Education

Ph.D., Communication and Culture, 1999, Indiana University
M.L.S., School of Library & Information Science, 1999, Indiana University
M.A., Literature in English, 1990, Gonzaga University
B.S., Major: English, Minor: Journalism, 1988, Northern Arizona University

Specializations 

Print culture, library history, book history, online reading, children's books and media, young adult literature, special collections and archives, texts and textiles

Biography

Jennifer Burek Pierce is professor and associate director in SLIS at the University of Iowa, with a courtesy appointment to the Center for the Book. She has written several books, most recently Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media (UIowa Press, 2020), which studies the work of John Green, his readers, and the resulting online community. Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media has been called "an important book" and "a deeply researched analysis of a revolution in progress." Her recent work includes "Readerly Cartography: Finding Fictional Places and Actual Readers on Digital Maps," published in Information & Culture in 2024, a study of how readers of Rainbow Rowell's Simon Snow trilogy created digital tributes to the series. She has also written about how we reason about big data sets that allow us to analyze contemporary readers for Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. A developing project studies the intersection of the attention economy and celebrity online book clubs. Although this recent work focuses on contemporary readers, she has a considerable reputation as a historian of libraries and readers, having won the Library History Round Table's Davis and Winsor awards. Her historical research has been supported with funded fellowship awards from the American Antiquarian Society; Winterthur Museum, Library, and Gardens; and the University of Southern Mississippi's de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection. With her research awards and expertise in library history, and several years as a practicing librarian, she now anchors SLIS's course for entering students, Libraries, Culture, and Society. She and recent SLIS alumna Nancy Henke, now a librarian at the University of Northern Colorado, developed an open educational resource (OER) textbook for the course, Librarians Learning Together. This book includes some of her publications with American Libraries magazine, where she was a contributing writer for more than a decade beginning in 2001.   

Recent Projects and Presentations 

• Needlework as a Means of Documenting Literacy, Building Book Labs, Skeuomorph Press, School of Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, May 2025
• From Maps to Modernity:  Finding Literary Histories, Magliocco Lecture Series, Department of English, Western Illinois University, Macomb, Ill. (October 30, 2024).
• With Nancy Henke and Mark Anthoney. Reimaging Our Roles: Lessons from the Field in OER Authoring and Open Pedagogy, All Things Open Conference (April 2024), https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/ato/2024allthingsopen/.
• With M. Bateman and C. Matheis, Archiving the Digital Literary Sphere, Unique Archives, Digital Americanists, American Literature Association, Chicago, May 2024.
• With C. Theisen, YouTube Expectations in a Canvas World: Educational Video Online and in Higher Education, Association of Library and Information Science Educators, October 2023, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
• From Cadavers to Television: Mid-Century Surveys of U.S. Teen Library Users as Documentary Texts. Society for the History for Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), Centre of the Book at the University of Otago, New Zealand, June 2022.
• “Where Everybody Knows Your Name:” Participating in the Life’s Library Digital Book Club, Book Clubs as Sites of Digital, Ethical, and Identity-based Community: Three Case Studies, SHARP, Amsterdam, Netherlands, July 2022.
• Finding Fictional Places on Actual Maps: Methods for Locating Reader Responses in the Digital World in New Methods to Explore Digital Archives, SHARP at MLA, Washington, D.C., January 2022

Recent Publications

• Domestic Tensions: The Seventeen Cookbook and the 1960s,"American Studies / Amerikastudien, forthcoming.
• With Nancy Henke. Librarians Learning Together: An Introduction to the Profession. This OER textbook is available at https://pressbooks.uiowa.edu/librarianslearningtogether/
• "Readerly Cartography: Finding Fictional Places and Actual Readers on Digital Maps," Information & Culture (May 2024)
• “When Voices Become Data: Reading Data Documenting Contemporary Reading,” in Evidence: The Use and Misuse of Data (American Philosophical Society: Philadelphia, 2024), 201-15.
• “Old Books and New Media: Reader Responses to The Thorn Birds on Late Night with Seth Meyers,” Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic (London and NY: Palgrave, 2022): 93-111.