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Director and Curator of Special Collections and Archives Christian Goodwillie recently published several articles on communal societies.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing Nhora Lucía Serrano curated a book exhibition on “The Columbian Exchange” that displays rare materials from Burke Library’s Special Collections and four new recent acquisitions printed in Mexico.

“I’m hoping that I can give this document to an organization that will take good care of it and allow other people to study and appreciate it.” These words, spoken by Jean Waite on an episode of PBS’s History Detective in 2012, prompted Hamilton’s Director of Special Collections Christian Goodwillie to place a call that, three years later, led to a donation to the college’s Communal Societies collection.

A spring meeting with Everson Hull, St. Kitts and Nevis’ Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States, and Hamilton students planning a service trip to Nevis resulted in yet another meeting and alliance between Alexander Hamilton’s birthplace and the college. During the March visit Hull met with Christian Goodwillie, director and curator of Special Collections and Archives, to review documents from Hamilton’s Beinecke Lesser Antilles Collection related to Nevis.

This summer KT Glusac ’17, working with Professor of Philosophy Marianne Janack, will travel throughout New York State, living with and researching a variety of communal societies. Her research is funded through a Levitt Center grant.

The Central NY Library Resources Council (CLRC) recently awarded Hamilton funding to complete the digitization of the Beinecke Lesser Antilles manuscripts, part of the Burke Library’s Special Collections. The Beinecke Collection includes rare original documents, maps, plantation reports and correspondence, along with oil paintings and watercolors.

Christian Goodwillie, director and curator of Special Collections and Archives in Burke Library, recently published “Baseball, Beards, Bands, and the Babes: Michigan’s House of David Religious Community” in Ephemera Journal, the quarterly publication of the Ephemera Society of America.

Christian Goodwillie, director and curator of Special Collections and Archives in Burke Library, recently published “Baseball, Beards, Bands, and the Babes: Michigan’s House of David Religious Community” in Ephemera Journal, the quarterly publication of the Ephemera Society of America.

Leigh Gialanella ’15 will be continuing along the path that she started at Hamilton by pursuing master’s degrees at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor this fall. Gialanella, a history major with dual Hispanic studies and anthropology minors, hopes through her studies to specialize in Archives and Records Management (ARM) and Preservation of Information (PI).

In the age of eReaders and online libraries, the story of books gets lost. Not the story within the book, which is arguably more permanent, but rather the story contained on its faded pages, in its stretched spine, on its battered covers. Hamilton’s Burke Library has an impressive selection of rare books and other special collections; of particular note are the Ezra Pound Archive and the abundance of Adirondack-related acquisitions. Christian Goodwillie, director and curator of Special Collections and Archives, is currently cataloguing a recently procured collection: The John Quinn and Jeanne Robert Foster Library, a generous gift from Jim and Carol McCord.