Announcements — Winter/Spring 2022

Staff News

The Clements Library welcomes new staff members Meg Bossio and Maggie Vanderford.  As a reading room supervisor, Meg is now part of the team providing services to our onsite researchers. In a newly created position, Maggie joins the Clements as Librarian for Instruction and Engagement. Maggie’s mission is to coordinate the teaching program by working closely with university faculty and staff to integrate our collections into curricula.

New Joyce Bonk Graduate Student Assistant Claire Danna joins the staff for the next two years while she attends the University of Michigan’s School of Information. Claire is currently working to digitize real photo postcards from the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography and is participating in a new crowdsourcing program on Zooniverse.

As part of the Clements Library’s grant-funded initiative to digitize the Thomas Gage Papers, we welcome digitization technicians Tulin Babbitt, Katrina Shafer, and Michelle Varteresian. Their skills in scanning and providing metadata will help usher one of our largest and most-used collections into the online environment.

In Memory

Distinguished historian and archivist Philip P. Mason, a member of the Honorary Board of Governors of the Clements Library Associates, passed away on May 6, 2021.

Rare 1761 Manuscript Plan of Detroit Acquired

The Clements Library has recently promoted exciting news of a new acquisition—the “Plan of the Fort at De Troit,” hand-drawn for British officials in 1761. It becomes our earliest original manuscript plan of the fort and an inset is now our earliest pictorial view. Clements staff acted fast to secure this rare resource for its purchase cost of $42,500.

Transatlantic Fellowship Partnership Launched

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new research funding program for 2022-2023. In partnership with the American Trust for the British Library, we will offer a Transatlantic Fellowship designed to support at least four weeks of research between the British Library and the Clements Library, with at least one week of research time at each institution. This opportunity will support researchers whose projects will benefit from the use of primary source materials in both libraries, enabling the production of exciting transatlantic scholarship.

The New Julius S. Scott III Fellowship in Caribbean & Atlantic History

In memory of the late Dr. Julius S. Scott, colleagues, friends and family have established a new fellowship to support early-career researchers traveling to use the collections of the Clements Library to conduct research in the fields of Atlantic and Caribbean history, broadly construed. Dr. Scott, who passed away in December 2021, was a Lecturer in Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan and author of the groundbreaking book The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London, 2018). The Clements is now fundraising towards a $50,000 goal to sustain the fellowship through endowed funds.