Announcing the Slate for the Upcoming Election of the Council
December 6, 2023
At the upcoming BSA Annual Meeting on January 26, 2024 the Society will announce the election of a new slate of members to the Council. Active members will be invited to vote electronically starting January 15, with voting closing on January 26, 2024 at 12pm 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 Leslie A. Morris. Shannon Supple, Heather O’Donnell, Todd Pattison, Douglas Pfeiffer, and Jacinta Saffold served with her; Erin McGuirl, Megan Peiser, and Caroline Duroselle-Melish also served ex officio in an advisory capacity. Candidates were carefully considered after the placement of an open call for nominees in September of this year.
The Nominating Committee is proud to present the Slate of Officers and members of the Council Class of 2027.
Nominees
Kinohi Nishikawa, Princeton University – President
Kinohi Nishikawa is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (Chicago, 2018) and of several essays and book chapters on Black print culture and publishing history. Nishikawa is currently at work on a book titled Black Paratext: Reading African American Literature by Design.
Megan Peiser, Oakland University, Vice President (2nd Term)
Citizen of Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Megan Peiser is an associate professor in the department of English at Oakland University, located outside Detroit, MI. Her research, teaching, and service are focused on eighteenth-century literature, Indigenous literature and culture, women writers, bibliography and book history, periodicals, and digital humanities. Peiser’s work is published in PBSA, Textual Studies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Criticism, Eighteenth-Century Theory and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the LA Review of Books. Her monograph on book review periodicals is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. She is the co-director of the Marguerite Hicks Project which investigates queer book collecting scholarship in early 20th century Detroit and is the co-chair of Oakland University’s Native American Advisory Committee. Peiser is an apprentice to her garden, and caretaker of two dachshunds.
Meghan R. Constantinou, Simmons University, Secretary
Meghan R. Constantinou is a private rare book curator in the Boston, Massachusetts area. She is concurrently pursuing a PhD in Library and Information Science at Simmons University, where her research focuses on the contemporary documentation of private collections. Her research interests include bibliography, book collecting, the history of private libraries, and private printing. She was Librarian of the Grolier Club from 2011 to 2022 and has been a member of the club since 2013. She has been a member of the Bibliographical Society of America since 2015 and has served on the Development Committee (Vice-Chair, 2019-present), the New Scholars Committee (2019-present), and the Nominating Committee (2020). In 2021, she received the joint BS/BSA Fredson Bowers Award for her project on the library of the Elliots of Minto. She is also a member of the Society of Printers and the Ticknor Society in Boston.
Patrick Olson, Patrick Olson Rare Books, Treasurer
Patrick Olson joined the rare book trade in 2003 and went on to earn his library degree from the University of Illinois. He spent a decade working in the academic special collections environment, as a cataloger, curator, and administrator. He returned to the trade in 2018, under his own name, and is a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. He has institutional budgeting experience, keeps his own books for his business, and has prepared his own taxes since he was a teenager. He has been a BSA member since 2009 and served on its Development Committee 2020-2023.
Joan M. Friedman, Urbana IL, Chair of the Audit Committee
Joan Friedman is a graduate, in the history of art, of Harvard University and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She studied under Terry Belanger in the rare book program at Columbia University’s School of Library Service and then spent sixteen years as a rare book librarian at Yale, for fourteen of those years as Curator of Rare Books at the Yale Center for British Art. In mid-life she began a new career as an accountant and Professor of Accounting, and is now retired and living in Urbana, Illinois. She is a long-time member of the BSA who has served on Council as well as on several committees, and has been the Chair of the Working Group responsible for the BSA’s Policies and Procedures Manual.
Megan L. Cook, Colby College, Council Class of 2027
Megan L. Cook is an associate professor of English at Colby College, specializing in late medieval literature and early European books. Since 2020, she has served on the BSA’s Digital Strategies Working Groupo, helping to coordinate the rollout of BibSite and the ongoing redesign of the BSA website. She is also the secretary of the executive committee of the Chaucer division of the Modern Language Association, as well as a senior fellow and founding member of the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, for which she served as programming committee chair 2018-2022. These activities are all united by a desire to make the professional spaces that have been important to her accessible to others, whether they are students, early career researchers, or anyone working or studying at a distance from major cities or research libraries. Her published scholarship includes The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532-1635 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) and, with Elizaveta Strakhov, John Lydgate’s Dance of Death and Related Works (TEAMS 2019). With Megan Heffernan, she is the co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly medieval and early modern miscellanies.
Jose Guerrero, Berkeley Public Library, Council Class of 2027
Jose Guerrero is a cataloging librarian currently working for Berkeley Public Library (CA). He has worked in the antiquarian book trade and in special collections libraries since 2013. His research interests include the histories of books and book collecting in Latin America during the 20th century, on which he has presented and published. Guerrero previously served on BSA’s Membership Committee and Events Committee, and currently serve on the BibSite Editorial Board and as the BSA liaison to the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.
Magalí Rabasa, Lewis & Clark College, Council Class of 2027
Dr. Magalí Rabasa is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Department of World Languages & Literatures at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She received her PhD from the University of California, Davis in Cultural Studies with an emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research. Her research and teaching explore contemporary networks of social movements and radical publishing in the Americas, with a focus on the US, Mexico, and Argentina. Her first book, The Book in Movement: Autonomous Politics and the Lettered City Underground, was published in 2019 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The Spanish translation was published in 2021 by Tinta Limón/Tren en Movimiento Ediciones in Argentina, in 2022 by Bajo Tierra Ediciones in Mexico, and in 2023 by Kikuyo Editorial in Ecuador/Chile.
Emily Spunaugle, Oakland University, Council Class of 2027
Emily Spunaugle is Associate Professor, Humanities and Rare Books Librarian at Oakland University in Rochester, MI. Her research interests include women’s book history, feminist bibliography, and library history of the long eighteenth century. Her research appears in PBSA, Libraries: Culture, History, and Society, Romantic Circles, ABO, and she is co-editor of Libraries without Borders: New Directions in Library History, forthcoming from ALA Editions. With Megan Peiser, she is co-director of the Marguerite Hicks Project, which explores the queer, disabled collector of one of the first collections in America of British women’s books of the 17th-19th centuries. She is a former Chair of the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association, and a former Associate Editor for SHARP News. She joins the BSA with a passion for making opportunities available to scholars and practitioners who are geographically, educationally, and financially distant from the study of and training in bibliography.