Welcome.
My name is Briana Wipf, and I am a writer, researcher, and teacher.This website is a portfolio designed to showcase the different mediums and genres in which I work.Thanks for dropping by. Let me know if you have questions or want to collaborate.
Research, Teaching
Writing and presentations
Journalism
Reporting
Digital Humanities
Adventures in text and data
Multimedia
Policy, podcasting, blogging, reporting
Creative
Fiction, nonfiction, humor
Research, Teaching
I am a literary scholar whose primary interest lies in medieval literature dealing with cultural contact. I study how literature portrays people or groups considered outsiders of others and what that portrayal can tell us about the encounter. While cultural contact was frequently adversarial or violent during the Middle Ages, there was also a great deal of intellectual, artistic, and economic contact that was not predicated on violence or intolerance: it is this sort of contact I am most interested in. Defended in April 2024, my dissertation, “Marvels and ‘Ajā’ib as Contact Points: Medieval Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Literature on Cultural Contact,” is the first study of how the appearance of marvels in Christian, Muslim, and Jewish literature portrays cultural contact.While working toward my doctoral degree, I also studied digital humanities. My work here is primarily interested in digital textual analysis. Because of the relatively small number of extant medieval and early modern texts, my work is interested in text analysis on small corpora (for example, under a million words). My Digital Humanities page features more examples of this work.As an instructor in the college classroom, I believe that teaching for transfer empowers students to use the skills they learn in my composition and literature classes in other classes, the workplace, and in their lives generally. The critical thinking, community engagement, and writing skills students learn equip them to leave my classroom able to write in other classes and to use their rhetorical skills in service of causes and issues they care about.
Journalism
I started my journalism career at weekly newspapers in rural Montana as a features reporter. I later began covering news and local events before moving on to the editor's chair at the Shelby Promoter. Here, I produced several articles and oversaw the layout of the newspaper each week. Working for a small weekly paper means learning how to cover just about every beat: business, entertainment, local, politics, education, and natural resources to name a few. I regularly took and worked up my own photos, and the layout work I did helped me to think like a reporter and an editor at the same time.In 2012, I moved to the Great Falls Tribune in Great Falls, MT, one of the state's large daily newspapers. For almost three years, I covered health, arts and entertainment, business, and anything else my editor assigned. In my health coverage, I prided myself on privileging expertise and rigorous science in my reporting. At the Tribune, I began working with video to augment my stories.My strengths as a reporter are in my ability to listen and respect the people I interview, something that comes in handy when writing feature stories and profiles. As an editor, I tried to make the Promoter the go-to source for local news, making sure I cast a wide net for stories and stayed up-to-date on local governments, schools, and community events.
Digital Humanities
Because I work primarily with medieval and early modern subjects, my digital humanities work deals with relatively small text corpora. Throughout a multiyear project looking at rhetorical trends in witchcraft accusation and murder accusation pamphlets from the sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries, I have focused on best practices for small corpus (less than one million words) analysis. I have shared the GitHub repositories for both corpora.While at the University of Pittsburgh, I also completed a collections-as-data project, part of CaD@Pitt, that catalogued all the manuscript, early book, and facsimile holdings of the Pitt libraries, putting these sources in an easily findable format for the first time. I have shared the enrichment layer on GitHub.
Multimedia
The work in this section showcases versatility. From formal writing to video or podcasting, I have tried to produce content that is both informative and engaging. I believe d that all genres of writing should be lucid, concise, and above all readable.
Creative Writing
Much of my creative writing is short fiction, but regardless of the genre, I try to write deliberate and economical prose. I explore interpersonal dynamics or ethical questions in my work, always with an eye toward character development and establishing a sense of place.One of the best compliments I've ever received on my creative work was from a former professor. My stories, she said, were "mired in the everyday." To me, the banal and everyday is significant and beautiful, the building blocks of what make up a life. My stories reflect that belief.
