Beinecke Library hires six curators, launching a new era for Yale Library Special Collections
The Beinecke Library has hired a cohort of six new curators—more than half of its curatorial team—who will shape how Yale Library special collections are selected, taught, and used for decades to come.
“Rather than hiring one curator at a time for a specific collecting area, we had an opportunity to reimagine how we defined curatorial boundaries when hiring a cluster of curators with intersecting and complementary specializations,” said Michelle Light, Yale Library’s associate university librarian for Special Collections and director of the Beinecke Library. “Combined with the deep knowledge of our existing staff, our strategic priorities, and our commitment to sustainable stewardship, their impact will be transformational.”
The new curators—Michelle Al-Ferzly, Julia C. Hernández, Sarah Keyes, Agnieszka Rec, Sandra Xiomara Sánchez, and Shannon K. Supple—bring a combination of expertise in Indigenous history and culture, including North America; pre-1800 European history and culture; classics; Islamic art; medieval studies; U.S. history and culture; ethnicity, race and migration; history of science; environmental history; and material history, including print culture, book history, and critical bibliography.
They will join Melissa Barton, curator of prose and drama for the Yale Collection of American Literature; Joshua Cochran, curator of American history and diplomacy; Nancy Kuhl, curator of poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature; and Kevin Repp, curator of modern European books and manuscripts, under the leadership of Cheryl Beredo, the Beinecke’s chief curator and director of collections, who led the search process. See a visual feature about the curators.
Exceptional Diversity
Beyond their wide-ranging expertise, the new cohort brings exceptional diversity of experience and expertise in geographies, languages, cultural perspectives, professional backgrounds, and methods, noted Beredo. “We are developing a team of curators who can complement and extend each other’s work, build on the work of past curators, and collaborate with colleagues across Yale and beyond,” Beredo said.
Beredo joined Yale Library in 2023 from the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where she was most recently associate director of Collections and Research Services. Along with a master’s degree in library science and a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa, she brings broad curatorial and administrative experience in research libraries. Her vision for Beinecke Library collections is one in which curators are constantly finding new ways to connect people with collections through teaching, writing, community engagement, exhibitions, and collaborations with colleagues inside and outside the library.
New curator Agnieszka Rec is already participating in one such collaboration, “Taught by the Pen: The World of Islamic Manuscripts,” an exhibition opening at the Beinecke Library in February. Rec is co-curating with Roberta L. Dougherty, librarian for Middle East studies, and Özgen Felek, a lector of Ottoman in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
“Building the Beinecke Library’s outstanding collections remains a critical part of the curators’ work,” Beredo said. “At the same time, partnership with students, scholars, and readers of all kinds—to explore the collections, create new work, and be surprised and transformed—is enduring and meaningful.”
For collections as vast and varied as the Beinecke Library’s, the possibilities are virtually unlimited. Beredo foresees, for example, that the famed Yale Collection of Western Americana will reveal new facets when viewed through the lens of curator Sandra Xiomara Sánchez’s work in Native and Indigenous studies or the critical eye that Sarah Keyes deployed to bring readers a new history of the Overland Trail. The Beinecke’s extensive Modern English and European collections will be illuminated in new ways by the work of Julia Hernández on the early modern period in the Spanish-speaking world and Shannon Supple’s work in the history of science and the natural world. And faculty and students studying the history of the book will now be able to draw on the new and overlapping expertise of curators Michelle Al-Ferzly and Agnieszka Rec in the Islamic world, manuscript studies, and a broad conception of the Middle Ages.
The new curators will also help develop a more collaborative approach to acquisitions across Yale Library Special Collections, which, in addition to Beinecke Library, include rare and unusual materials held by the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, the Divinity Library, the Gilmore Music Library, the Haas Arts Library, and the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington. All curators will work closely with faculty to activate collections in support of Yale’s research and teaching priorities.
Meet the Curators
Michelle Al-Ferzly holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a B.A. from Wellesley College. She is a specialist of medieval and Islamic art, with a focus on the cross-cultural encounter in the medieval Mediterranean and on the visual and material culture of health and foodways between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries. She was previously a research associate in the Department of Medieval Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she contributed to the 2023 exhibition “Africa & Byzantium,” and has worked in a number of other museums, including the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto and the Dallas Museum of Art. Her research and curatorial work have been supported by the Mellon Mays Fellowship, the Center for Curatorial Leadership, and the Fulbright-Hays. She began her new position on Sept. 23.
Julia C. Hernández is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges the fields of classics and Hispanic studies. With training in both areas, she specializes in the history of ancient Greek—from its teaching to its translation to its reconstructed literary production—in the early modern Spanish-speaking world. Her teaching and research explore the intersections of classics, early modernity, and U.S. Latinx identity through the lens of book history. Julia will start at Yale Library on Oct. 1 having served most recently as visiting assistant professor of Spanish at New York University. She has taught the legacy of the early modern book to a diverse range of undergraduates, with an emphasis on student-curated exhibitions and other project-based learning. Hernández also serves as associate editor of the international early modern Spanish theater journal “Bulletin of the Comediantes” and is a co-founder and steering committee member of the international scholarly society “Hesperides: Classics in the Luso-Hispanic World.”
Sarah Keyes is a historian who specializes in U.S. history and culture and environmental history with an emphasis on the nineteenth century and the U.S. West. She joined Beinecke Library from the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) where she was an associate professor. At UNR, she collaborated with Special Collections and university Archives and worked with K-12 educators and students across the state. She holds a doctorate from the University of Southern California and a B.A. from Pomona College. She previously held faculty positions at Texas Tech University and the University of California, Berkeley, and has experience in museums, including the National Museum of American History. Her work has been supported by numerous institutions including the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is the author of “American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail,” published in 2023 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She will begin her curatorial position in July 2025.
Agnieszka Rec earned her doctorate in medieval history from Yale and her B.S., also from Yale, in mathematics and humanities. She returned to Beinecke as an early materials cataloger in 2021. Rec has pursued a consciously cross-disciplinary path through cultural heritage collections exploring the scientific materials at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Indigenous manuscripts recovered at the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), and the wide-ranging scholarship published by the Medieval Academy of America and “Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies.” She brings broad expertise at the intersections of medieval studies, the history of science, and material history, especially in the paleography and codicology of early books and manuscripts. She can be heard discussing recent collaborations for Material Evidence in Incunabula and Ottoman Turkish manuscript cataloging on the Beinecke Library YouTube Channel. She started her new position in August.
Sandra Xiomara Sánchez is a doctoral candidate in history at Yale working across the fields of immigration and Borderlands histories, and Native and Indigenous Studies. Their current work traces the ongoing legacies of deportation and border enforcement for tribes living along and across the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border regions. A Guatemalan adoptee raised in the U.S., Sánchez’s curatorial work focuses on sustainable community engagement and stewardship, particularly of Indigenous materials and histories at Beinecke Library. Sánchez graduated from the University of Kansas with a B.A. in History and Chinese in 2018, and has worked in various museums and libraries, including the National Museum of American History and the Yale Peabody Museum. An active member of the Yale Group for the Study of Native America, they have presented work internationally and at conferences for the Organization of American Historians, the Western History Association, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. Sánchez will begin their position on Nov. 1.
Shannon K. Supple is joining Yale from Smith College, where she served as curator of rare books for more than seven years. She previously worked at the Bancroft Library and Robbins Collection at the University of California, Berkeley, and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. Supple specializes in book history and the material and social contexts of texts in the early modern and modern worlds. Her approach is to ask what a particular book does, and what can be learned from its creation and use over time. She employs book historical methodologies to inquire into the early modern history of science, with a focus on studies of the natural world. She also has expertise in contemporary artists’ books. Her favorite professional organization is the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). She will begin her position on Sept. 30.
Looking Ahead
As she builds her new curatorial team, Beredo notes that the emerging team reflects deep changes in the way cultural heritage institutions think about their work. “The dream of total curatorial coverage is a fantasy,” Beredo said. “There aren’t enough curators in the world. Even if we had replaced exactly the areas of specialization that were here before, we would have gaps. Our understanding of the collections is always evolving.”
In contrast to a bygone era when leading cultural heritage institutions were seen as competing among themselves to acquire the most prestigious and comprehensive collections, Beredo sees a new emphasis on inter-institutional relationships and collaboration, including emerging ideas for collaborative and community-based collection development.
“We recognize that there are many more players in a broader, more diverse ecosystem,” Beredo said. “It’s not just a handful of elite institutions, and it never was. The strength of collections is all of us.”
—Patricia M. Carey
Image: Clockwise from top left, Julia Hernández, Agnieszka Rec, Sandra Xiomara Sánchez, Sarah Keyes, Michelle Al-Ferzly, Shannon Supple (contributed photos)
