I am a scholar of the material book and a book artist, interested not just in what we read but how a text makes its way to us. While my research focuses on 16th- and 17th-century English literature, my interests are interdisciplinary and trans-historical, which helps me engage a wide range of student experiences and interests. As an artist, binding books, printing on letterpress machines, and making paper and ink have helped me cultivate my knowledge of the material book, and have made even more apparent the networks of machines, plant matter, animal bodies, and human labor that make a book. This is the kind of dynamic, interactive work we do in my Engagements class. My goal is always to build a classroom community willing to creatively and critically examine the relationship between the arts and sciences by experiencing together how art can help us ask hard questions, make new knowledge, and cross disciplinary boundaries. Through this experimentation, we learn to see both historical and everyday objects in new ways.