Morgan Library & Museum announces new appointments
The Morgan Library and Museum is located at 225 Madison Ave. at 36th Street in New York City, just a short walk from Grand Central and Penn Station. Image courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum
NEW YORK – The Morgan Library & Museum announced four curatorial appointments on Monday. Dr. Philip S. Palmer has joined the Literary and Historical Manuscripts department as the Robert H. Taylor Curator and Department Head, while the Morgan’s Sal Robinson has been promoted to assistant curator in the same department.
Other new appointments include Dr. Robinson McClellan, who joins the museum as assistant curator of Music Manuscripts and Printed Music, and Dr. Deirdre Jackson, who joins in the role of assistant curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts.
Palmer is an expert on 16th- and 17th-century British literature and book history. His research interests center on travel writing and manuscript studies, with publications on Elizabethan voyage narratives, Renaissance private libraries and readers’ manuscript annotations. He holds both a Ph.D. and an MA in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before arriving at the Morgan he worked for five years at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, first as a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow and subsequently as Head of Research Services.
Robinson has been promoted from the Leon Levy Foundation Project Cataloger to Assistant Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at the Morgan. She is the recipient of a B.A. in English Literature from Columbia University and an MLIS from Long Island University. Before moving into the library and museum fields, she was an editor for international literature at the publishing houses Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Melville House. She has worked on archival projects at PEN America, the American Academy in Rome, Girl Scouts of the USA, the New York Transit Museum, the Keith Haring Foundation, and the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation.
McClellan joins the Morgan as assistant curator of Music Manuscripts and Printed Music. A composer, scholar, writer and teacher, he holds a doctorate in composition from the Yale School of Music and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He has completed artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and his music is published by E.C. Schirmer. His research in early Gaelic notated music is published by Ashgate. Dr. McClellan started his career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and originally came to the Morgan in 2008 to work on the music manuscripts digitization project. In addition to his new role at the Morgan, he teaches music theory at Rutgers University, and he founded and directs ComposerCraft, a seminar for advanced young composers at Kaufman Music Center.
Jackson joins the Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts team as assistant curator. From 2011 to 2018, Jackson was a research associate in the Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books at the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, where she conducted research as part of the internationally acclaimed Cambridge Illuminations project. Jackson received her Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
A museum and independent research library located in the heart of New York City, the Morgan Library & Museum began as the personal library of financier, collector, and cultural benefactor Pierpont Morgan. The Morgan offers visitors close encounters with great works of human accomplishment in a setting treasured for its intimate scale and historic significance. Its collection of manuscripts, rare books, music, drawings and works of art comprises a unique and dynamic record of civilization, as well as an incomparable repository of ideas and of the creative process from 4000 B.C. to the present.
