The 2022 Council Election: Slate of Nominees
December 14, 2021
At the upcoming BSA annual meeting on January 28, 2022 the Society will elect a new slate of members to the Council.
In accordance with the Society’s by-laws, the Nominating Committee assembles and presents a full slate of nominees to the membership for a vote at the Annual Meeting. Assembling a full slate for a vote – rather than presenting individual candidates in a competitive election, as some other organizations do – affords us the opportunity to assemble a group that carry out the mission and reflect values of BSA, as well as work toward the goals set by the Council in the Equity Action Plan. The Nominating Committee recognizes that other models may better serve the BSA in meeting its EAP goals in the future, and in the coming years the Council has committed to a full by-laws review and revision to ensure that the Society’s governance model aligns with its values.
This year the Nominating Committee was Chaired by Heather Wolfe. Devin Fitzgerald, Mark Samuels Lasner, Naomi Nelson, and Curtis Small served with her; Erin McGuirl and Barbara Shailor also served ex officio in an advisory capacity. Candidates were carefully considered after the placement of an open call for nominees in June of this year.
The Nominating Committee is proud to present the Slate for Officers and members of the Council Class of 2025. These individuals represent the best and brightest among us, and demonstrates the Society’s commitment to supporting and empowering individuals from under-represented groups in making contributions, when they choose to do so, toward the Society’s efforts in building equity within the field.
Please register to attend the virtual Annual Meeting on January 28, 2022 to ensure that we meet our quorum to elect the slate! Your participation as a member is vital.
Nominees
Candidate for President, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, was Secretary of the Bibliographical Society of America from 2011 to 2014 and has served as Council member since 2019. Caroline is Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Early Modern Books and Prints, and Associate Librarian for Collection Care and Development at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. She has also held various positions in other academic and independent research libraries. She holds a MA in book history and a MLS from France. Her publications reflect her research interests in the history of libraries, the Renaissance book trade, and the production and reception of early modern illustrated books.
Candidate for Vice President, Megan Peiser, is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Oakland University (Rochester, MI), where her research and teaching focus on women writers, eighteenth-century literature and culture, book history and bibliography, periodical studies, Indigenous studies, material culture, and digital humanities. She is currently working on her monograph manuscript, The Review Periodical and British Women Novelists, 1790-1820 and is creator of its companion resource, The Novels Reviewed Database, 1790-1820. With Emily Spunaugle, she is the co-director of the Marguerite Hicks Project. Peiser is the President of the Aphra Behn Society, and outgoing chair of the Bibliography and Scholarly Editing Forum for the Modern Language Association (MLA). Her writing can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books Antiracism in the Contemporary University series, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Romantic Textualities, and more.
Candidate for Secretary, John T. McQuillen, was elected as Secretary in 2019 and will be fulfilling his second term in that post. John is a curator of Printed Books & Bindings at the Morgan Library & Museum, where he has curated exhibitions on William Caxton, Martin Luther, J.R.R. Tolkien, and 18th-century French bookbinding and published on medieval and early modern library history and book provenance The Morgan and J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles are collaborating on a large exhibition on the German Renaissance artist Hans Holbein, for which John contributed on Holbein’s work producing illustrations for printed books and his representation of books in his painted portraits. He received his PhD in Art History with the collaborative program for Book History and Print Culture from the University of Toronto, where he spent four years as a graduate fellow at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and produced a descriptive catalogue of the incunabula at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. In 2013 he was named one of the BSA’s New Scholars for his work on 15th-century book production networks in Bavaria.
Candidate for Treasurer, G. Scott Clemons, was elected as Treasurer of the Bibliographical Society of America in 2005. He is a private collector of the Aldine Press, a collection he started as an undergraduate in the Classics Department at Princeton University. In 2015 Clemons curated an exhibition at the Grolier Club to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Aldus’s death, mounted largely with items from his own collection. He is the immediate past president of the Grolier Club; trustee of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia and the Morgan Library and Museum; a member of the Association internationale de bibliophilie (AIB); and a past President of the Friends of the Princeton University Library. By day, Clemons is a partner at the private banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.
Candidate for Council Class of 2025, Rebecca Romney, is the co-founder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book firm based in the Washington D.C. area. She is the co-founder and one of the judges of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize, the co-author of Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories in Book History, and the author of The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books, 1769-1999. Her current research interests lie in ethics and feminist practice as applied to rare book collecting and the rare book trade. She is a member of the Grolier Club, and she currently serves in the BSA’s Membership Working Group and Rare Book School’s Rendell Lecture Committee.
Candidate for Council Class of 2025, Alice Schreyer, is Roger and Julie Baskes Vice President for Collections & Library Services at the Newberry Library. She was previously Associate University Librarian for Area Studies and Special Collections at the University of Chicago Library, where she was director of the Special Collections Research Center from 1991 through 2011. She is on the Executive Committee of the Chicago Collections Consortium and served as Chair of the Board of Directors, Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, where she taught for over 20 years. Alice is a member of the Caxton Club and the Grolier Club.
Candidate for Council Class of 2025, Kenneth Soehner, is the Arthur K. Watson Chief Librarian at the Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of art, a position he has held for the past twenty-five years as Arthur K. Watson Chief Librarian. He has been active in raising funds and working with colleagues to develop the depth and geographic scope of both current publications and special collections.. He has an M.L.S. from Columbia University School of Library Service, and an M.A. in Art History from the Department of Art History and Archeology at the same university. He has been active in the Art Libraries Society of North America at both the national and local level and served as president of ARLIS/NA in 2008-09.
Candidate for Council Class of 2025, Derrick R. Spires, is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. He specializes in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), won the MLA Prize for First Book and the Bibliographical Society/St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize.