The Library Company of Philadelphia is making some exciting changes to better support researchers starting Monday, September 14, 2026.
"Serious Fun" opens November 5th
Register HereOpening event on November 5th at 5:30.Lecture by Dr. Juliet Sperling, “Metamorphic Print and the Untouchable Arts in Nineteenth-Century America”
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October
20oct5:30 pm8:00 pmToni Morrison in the Archive, Toni Morrison as ArchiveLecture | Free
Event Details
Toni Morrison in the Archive, Toni Morrison as
Event Details
Toni Morrison in the Archive, Toni Morrison as Archive
with Autumn Womack and Dana Williams
Tuesday, October 20th, 2026 | 5:30 pm | Free
In-Person | Founder’s Hall – Mother Bethel AME Church | 419 S 6th St. Philadelphia, PA 19174
Please join the Library Company at Mother Bethel AME Church on October 20th at 5:30 pm for a panel with historians Autumn Womack and Dana Williams.
This panel will consider Toni Morrison both as a subject of the archive, and as a figure who reshaped how we understand it. Bringing together work on her papers, her editorial career, and her fiction, this conversation asks what Morrison’s practice reveals about the making—and the limits—of the historical record for Black history. Drawing on recent scholarship on the Toni Morrison Papers, her work as an editor at Random House, and new critical studies of her novels, this panel will explore how Morrison used the archive, worked against it, and expanded what counts as historical knowledge.
Autumn Womack
Associate Professor of African American Studies and English, Princeton University. Womack works on African American literary history, visual culture, and archival practice. In 2023, she led the curatorial team for the exhibition Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, which drew on previously unseen materials from the Toni Morrison Papers to illuminate Morrison’s creative process. Her forthcoming book, The Wanderer (Knopf, 2025), examines Morrison’s creative process through her archive, and she is co-editing, with Kinohi Nishikawa, a volume on Toni Morrison and Black archival practice.
Dana A. Williams
Professor of African American literature and Dean of the Graduate School, Howard University. Williams is a leading scholar of African American print culture and publishing history. She is the author of Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship (2025), which examines Morrison’s work at Random House and her role in shaping late twentieth-century Black literary and intellectual life.
Sponsored by the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia
Event Details
Queerness on the Move: Tracing Black Trans Histories 2026
Event Details
Queerness on the Move: Tracing Black Trans Histories
2026 Charlotte Cushman Lecture
with Candice Lyon
Thursday, October 29th, 2026 | 7:00 PM EST
Join us on the evening of October 29th for our 2026 Charlotte Cushman Society Lecture, featuring Candice Lyons.
Throughout the era of U.S. chattel slavery, bondspeople consistently subverted enslavers’ expectations, laying claim to their own labor, movement, bodies, and genders. Many of these figures formulated and executed elaborate plans to evade bondage, at times utilizing cross gender modes of escape in order to do so. In her talk, Dr. Candice
Lyons maps these histories of defiance, drawing on the archives of runaway slave advertisements published in Southern newspapers prior to Emancipation. These notices document the unsanctioned mobility of enslaved people and offer insight into the multiple ways Black gender was created and expressed in the years preceding the conclusion of the American Civil War. Lyons invites us to reframe self-emancipation as more than a rejection of captivity, but also a rejection of slavery’s imposed gender norms.
Candice Lyons is the Black Star Assistant Professor in Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her forthcoming manuscript, tentatively titled Archival Shouts: Queer Re-Examinations of U.S. Chattel Slavery, traces the queer gender and sexual practices of enslaved and free Black people living in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century United States. Her 2021 Feminist Studies article “Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space” is the winner of the 2020 Feminist Studies Graduate Student Award, and her work has also been published in The Journal of Southern History, Souls, and the public history site Not Even Past.
Donate to the Charlotte Cushman Society today!
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November
Event Details
Born in Flames, The Business of Arson and
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Born in Flames, The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
with Bench Ansfield
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026 | 5:30 pm | Free
In-Person | 1314 Locust St, Philadelphia, 19107
Join us on the evening of November 3rd for a book talk with Bench Ansfield, author of Born in Flames (W.W. Norton, 2025) , Finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in History
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in their new book, Born in Flames, the most destructive fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts. Driven by perverse incentives—new government-sponsored insurance combined with tanking property values—landlords hired “torches,” mostly Black and Brown youth, to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them. Tens of thousands of families lost their homes to these blazes, yet for much of the 1970s, tenant vandalism and welfare fraud stood as the prevailing explanations for the arson wave, effectively indemnifying landlords.
Bench Ansfield is an assistant professor of history at Temple University. Their book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, was published by W. W. Norton in 2025 and named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times and Kirkus Reviews. It also won the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize for the best book in American history as well as the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. Wang, 2009).
Event Details
Exhibition Opening: Serious Fun: The Robert Staples Metamorphic
Event Details
Exhibition Opening: Serious Fun: The Robert Staples Metamorphic Collection of Movable and Moving Art before 1920
Reception followed by lecture by Dr. Juliet Sperling, University of Washington,
“Metamorphic Print and the Untouchable Arts in Nineteenth-Century America”
Free | In Person
Thursday, November 5th, 2026 | 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
1314 Locust St, Philadelphia, 19107
Join us in celebrating the opening of Serious Fun an exhibition curated by Curator of Graphic Arts and Director, Visual Culture Program Erika Piola with “Metamorphic Print and the Untouchable Arts in Nineteenth-Century America,” a lecture by Dr. Juliet Sperling.
Metamorphic Print and the Untouchable Arts in Nineteenth-Century America
Nineteenth-century audiences largely kept a polite distance from high-status works of painting and sculpture. And yet these ostensibly untouchable arts were often made and understood with tactile sensibilities in mind. This talk focuses on the vital role of prints as a medium in shaping and disseminating these pervasive, culturally trained ideas about touch’s role in perception. It highlights a selection of metamorphic prints, or paper constructions with folded, layered, and expandable features that proliferated in U.S. print culture between roughly 1780 and 1910. Closely examining how these objects guided users from applied interaction toward more abstract concepts of tactility reveals the print medium’s power both to model sophisticated visualities and transport them across media, fundamentally shaping encounters with artworks beyond reach.
Juliet Sperling is Assistant Professor of Art History and Kollar Endowed Chair in American Art in the School of Art + Art History + Design at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on the art and material culture of North America from the colonial period through the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on print history and theory. She is the author of Tactile Sensibilities: Seeing Through Print in American Art, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2027.
06nov11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, November 6th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, November 6th at 11:00 AM
In-Person Event
Join us for a guided tour of the Library Company’s first-floor exhibition galleries. Learn more about the history of the de facto first Library of Congress and oldest colonial cultural institution in the United States. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, as well as hear about the collection materials showcased in our rotating exhibition space.
Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available for all First Fridays from November 6th through February 5th, 2027.
More upcoming events here.
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