The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, Curatorial Department
Curator of Literary Collections
Institution Type: | Nonprofit |
Location: | California, United States |
Position: | Curator |
SUMMARY:
The Huntington Library seeks an energetic and collaborative professional with strong academic background to develop and interpret its collections of literature in English. The incumbent will be responsible for the stewardship of holdings in this area, building and maintaining a vibrant collections profile that serves the needs of advanced researchers and contributes to the cultural enrichment of the wider public.
The Huntington is one of the world’s leading libraries for advanced research in the humanities. Its strengths in English literature are anchored by the Ellesmere Chaucer and outstanding Shakespeare and British Renaissance print holdings. The broad and deep literary collections include early modern commonplace books; eighteenth-century letters; the Larpent Collection (a unique archive of almost every play submitted for license in Great Britain between 1737 and 1824); the writings of the Romantic poets; print and manuscript material of the New England authors, most notably, Thoreau’s Walden manuscript; Victorian novels and related correspondence; manuscripts of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites; and the 2,500-volume library and papers of Sir Richard Francis Burton. Twentieth-century authors collected include Jack London, Mary Austin, Wallace Stevens, Kingsley Amis, Christopher Isherwood, Hilary Mantel, Charles Bukowski, Octavia E. Butler, and Paul Theroux.
The Curator of Literary Collections is part of a unified Library Curatorial Department staff and supervises the Assistant Curator of Literary Collections. He/she reports directly to the Chief Curator & Associate Director of Library Collections and works closely with the Curator of Rare Books, the Curator of Medieval Manuscripts & British History, and other curators with intersecting collection areas.
The successful applicant will demonstrate an understanding of physical historical collections—their intellectual content and materiality— and their use in present-day scholarship, as well as an aptitude for the focused acquisition of contemporary literary archives.
Qualifications include an advanced degree in English and/or comparative literature and a minimum of 2 years work experience in a special collections or academic library, digital humanities project, literary publishing and/or archives, and/or the antiquarian book and manuscript trade. Salary: $63,315 to $89,197.
To learn more about the position, please go to the website www.huntington.org and click on “More to Explore” under “Employment” at the bottom of the page.
Preference will be given to applications received by January 5, 2018.
Contact: |
Lupe Guzmán Human Resource Manager lguzman@huntington.org |
Website: | http://huntington.org |
Primary Category: | Literature |
Secondary Categories: | None |
Posting Date: | 12/12/2017 |
Closing Date | 03/11/2018 |