Announcing the Election Slate for 2026
At the upcoming BSA Annual Meeting on 23 January 2026 the Society will announce the election of a new slate of members to the Council. Active members will be invited to vote electronically starting 12 January 2026, with voting closing on 22 January 2026 at 11:45pm ET. BSA members will receive information by email with instructions for electronic voting.
In accordance with the Society’s by-laws and following published guidance for diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Nominating Committee assembles and presents a full slate of nominees to the membership for an electronic vote. 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 will carry out the mission and reflect the 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 Elizabeth Ott. Heather Cole, Adam Hooks, Christina Vortia, and Nick Wilding served with her. Martin Antonetti, Kinohi Nishikawa, Megan Peiser, and Patrick Olson 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 and Kinohi Nishikawa are proud to present the Slate of Officers and members of the Council Class of 2029.
- John McQuillen, Morgan Library & Museum, President
- Aaron Pratt, Harry Ransom Center, Vice President
- James Blanco, Guggenheim Securities, Council Class of 2029
- Katie Mitchell, Good Books, Council Class of 2029
- Megan Peiser, Oakland University, Council Class of 2029
- Katherine Ruffin, Wellesley College, Council Class of 2029
John McQuillen, Morgan Library & Museum, President ↑
John T. McQuillen is the Associate Curator of Printed Books & Bindings at the Morgan Library & Museum. He specializes in European late medieval and Renaissance book history, particularly during the incunable (books printed from 1450–1501) period, and has published on library history and the commercial networks of book printers. John has curated exhibitions on William Caxton, the first English book printer, Martin Luther, the Renaissance artist Hans Holbein, and 18th-century French bookbindings, and organized a record-breaking exhibition from the Bodleian Library, Oxford on J.R.R. Tolkien. His current research is centered on the material history of 15th-century European blockbooks and Renaissance bookbindings. John has been a member of the BSA since 2013, serving on the Publications Committee (2019–25) and the Executive Committee as Secretary (2020–24), as well as the recipient of a New Scholars Award (2014) and a fellowship (2020).
Aaron Pratt, Harry Ransom Center, Vice President ↑
Aaron T. Pratt has served as Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center since 2017. Before that, he was Assistant Professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, having earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from Yale University. He holds a B.A. and M.A. from The Ohio State University. Among other professional affiliations, he is a founding member of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.
Pratt’s research focuses on bibliography, the history of the book, and the literature and culture of early modern England. His writing has appeared in several venues, including Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, The Library, Fine Books and Collections magazine, and edited collections published by Oxford and Cambridge. Most recently, a coauthored article in the Times Literary Supplement announced the discovery of John Milton’s extensively annotated copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles. In addition to his publishing, Pratt has lectured and taught widely on topics related to his research and curatorial work. For the past two years, he has offered Descriptive Bibliography at California Rare Book School; he will do so again in 2026. And, for the first time, he will teach Evidence in Handpress-era Books, 1450–1830. Organized by Virginia’s Rare Book School, it will meet at the Ransom Center. Finally, he has curated a number of exhibitions. His largest, The Long Lives of Very Old Books, was on view at the Ransom Center in 2023, and he is cocurator of an exhibition that will open in April 2026: Lives and Literacy in Ancient Egypt.
James Blanco, Guggenheim Securities, Council Class of 2029 ↑
James Blanco is a senior managing director at Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking arm of Guggenheim Partners. He has advised on some of the largest transactions in financial services including the sale of Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank, two of the largest bank failures in US history, Apollo’s $1.4 billion acquisition of a controlling interest in OneMain Financial, the $9.0 billion purchase of ING Direct by Capital One, the formation of the U.S. automotive financing business Chrysler Capital, the national mortgage alliance between State Farm and Rocket Mortgage, the $1 billion sale of Ally Bank’s mortgage servicing business, the $1.2 billion sale of HomEq Servicing Corporation to Ocwen Financial.
James received a BS from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and an MBA from the Columbia Business School. He holds graduate degrees from New York University and the City University of New York. He is a member of Dean’s Advisory Council at the Cornell University ILR School, the Board of Trustees of the Graduate Center Foundation at the City University of New York, the co-chairman of the Kingsbridge Heights Community Center in the Bronx and a Trustee of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library. He is a member of the Economic Club of New York.
Katie Mitchell, Good Books, Council Class of 2029 ↑
Katie Mitchell is a storyteller and bookseller. Katie lives, works, and writes in Atlanta, Georgia. Her online and pop-up Black bookstore, Good Books, has been featured in The New York Times, NBC, NPR, PBS, and many other outlets. Katie is a 2023 BSA Dorothy Porter Wesley fellow. Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores, her debut, received an honorable mention for the BSA’s St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize.
Megan Peiser, Oakland University, Council Class of 2029 ↑
Megan Peiser is an enrolled citizen of Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is associate professor of English at Oakland University (Rochester, MI), where her scholarship, teaching, and service focus on book history and bibliography, Indigenous literature and culture, eighteenth-century studies, periodical studies, and digital humanities. Her monograph, British Women Novelists and the Review Periodical, is out in March 2026 with Johns Hopkins University Press. Peiser’s published work can be found in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Romantic Textualities, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Peiser is a former BSA New Scholar (2017), outgoing BSA Vice President (2026), and former recipient of BSA’s Rare Book School Scholarship (2013), BSA-ASECS Research Fellowship (2019), and BSA’s William L. Mitchell Prize (2021).
Katherine Ruffin, Wellesley College, Council Class of 2029 ↑
Katherine M. Ruffin is the Director of the Book Studies Program and a Senior Lecturer in Art at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She also teaches the history of the book at the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University and teaches the history of typography and printing at Rare Book School. Her book A Printer with My Hands: The Life and Work of Carl P. Rollins was published byThe Legacy Press in 2025.
Katherine holds an AB in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College, an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Alabama, and a PhD in Library and Information Science from Simmons University. She served as the Vice President for Publications for the American Printing History Association from 2016 to 2020. She was elected to membership in the Society of Printers (Boston) in 2002 and to the American Antiquarian Society in 2022. The School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama honored her with an Outstanding Book Arts Alumnae Award in 2024.