Mellon Research Fellow: Sophia Hornyak
Letterforms As a Barometer for Social Mood, Cultural Shifts, and Collective Memory
College: Brightpoint Community College
Faculty mentor: Greg Hansard
Project summary: Few things are made more continuously or more invisibly than the shape of letters. This research proposes that letterforms are active cultural artifacts that register social tension, ideological shift, and collective experience, and that the typographic conditions of our current moment bear a striking resemblance to those of the First Gilded Age. Drawing on archival research, critical theory, and interviews with contemporary practitioners, it argues that learning to read the patterns in letterforms serves as an ontological reorientation granting us more agency than we realize.