Whitney Trettien researches the history of the book and other text technologies from print to digital. Her work is invested in exploring the past to better understand our present media environment.

Her first book, Cut/Copy/Paste (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), journeys to the fringes of the London print trade to uncover makerspaces and collaboratories where paper media were cut up and reassembled into radical, bespoke publications. Bringing these long-forgotten objects back to life through hand-curated digital resources, Trettien shows how early experimental book hacks speak to the contemporary conditions of digital scholarship and publishing. The project is also itself an experiment in digital publishing, existing as both a print book and an open access edition staged on Manifold Scholarship, where the text has been enriched with images, datasets, and other digital assets. Supported by the Mellon Foundation, an NEH-Mellon Digital Publication Fellowship, and an NEH Fellowships Open Book Award, Cut/Copy/Paste was awarded an honorable mention for the Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship and shortlisted for the ACLS Open Access Book Prize in the Multimodal category. It has been favorably reviewed in Media History (“a subtle, absorbing, and important work of scholarship”), Afterimage (“a frankly staggering amount of primary research” … it “succeeds, in the end, not only in rescuing bookwork from the margins but in stretching the margins themselves, making way for more accommodating practices”), Information & Culture (“this groundbreaking project asks us to discover and perform our own bookwork”), Textual Cultures (“a pleasure to read and a piece of exemplary bibliographic work”), Modern Philology (“an innovative intervention into historical literary study – and into the radical approaches such study might take”), and LSE Review of Books (“its prose is magnetic … a weird and joyous book about people doing weird and joyous things with books”), among other venues. 

Trettien is currently working on a second book that traces early histories of computing, with a special focus on how printing technologies crucially contributed to the development of textual encoding. Other work has been published in PMLA, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Papers of the Bibliiographical Society of America, Shakespeare Quarterly, Textual Cultures, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Scholarly Editing, and postmedieval, as well as numerous book chapters in edited collections.

Much of Trettien's work involves collaboratively designing and building digital editions, publications, and tools for studying the history of the book. She is currently involved in a collaboration, Printing in Prisons, that traces the history of the use of printing presses in prisons, both as a form of prison labor and by incarcerated people writing, editing, and printing their own texts. With student research assistants, she has built a digital network of the Little Gidding harmonies, as well as the commonplace book of a seventeenth-century woman, Susanna Collet. She has also built a dataset and social network to examine the important early modern printer Humphrey Moseley. With Liza Daly and Dot Porter, she has worked on Manicule, an open source platform for building digital exhibits with books. And she is the co-editor and co-designer of thresholds, an occasional digital zine for creative/critical interventions. The digital project Provoke!, a web-based collection of sonic scholarship, resulted in Digital Sound Studies (Duke University Press, 2018), co-edited with Mary Caton Lingold and Darren Mueller.

Trettien is affiliated faculty in Cinema & Media Studies, the Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies program, and Comparative Literature & Literary Theory.