Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters

Deborah Parker chronicles the making and empowerment of a female connoisseur, curator, and library director in a world where such positions were held by men. Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was Pierpont Morgan’s personal librarian (1908–1913) and the first Director of the Morgan Library (1924–1948). She was also the daughter of two mixed-race parents and passed for white. In the nearly six hundred letters that Greene sent to art historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), Parker identifies Greene’s energetic pursuit of exceptional opportunities, illuminating the artistry and imaginative features of Greene’s writing―her self-invention, her vibrant responses to books and art, and her pathbreaking work as a librarian. As Greene transformed a private library into a magnificent public institution, she also transformed herself: hers was a life both lived and writ large. The skills and strategies required to obtain prized manuscripts in an era when wealthy collectors vied for such rarities were considerable. Belle Greene possessed these abilities in abundance. She acquired these talents on the job and much of the finesse she exercised when on the hunt can be traced to her experiences in Europe. From 1908-1936 Belle Greene made thirteen trips to Europe. This talk will explore the way in which Greene’s friendships with rare book experts in Europe, especially England, helped refine her expertise.

About the Speaker

Deborah Parker is Professor of Italian at the University of Virginia. Her research expertise and teaching focus is on Italian and Mediterranean visual and print cultures in the medieval and early modern eras. Her books include Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance (1992), Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet (2000) and Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing (2011). Her most recent book, Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters (2024) was published this fall by Villa I Tatti -The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Parker co-authored “Belle Greene and Literature,” for the exhibition catalogue for the Morgan Library exhibition, Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy. She has given talks on Belle Greene for Villa I Tatti, the Rare Book School, Book Club of California, Caxton Club, and the Beinecke Library. Notices and podcasts have appeared in Humanities Watch, Fine Books & Collections magazine, and the New Books Network.

Noble Fragments: The Gripping Story of the Antiquarian Bookseller Who Broke Up a Gutenberg Bible

One hundred years ago, Gabriel Wells, a New York bookseller, committed a crime against history. He broke up the world’s greatest book, the Gutenberg Bible, and sold it off in individual pages. This is the story of an Australian man’s hunt for those fragments and his family’s debt to an act of literary vandalism. In 1921, Wells’ audacity scandalized the rare-book world. Was the break-up a sacrilege or a canny deal? New Yorkers were divided. It was the Roaring Twenties, the Gatsby era of fabulous wealth. Tycoons were in a feeding frenzy to acquire items that would demonstrate their refinement. Wells marketed the pages as “Noble Fragments,” they sold like hot cakes, and he died a rich man. A century later, Sydney journalist Michael Visontay stumbled upon a mysterious legal document that linked Wells to his own family. He became obsessed by the Gutenberg’s invisible imprint on his life, and set out to track down the pages of the broken bible. Part detective story and part memoir, Noble Fragments is an expedition into the arcane world of book collectors and their eccentric passions, and a journey of discovery about how Wells’s gamble set off a chain of events that changed a family’s destiny.

About the Speaker

Australian journalist Michael Visontay has worked for over 40 years as a reporter, editor, author and lecturer. Michael was a writer and senior editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian newspapers, and is a former editor of The Jewish Independent, where he is now a senior writer. He has founded and taught journalism at several Australian universities, and is the author of six nonfiction books.

Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters

A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In Why We Remember, pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, he reveals the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and to imagine and plan for the future.

Memory, Dr. Ranganath shows, is a highly transformative force that shapes how we experience the world in often invisible and sometimes destructive ways. Knowing this can help us with daily remembering tasks, like finding our keys, and with the challenge of memory loss as we age. What’s more, when we work with the brain’s ability to learn and reinterpret past events, we can heal trauma, shed our biases, learn faster, and grow in self-awareness.

Including fascinating studies and examples from pop culture, and drawing on Ranganath’s life as a scientist, father, and child of immigrants, Why We Remember is a captivating read that unveils the hidden role memory plays throughout our lives. When we understand its power–and its quirks–we can cut through the clutter and remember the things we want to remember. We can make freer choices and plan a happier future.

About the Speaker

Charan Ranganath is a Professor at the Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis. For over 25 years, Dr. Ranganath has studied the mechanisms in the brain that allow us to remember past events, using brain imaging techniques, computational modeling and studies of patients with memory disorders. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. He lives in Davis, California. Outside of neuroscience, Dr. Ranganath is also a songwriter and guitarist with a number of recording credits, including a song on a feature film soundtrack.

Ayanna Thomas is Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Professor at Tufts University. In her research, she investigates interactions between memory and metamemory to better understand the role metamemory plays in memory acquisition, distortion, and access. She examines these questions using a balanced approach towards basic and applied designs as they related to education, eyewitness memory, and age-related changes in memory. Her research is supported by the National Institute on Aging, and the National Science Foundation. She regularly contributes to popular podcasts that focus on disseminating research findings to general audiences.

Jewish Country Houses An exploration of the world of Jewish country houses, their architecture and collections, and the lives of the extraordinary men and women who created, transformed and shaped them. Country houses are powerful symbols of national identity, evoking the glamorous world of the landowning aristocracy. Jewish country houses—properties that were owned, built, or renewed by Jews—tell a more complex story of prejudice and integration, difference and connection. Many had spectacular art collections and gardens. Some were stages for lavish entertaining, while others inspired the European avant-garde. A few are now museums of international importance, many more are hidden treasures, and all were beloved homes that bear witness to the remarkable achievements of newly emancipated Jews across Europe—and to a dream of belonging that mostly came to a brutal end with the Holocaust. Lavishly illustrated with historical images and a new body of work by the celebrated photographer Hélène Binet, this book is the first to tell their story, from the playful historicism of the National Trust’s Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire to the modernist masterpiece that is the Villa Tugendhat in the Czech city of Brno—and across the pond to the United States, where American Jews infused the European country house tradition with their own distinctive concerns and experiences. This book emerges from a four-year research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council that aims to establish Jewish country houses as a focus for research, a site of European memory, and a significant aspect of European Jewish heritage and material culture. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Abigail Green is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Brasenose College. She is author of the award-winning book, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero and has published widely on aspects of international Jewish history and European political culture. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the Jewish Review of Books. Juliet Carey is Senior Curator at Waddesdon Manor, where she is in charge of paintings, sculpture and works on paper and oversees academic collaborations and research. She has curated exhibitions and published on subjects including Elizabethan portraits and French drawings, Guercino, Chardin, Gainsborough and Gustave Moreau, Sèvres porcelain and Edmund de Waal. This year she is curating two exhibitions relating to the Jewish Country Houses project – photographs by Hélène Binet and a new commission for Pablo Bronstein.

Dürer’s Knots: Early European Print and the Islamic East

Albrecht Dürer’s depictions of Muslim figures and subjects are considered by many to be among his most perplexing images. This confusion arises from the assumption that the artist and his northern European contemporaries regarded the Muslim Levant as an exotic faraway land inhabited by hostile adversaries, not a region of neighboring empires affiliated through political and mercantile networks. Susan Dackerman casts Dürer’s art in an entirely new light, focusing on prints that portray cooperation between the Muslim and Christian worlds rather than conflict and war, enabling us to better understand early modern Europe through its visual culture. In this beautifully illustrated book, Dackerman provides new readings of three of the artist’s most enigmatic print projects—Sea Monster, Knots, and Landscape with Cannon—situating them within historical contexts that reflect productive collaborations between Christendom and Islam, from the artistic and commercial to the ideological and political. Dackerman notes how Gutenberg’s development of printing shares an inextricable relationship to the 1453 Ottoman siege of Constantinople. While Gutenberg’s workshop produced a call to crusade and other publications antagonistic to the Muslim East, Dürer’s prints, she shows, instead emphasize instances of affiliation between Christendom and Islam. A breathtaking work of scholarship, Dürer’s Knots shows how the artist’s prints of Muslim subjects give expression to the interconnectedness of Christian Europe and the Islamic East.

About the Speakers

Susan Dackerman is an art historian and curator previously at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums, Getty Research Institute, and Stanford University. Her books include Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts; Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe; and (with Jennifer L. Roberts) Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Monotypes.

Jennifer Roberts is the Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, where she teaches art history, print history, and material studies, with an emphasis on intersections between the arts and the natural sciences. She is the author of six books on American and European art from the eighteenth century to the present, and has written extensively on printmaking, especially in terms of its impact on the development of modern and contemporary art. Her latest book, Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, was published with Princeton University Press in 2024.

After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart

Megan Marshall’s innovative books, including The Peabody Sisters and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Margaret Fuller, are treasured works of American biography. In the richly absorbing essays of After Lives, Marshall turns her narrative gift to her own art, life, and the people in it. In each of six essays, Marshall reinvents the personal essay form, as a portal to the past and its lessons for living into the future. The book’s brilliant, assured interplay between memoir and biography places surprising characters on the page, including the twelfth-century Buddhist hermit Kamo no Chomei, a reassuring spiritual presence for Marshall during several otherwise deracinating months in Kyoto. In her stunning coming-of-age tale, “Free for a While,” set in 1970s California, Marshall interweaves the story of her adolescence with that of Black Power martyr Jonathan Jackson, the author’s AP history classmate, gunned down at seventeen in a failed attempt to free his famed older brother George from prison in the case that put Angela Davis on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Here too is the author’s passion for the biographical chase, and for the mysteries at its heart. She tells the astonishing story of viewing the disinterred remains of her one-time subject Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, wife of Nathaniel, and their daughter Una, the truths of whose early death Marshall works to reveal. Throughout these finely wrought essays, Marshall, “[at] the front rank of American biographers” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), makes palpable her driving impulse to “learn what I could from others: how to live, how not to live, what it means to live.”

About the Speakers

Megan Marshall is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life as well as Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor of Nonfiction Writing at Emerson College and a recipient of the BIO Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization.

Joan Wickersham is the author of The News from Spain and The Suicide Index, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her new book is No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck. Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, as well as many magazines. For the past 15 years her essays have appeared regularly on the op-ed page of The Boston Globe.

To kick off Women’s History Month, the Athenaeum joined forces with The League of Women for Community Service (LWCS) of the South End, one of the oldest continuing Black women’s service organizations in the United States, with a rousing author talk by Kellie Carter Jackson, the Michael and Denise Kellen 68’ Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College and author of We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance. Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse, historian Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women. Carter Jackson’s scholarly research shares a natural connection with the rich legacy of LWCS – revolution, resilience, flight, protection, and especially joy!

About the Author

Kellie Carter Jackson is the Michael and Denise Kellen 68’ Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of the award-winning book, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence. Her most recent, critically acclaimed work, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press), examines a radical reframing of the past and present of Black resistance—both nonviolent and violent—to white supremacy. We Refuse was listed as one of the best books of 2024 by eight different publications and organizations. Dr. Carter Jackson’s essays have been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, and other outlets. She has also been interviewed for her expertise on Netflix, Apple TV, Good Morning America, CBS Morning, MSNBC, PBS, Vox, CNN, the BBC, and a host of documentaries. Carter Jackson served as Historian-in-Residence for the Museum of African American History in Boston from 2021 – 2024. She also serves as a commissioner for the Massachusetts Historical Commission. Lastly, Carter Jackson loves a good podcast! She is the co-host of the podcast, “This Day in Esoteric Political History” with Jody Avirgan and Niki Hemmer.

Rosario Candela & The New York Apartment 1927-1937 

Known and celebrated for many of the apartment buildings on Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and in Sutton Place—82 in NYC, including the storied 740 Park, sometimes called the richest and most powerful address in New York and whose famous residents included John D. Rockefeller Jr.—Candela’s work is at once timeless and profoundly of its time. Classical in styling and even modest on the exterior, it is on the insides, in the apartment interiors, the floorplans, the extraordinary and frequently luxurious arrangements of rooms and space, where his designs set a standard that serves as a benchmark and aspirational goal of taste and refinement. In Rosario Candela & The New York Apartment, David Netto explores these seminal spaces through the lens of exteriors and urbanism, planning and interior architecture, and the circumstances and stories of creation. Lavish and comprehensive black-and-white vintage photography as well as color imagery of the exteriors, original plans, and a collection of exceptional interior views give historical perspective (including a seductive Slim Aarons’ Park Avenue streetscape) and contemporary sizzle (as seen in Derry Moore’s depiction of K. K. Auchincloss’s penthouse at 1040 Fifth). The story told is of a genius designer who gave form to the New York of his dreams.

About the Speaker

David Netto is a Los Angeles-based interior designer and writer. He has written on architecture and design for the The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Cabana, and other publications, and he currently writes the “Case Studies” column for Town & Country. He is the author of monographs on François Catroux and Stephen Sills, and most recently, authored a monograph on architect Rosario Candela. His interiors have appeared in Vogue, Elle Decor, Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, House & Garden, Town & Country, and Veranda. In 2023, a self-titled book representing 20 years of his own designs was published with Vendome.