Meet Gabrielle N. O. Dean - PhD

Dr. Dean is the William Kurrelmeyer Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts in the Sheridan Libraries and Adjunct Professor in the English Department and the Program in Museums and Society. She also serves as Associate Editor of Archive Journal and as Executive Director of the Society for Textual Scholarship.

Gabrielle’s research focuses on authorship and photography, race and gender in the archival record, and the exchanges between textual and visual cultures during the industrial era of print—ie, the mid 19th century through the mid 20th century. She has recently published a long essay about Emily Dickinson’s early poetry and musical training, part of a longer project on Dickinson’s sheet music, race, gender, and the 19th-century domestic scene. Essays on queer authorship—that of Henry James and Gertrude Stein—are forthcoming. Previous work has been published in the journals Modernism/modernity, The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and Digital Humanities Quarterly, among others, and the book collections Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, edited by Rebecca Frost Davis, Katherine D. Harris, and Matt Gold, Emily Dickinson in Context, edited by Eliza Richards, Primary Stein, edited by Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch, and Past or Portal?: Teaching Undergraduates Using Special Collections and Archives, edited by Eleanor Mitchell, Peggy Seiden and Suzy Taraba.

She has been the lead curator of over fourteen exhibitions at Hopkins, including major exhibitions about H. L. Mencken, Stephen Crane, John Barth, Edgar Allan Poe, and, most recently, the photographs of John Clark Mayden, also represented in the JHUP book Baltimore Lives.