Christy Pottroff
Assistant Professor
Biography
Christy L. Pottroff teaches courses in early and nineteenth-century American literature, American studies, book history, and material culture. Her first book, Postal Hackers (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press), tells the stories of the nineteenth-century outsiders who hacked the U.S. Mail by creatively using postal tools and protocols in extraordinary ways. The project reveals how everyday infrastructure became a site of resistance, experimentation, and social change. Most recently, this project was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-term Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society . From 2019 to 2024, Pottroff collaborated with Donald Slater on an archaeological investigation of the home of 17th-century poet Anne Bradstreet . Her next book project draws on that work to reinterpret Bradstreet and colonial New England through archaeology, wood, and the environmental histories of settler colonialism. As a teacher, Pottroff invites students to encounter literary history through archival research, hands-on experiences with bygone historical practices, and place-based explorations of Boston. Students in her classes study rare books and manuscripts in the Burns Library , experiment with historical letterpress printing and bookmaking in the Hatchery Makerspace , and read Boston itself as a text in the study of American literary and cultural history. She is also collaborating with librarians and students to recover the library of abolitionists Robert and Catharine Morris , among Boston College's earliest supporters and major donors. Learn more about their extraordinary story and the ongoing recovery effort in a podcast Pottroff co-created with BC PhD student Justin Brown-Ramsey . A founding member of the Boston College Printers Guild, she enjoys thinking, teaching, and creating with an interdisciplinary community dedicated to the history and practice of printing and bookmaking.