Fellow of the Volkswagen Stiftung and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

October 2014 – October 2015

Punctuating Presences:  How Punctuation “Marks” Voice

Elizabeth M. Bonapfel received her Ph.D. in American and English Literature from New York University in 2014.Her current book project, Punctuating Presences:How Punctuation “Marks” Voice, traces how many current punctuation practices (dashes, ellipses, parentheses) derive largely from the novel’s tendency to borrow from 18th-century printed dramatic texts, which attempted to translate the impression of spoken speech from the stage to the page. The book project explores what punctuation usage tells us about the interrelationship among genres and how punctuation signals transitions in various “voices” (character, narrator, speaker, actor) in a textual medium. Elizabeth M. Bonapfel is co-editor of Doubtful Points:Joyce and Punctuation (Rodopi Press, 2014).She received her B.A. from Haverford College.

In the summer term of 2015, Elizabeth M. Bonapfel organized the workshop Punctuation in Practice at Freie Universität Berlin.

Elizabeth M. Bonapfel is currently working on a project on the evolution of punctuation in modern English literature funded by the German Research Federation (DFG). More information can be found here.