Education

PhD, Communication and Culture, Indiana University
MLIS, Library & Information Science, Indiana University
MA, Literature in English, Gonzaga University
BS, English, Northern Arizona University

Specializations 

Print culture, library history, book history, online reading, young adult literature, texts and textiles.

Biography

Jennifer Burek Pierce is professor at SLIS at the University of Iowa, jointly appointed to the Center for the Book. Her research focuses on understanding reading culture and library history, particularly in the mid-twentieth century. She has written several books, notably Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media, a study of the online community that responds to the work of John Green; it 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, which examines the role of digital maps in readers’ responses to Rainbow Rowell's Simon Snow trilogy. Additionally, she has achieved 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; the University of Southern Mississippi's de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection; and the State Historical Society of Iowa. Most recently, this funding supports her study of Mary Ellen Solt, who was born in Iowa and became an educator and internationally renowned poet. 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 SLIS alumna Nancy Henke, Textbook Affordability Librarian at the University of Northern Colorado, developed an open educational resource (OER) textbook for the course, Librarians Learning Together. This book includes her publications with American Libraries magazine, where she was a columnist and contributing writer for more than a decade. Collectively, these activities have resulted in her appointment to the editorial board of Information & Culture.

Recent Projects and Presentations 

• Burek Pierce, J. (May, 2025). Needlework as a means of documenting literacy. Building Book Labs, School of Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL.
• Burek Pierce, J. (2024). From Iowa origins to an international reputation: Mary Ellen Solt’s twentieth century education and instruction in Iowa. State Historical Society of Iowa Grant, Des Moines, IA
• Burek Pierce, J. (October, 2024). From maps to modernity: Finding literary histories. Magliocco Lecture Series, Department of English, Western Illinois University, Macomb, Ill.
• Henke, N, Anthoney, M., & Burek Pierce, J. (April, 2024). Reimagining our roles: Lessons from the field in OER authoring and open pedagogy. All Things Open Conference, Kennesaw, GA. https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/ato/2024allthingsopen/.
• Theisen, C., & Burek Pierce, J. (October, 2023). YouTube expectations in a canvas world: Educational video online and in higher education. Association of Library and Information Science Education International Conference, Milwaukee, WI.

Recent Publications

• Burek Pierce, J. (in press). Domestic tensions: The seventeen cookbook and the 1960s. American Studies / Amerikastudien.
• Burek Pierce, J., & Henke, N. (2023). Librarians learning together: An introduction to the profession. University of Iowa Pressbooks. https://pressbooks.uiowa.edu/librarianslearningtogether/
• Burek Pierce, J. (2024). Readerly cartography: Finding fictional places and actual readers on digital maps. Information & Culture, 59(3), 266-284. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/946239.
• Pierce, J.B. (2023). Chapter 10. When voices become data: Reading data documenting contemporary reading. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 112(3), 201-215. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tap.2023.a918774.
• Burek Pierce, J. (2022). Old books and new media: Reader responses to The Thorn Birds on Late Night with Seth Meyers. In C. Norrick-Rühl & S. Towheed (Eds.), Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic (pp. 93-111). Palgrave Macmillan.