I am pleased to announce that Rebecca Wingfield has accepted our offer to become the Curator for British and American Literature and will begin in early January. Rebecca comes to Stanford from Harvard College Library, where she currently serves as Bibliographic Specialist for North America in Widener Library and is responsible for selecting materials in all formats for English language research collections in the humanities and social sciences.

Rebecca holds a BA in English from Boston College and an MA and Ph.D. in English from Brown University, where she completed a dissertation titled “Political Entertainment: The Thriller, Popular Culture, and Mass Politics, 1917-1945.” She also holds an MSLIS from Simmons College.

Rebecca brings a strong combination of library and teaching experience to SUL. Prior to her collection development work in Widener Library, Rebecca served in a similar position in Harvard College’s Lamont Library. Rebecca also served as a collection development specialist in Harvard College Library’s Open Collection Program,  where she evaluated monographs, special collections, and archival materials from Harvard repositories for inclusion in theme-based digital collections. As part of this position, Rebecca also led the Metcalf project to identify all pre-1800 manuscript holdings across the Harvard library system. As a graduate student, Rebecca served as an editor with the Modernist Journals Project at Brown.

In addition to her strong background in librarianship and collection development, Rebecca served as a postdoctoral teaching fellow and lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, where she taught senior thesis tutorials, as well as an English course: “Spies, Sleuths, and Seducers: British Popular Fiction, 1880-1945.” Rebecca also taught extensively as a graduate student at Brown.

I'd like to thank the search committee – Professor Nick Jenkins, Roberto Trujillo, Nicole Coleman, and Anna Fishaut – as well as colleagues throughout SUL and the English Department who participated in this search. We look forward to welcoming Rebecca to Stanford in January!

A special thanks also to Chris Matson, who will continue to carry out selector responsibilities until Rebecca's arrival.  Chris' hard work as an interim selector has been exemplary!