The Library Company of Philadelphia is making some exciting changes to better support researchers starting Monday, September 14, 2026.
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October
02oct11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, October 2nd at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, October 2nd 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, and 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 May 1st through October 2nd, 2026.
15oct1:30 pm3:00 pmFireside Chat: Roundtable: Disability, Literature, Art, and Civil Rights
Event Details
Fireside Chat: Roundtable: Disability, Literature, Art, and Civil
Event Details
Fireside Chat: Roundtable: Disability, Literature, Art, and Civil Rights
with Sari Altschuler and Vanessa Warne
Thursday, October 15th, 2026 | 1:30 PM EST
Virtual Event | Free
Join us as we talk to Sari Altschuler, author of Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship, and Vanessa Warne, author of By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture, as they discuss their cultural histories addressing disability, literature, art, and civil rights.
Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026)
In the wake of the American Revolution, many of the differences we now call disabilities could be accommodated into citizenship—and for some even exemplified its promises. By the antebellum period, however, disability was becoming a powerful, racialized tool of civic exclusion and, by the century’s end, a target for eugenic elimination. Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship tells the story of how this dramatic transformation occurred.
Sari Altschuler is associate professor of English and founding director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at Northeastern University. She is the author of Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship (Penn Press, 2026) and The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (Penn Press, 2018), as well as coeditor with Jonathan Metzl and Priscilla Wald of Keywords for Health Humanities (NYU Press, 2023). With David Weimer she directs Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read, a multi-local and online exhibition about the multisensory experiences of reading, which won the Library Company’s Innovation Award in 2019.
Available for purchase at Penn Press.
By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2025) puts the history of disability into conversation with the history of books. Guided by the experiences of the first generation of blind people to learn to read by touch, this book explores the ways in which raised-print books changed not only individual lives but also nineteenth-century culture.
Vanessa Warne is a Professor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba (Treaty One Territory). Her current research explores the intersection of the history of craft and the history of disability. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and disability, including serving as the co-editor of a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly on blindness studies. She has co-hosted two international conferences on critical blindness studies, is a co-creator of the Crafting Communities Project, and a co-host of the Victorian Samplings podcast.
Available for purchase at University of Michigan Press.
15oct5:30 pm9:00 pm12th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, with Michael J. Lewis
Event Details
12th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, with Michael J. Lewis Thursday, October 15, 2026 Franklin Hall at the American Philosophical Society
Event Details
12th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, with Michael J. Lewis
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Franklin Hall at the American Philosophical Society
Join us in-person or virtually, for a conversation with author and historian Michael J. Lewis about the history of Philadelphia’s great libraries. Lewis’s books include Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), American Art and Architecture (W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), and the prize-winning August Reichensperger: The Politics of the German Gothic Revival (MIT Press, 1993). He was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2000-2001) and in 2008 received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the completion of City of Refuge (2016), his study of millennial Utopias.
Help us celebrate Dr. John C. Van Horne’s legacy of education and scholarship by joining us at the free public lecture and book signing, members-only reception, and private dinner immediately following the event.
November
Event Details
Born in Flames, The Business of Arson and
Event Details
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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