Project Team
Institute Directors
Dr. Adrian Finucane is an Associate Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University. Her first book, The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2016. It explores the close, sometimes cooperative relationships between agents of the British and Spanish empires through the slave trade in the early eighteenth-Century Caribbean. She is currently working on a book project about prisoners of war in the eighteenth century Americas. She has held fellowships through the John Carter Brown Library, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.
Victoria Thur is a rare book librarian and has served FAU Libraries for 20 years. In 2009, she joined the Special Collection Team where Vicky leads, curates, and manages the library’s distinctive collections: Marvin & Sybil Weiner Collection, Jaffe Center for Book Arts, Recorded Sound Archives, and University Archives. Special Collections materials range from the 16th century to the modern era, including rare books and manuscripts, photographs, artist books, records, and other primary materials. Vicky and the Special Collections team curate exhibits, hosts class visits, and engage with the local community and researchers to access materials, lectures, and programming.
Visiting Faculty and Lecturers
Dr. Joseph M. Adelman is an associate professor of history at Framingham State University. A historian of media, communication, and politics in the Atlantic world, he recently published his first book, entitled Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789. It was awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2019 St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America. He is now at work on a history of the Post Office in America. Previously a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia, he has presented and published broadly, including in the journals Enterprise & Society and Early American Studies, TheAtlantic.com, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, and as a blogger at the Junto. In addition, he serves as Assistant Editor for Digital Initiatives at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and Assistant Producer for the Ben Franklin’s World podcast.
Dr. Tara Bynum is an Assistant Professor of English & African American Studies at the University of Iowa and a scholar of early African American literary histories before 1800. Her current monograph, Reading Pleasures (fall 2022, U of Illinois Press’ New Black Studies series), examines the ways in which eighteenth-century enslaved and/or free men and women feel good or experience pleasure in spite of the privations of slavery, “unfreedom,” or white supremacy. It is a pleasure that isn’t beholden to social expectations or systemic oppression, but instead is experienced because of an individual’s commitment to religious faith, friendship, or community building. This work is part of a larger, ongoing project that thinks more deeply about how black communities in the early republic made and shaped the very meaning of nation-building in the greater New England area and beyond. Related essays have appeared or are forthcoming in: Early American Literature, Common-Place, Legacy, J19, Criticism, American Periodicals, and African American Literature in Transition, Vol. 1, 1750-1800.
Dr. Lindsay DiCuirci is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where she specializes in early American literature and the history of the book. She is also director of the Humanities Teaching Labs through UMBC's Dresher Center for the Humanities. Her book Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) won the Library Company of Philadelphia's First Book Award, the Early American Literature Book Prize and was co-winner of the Bibliographical Society of America’s St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize. Her work has recently appeared in Archive Journal, Early American Literature, and the edited collection The Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2020). Her current research focuses on the intersections of spirit belief, radical politics, and print in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Dr. Jesse R. Erickson is the Coordinator of Special Collections and Digital Humanities, Assistant Professor in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Associate Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center at the University of Delaware. He previously worked as a bibliographic researcher and archival processor in the Manuscripts Division of the Charles E. Young Research Library and the Center for Oral History Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. He recently served as the Vice President for Programs for the American Printing History Association. Currently, he serves on the editorial boards of the University of Delaware Press and Publishing History, and he is the co-editor for the Papers of Bibliographical Society of America. His research specializations are in ethnobibliography, alternative printing, non-canonical textuality, African American print culture, and the transnational publishing history of the works of Ouida.
Dr. John J. Garcia is Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University. His monograph-in-progress, Without Order: Booksellers and the Failures of the Early American Book Trade, 1679-1825, reconceptualizes the rise of print culture in colonial North America and the Atlantic world in terms of failed business projects and contingencies of book publishing. He is Vice-President and Senior Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, a scholarly program of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.
Dr. Karen J. Leader is Associate Professor of Art History at Florida Atlantic University. She received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley and her MA and Ph.D. at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her areas of interest include art and popular culture in the 19th through the 21st centuries, feminist theory, and the history and future of the discipline of art history. She has published on the artist Gustave Courbet, French caricature, and contemporary tattoo culture.
Dr. Robert Parkinson’s interests are in early American history, especially the American Revolution. His first project, The Common Cause: Creating Nation and Race in the American Revolution (UNC Press, 2016) and Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence (UNC Press, 2021), explored how questions of race collided with pressing issues of nation building at the Founding. His current book project, The Heart of American Darkness (Liveright/Norton), is a microhistory about how the grisly murder of nine Indians on a tributary of the Ohio River in 1774 exerted a surprisingly powerful influence in the political and rhetorical life of the early American republic. Parkinson received his PhD in American History at the University of Virginia in 2005 and has held fellowships at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello.
Dr. Phillip Round is John C. Gerber Chair in English at the University of Iowa and author of Removeable Type: Histories of the book in Indian Country, 1663-1880 (University of North Caroline Press, 2010).
Dr. Neil Weijer is Curator of the Harold & Mary Jean Hanson Rare Book Collection at the University of Florida. His research and teaching focuses on the history of early books and manuscripts, and he has published on the intersections between legendary history, forgery, and scholarly practice in medieval and early modern England. He worked on the Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe as a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins, and has since been working on two projects that deal with the use of early books in digital spaces. Re-Imagining History (a collaboration with librarians and faculty at Dartmouth College) examines the digital legacy of a large medieval manuscript corpus, and Storied Books at the University of Florida showcases student research and experimentation around the collections in Gainesville.
Boca Campus Team
John Cutrone is a letterpress printer, papermaker, and bookbinder, and Director of FAU Libraries' Jaffe Center for Book Arts. Books made using these traditional skills, together with contemporary artists' books, comprise the Jaffe Collection around which the Center revolves. John engages students and the community through hands-on workshops, while utilizing the Collection as a tool for critical thinking skills: we believe that by seeing books in new ways, students can transfer this concept to seeing the world in new ways, too.
Robert Feeney is Assistant to Special Collections at FAU's Wimberly Library. He is a PhD. student in the Department of Comparative Studies and has a background in history, archaeology, and material culture studies.