St. Bonaventure’s Dr. Megan Walsh awarded National Endowment for Humanities fellowship

Dr. Megan Walsh, chair of the Department of English at St. Bonaventure University, has been awarded a 2019-20 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society.

This award grants Walsh, a professor of English, support for four months of residency to work at the AAS, a major independent research library. The AAS-NEH fellowship was awarded for research on her third academic book project, “Bad Archives: Extra-Illustration and the History of Information Management in the United States.”

Walsh’s project examines the history of libraries, data collection, and the organization of knowledge in the United States in the 19th century. She is investigating the critically understudied, but hugely important, practice of extra-illustration — readers would cut up and then glue historical documents, pictures, and other valuable texts into rare books, often “ruining” them in the eyes of modern librarians and curators.