Behind the Scenes of “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy”
A virtual event featuring
Erica Ciallela (Harvard Radcliffe Institute &
Philip Palmer (The Morgan Library & Museum)
in conversation with
Olivia Loksing Moy (City University of New York)
Theodore C. Marceau (1859–1922), Belle da Costa Greene, May 1911.
(Biblioteca Berenson, I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies)
Friday, March 21, 2025
4:00-5:30 p.m. EST
Register on Zoom here
Co-sponsored by the
Princeton Alumni Women of Color Collective
Baruch College Black Male Initiative
Keats-Shelley Association of America
Join us for a virtual conversation and a chance to learn more from Erica Ciallela and Philip Palmer, co-curators of Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy, currently on display at The Morgan Library & Museum. Focusing on themes of historical erasure and recovery, as well as racial passing, our discussion will explore
· the impact and intellectual legacy of Richard Greene, Belle Greene’s father and the first Black graduate of Harvard College
· Belle Greene’s time at Princeton University and her role as a leader and mentor of women in the workplace, and
· Belle Greene’s notable acquisitions of Keats and Romantic-era materials.
This event is presented to students of the Baruch Black Male Initiative, members of the Princeton Women of Color Collective, and the Keats-Shelley Association of America and friends. We invite you to engage with our speakers during the question and answer period. Audiences who have recently attended the Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy exhibition, or who are planning to attend, are most welcome.
Belle da Costa Greene (1879-1950) was the first director of The Morgan Library, J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, and a prodigious talent of celebrity status who built the impressive collection in the heart of New York City we can visit today. Through her vision, she was also responsible for transforming a private library into an institution for public use and enjoyment in 1904.
Greene came from a prestigious Black family, though she passed as white for the duration of her career and later life. It wasn’t until archivists confirmed her African American heritage through census records in a 1990s discovery that Greene’s personal history was uncovered.
Celebrated in The New York Times and recognized throughout the collecting world for her unparalleled expertise and flair, Belle Greene was one of the most prominent professional women of color on the New York book scene – yet could not fully embrace her identity in public light. Greene’s fascinating life has been explored in a biography by Heidi Ardizzone, the creative novel adaptations Belle Greene (2022) and The Personal Librarian (2021), as well as the podcast “Boss Like Belle.”
The Keats-Shelley Association of America invites you to an exciting virtual discussion about Greene’s life and her impact in the world of books and bibliography, as well as this stunning historical example of racial passing. Join Olivia Loksing Moy (City University of New York) for a conversation with Erica Ciallela (Harvard-Radcliffe Institute) and Philip Palmer (The Morgan Library & Museum), co-curators of the ongoing Morgan exhibition, to learn about Greene’s family background, key Romantic-era acquisitions of Keats and Shelley as Greene built out the Morgan collection, and the legacy she left as a director mentoring younger women colleagues in the 1920s-1940s in what was then still very much a man’s world.
Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian's Legacy is on exhibition at The Morgan Library & Museum in NYC until May 4, 2025. A smaller display, Belle da Costa Greene at Princeton, 1901-1905, is on exhibition at Firestone Library at Princeton University, New Jersey through February 2025.
About the Speakers:
Erica Ciallela is an Instruction & Outreach Librarian at Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America. Erica comes from the Morgan Library & Museum where she was a Belle da Costa Greene Curatorial Fellow as well as co-curator on Belle da Costa Greene, A Librarian's Legacy. Before the Morgan she worked at the Prudence Crandall Museum in Canterbury, Connecticut where she worked on reinterpreting the National Historic Site, bringing to light the stories of its African American students in the 1830s. Invested in seeing institutions tell more inclusive histories, she believes that looking at archival collections in non-traditional ways will help provide opportunities for sharing more complete histories.
Olivia Loksing Moy is an associate professor of English at Lehman College, The City University of New York, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature and directs The CUNY Rare Book Scholars. She is Vice President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America and serves on the organizing committee for the Princeton Women of Color Collective. Her published works include The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry (2022), Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life (2023), and Julio y John: Selections from Imagen de John Keats (2017). She holds a Ph.D. in literature from Columbia University.
Philip Palmer is the Robert H. Taylor Curator and Department Head of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum. He holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and worked for five years at UCLA's Clark Library before coming to the Morgan in 2019. His interests are wide ranging and he has curated exhibitions at the Morgan on Woody Guthrie, John Keats, Beatrix Potter, and The Little Prince, and is co-curator of the Morgan’s current exhibition on Belle da Costa Greene, as well as co-editor of Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy (DelMonico Books, 2024).