand the often dephysicalized, anthologized poems and histories we encounter in our own scholarly research and teaching.By locating texts that push the boundaries of different forms of media and their established bibliographic codes, Trettien combines profound attention to the historical specificity of her case studies with frequent reminders of the project’s longer view, which is to demonstrate how feminist and queer early modern textual projects are inflection points in the development of contemporary book history. In its scrutiny of the implications and legacies of marginalized textual praxis, Cut/Copy/Paste makes experimental forms of bookwork central to the history of the book.

  PublisherDOI

• Early Modern Leaven in Bread, Bodies, and Spirit

  2022-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Early Modern Leaven in Bread, Bodies, and Spirit

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2022-11-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2022

  • Philosophy
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Early Modern Leaven in Bread, Bodies, and Spirit

  2022-10-19

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay investigates how different leavening agents were used in early modern English devotional, culinary, and medicinal contexts. Baking bread leavened through various means in the modern kitchen offers insight into the historical processes that made leaven and its physical effects so telling for medical practitioners, home cooks, and devotional writers of the time. In discovering a complex and contradictory history of leaven in early modern life, this essay argues that the baker and believer must rely on their own physical and faithful experiences to employ the right leaven the right way for bread or belief. The domestic practice of using leaven becomes a method of spiritual knowing which early modern practitioners could express across their culture’s most central spaces.

  PublisherDOI

• Forming Sleep: Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance

  2020 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Cognitive science

  "A collection of essays exploring how biocultural and literary dynamics acted together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Essays envision sleep states as a means of defining the human, both literally and metaphorically"--

• Rest and Rhyme in Thomas Campion’s Poetry

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2020-04-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Forming Sleep

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2020-04-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nancy Simpson-Younger

  St. Olaf College

  223 shared

• Rebecca Totaro

  Universität Greifswald

  221 shared

• Wendy Beth Hyman

  221 shared

• Vin Nardizzi

  221 shared

• Joe Campana

  University of Colorado Boulder

  221 shared

• Scott Oldenburg

  Tulane University

  221 shared

• Gail Kern

  Rice University

  221 shared

• Paster Folger

  Rice University

  221 shared

Awards & honors

• NC State Alumni Association Outstanding Teacher Award (2024)