Angela Wachowich

Angela Wachowich
angelawachowich@uchicago.edu
Cohort Year: 2022
Research Interests: History of the Book and of Reading; Eighteenth Century and Romantic Literature and Culture; Print and Manuscript Cultures; Descriptive Bibliography; Environmental Humanities; Archival Studies.
Education: B.A. (Honours), Simon Fraser University, 2022. M.A., English, University of Chicago, 2023
Research Interests: History of the Book and of Reading; Bibliography; Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture; Library History and Archival Theory; Collection Studies; Life Writing; Environmental Humanities.

Biography

Angela Wachowich is a PhD Candidate in English Language & Literature at the University of Chicago, studying the history of the book and of reading. She writes about the social lives of books, texts, and their users, though she is more widely interested in all processes of printing, binding, collecting, and preserving. Her dissertation is a history of how we came to imagine book objects as living lives of their own and how we feel and care about those lives. It surveys how imaginations of books’ lives (in literary genres like it-narratives, as well as contemporary book histories, and on the antiquarian market) managed and mediated their place in society amidst major alterations to book making, distribution, use, and collection and changing human relations to the material world between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ultimately, it aims to trace what book life and book history can be through imaginations of what they were and how they might evolve to meet our current moment of planetary crisis.

 

Angela is the Rare Books Curatorial Assistant at the University of Chicago Library Special Collections. She previously co-founded and -coordinated the Kim-Park Book History Colloquium (formerly the Chicago School of Book History) with Dr. Eric Slauter and served as the Interim Program Coordinator and Inaugural Fellow of the Kim-Park Program for the Study of the Book. She is an alumnus of the Rare Book School (’23, ’25) and the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar (’26). 

 

Angela is from Calgary, Canada. She loves animals, folk music, and being in the mountains.

Publications

“‘Scratch it out’: Retrospective Editing in the Manuscript Verse Miscellany,” Women’s Literary Networks and Media Cultures in the Long Eighteenth Century. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, December 2026.

 

Schellenberg, Betty A., Linara Kolosova, and Angela Wachowich, eds. “Letters of Elizabeth Montagu to the Duchess of Portland 1741-1742,” Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online, General Ed. Nicole Pohl, Digital Humanities at Swansea University, 2024, https://emco.swansea.ac.uk/.

Teaching

Autumn 2026: Instructor of Record, History of the Book and of Reading

Spring 2026: Course Assistant, Print, Media Transformation and the Beginnings of Mass Communication (Andrew Pettegree)

Spring 2026: Course Assistant, Virginia Woolf: Love, Life, Writing (Christine Fouirnaies)

Winter 2026: Course Assistant, History of the English Language (Ben Saltzman)

Winter 2025: Course Assistant, Drama Queens: Early Modern Female Playwrights (Noémie Ndiaye)

Summer 2024, 2025: Course Assistant (Rare Books School), An Environmental History of the Book (Eric Slauter)