Meredith McGill

Meredith McGill is Professor of English at Rutgers University and the 2019-20 Beinecke Distinguished Fellow in the Humanities at Yale University. She is the author of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (2003; 2008), a study of nineteenth-century American resistance to tight control over intellectual property. She is the editor of two collections of essays: The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008), in which a number of scholars model ways of understanding nineteenth-century poetry within a transatlantic framework, and Taking Liberties with the Author (2013), a selection of essays from the English Institute that explore the persistence of the author as a shaping force in literary criticism. In addition to essays on nineteenth-century poetry and poetics, she has published widely on intellectual property, authorship, and the history of the book. She has written two essays that reflect on the place of bibliography in the contemporary disciplinary division of knowledge: “Echocriticism: Repetition and the Order of Texts” (American Literature 88:1) and “Literary History, Book History, and Media Studies” in Hester Blum, ed. Turns of Event). She served as President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth Century Americanists from 2018-2020.

She is the co-PI with Jacqueline Goldsby (Yale) of the Black Bibliography Project.

Publications:

• “What is ‘Black’ about Black Bibliography?,” with Jacqueline Goldsby. Special issue on Black Bibliography, Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith L. McGill, eds. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 116:2 (June 2022), 161-189.
• “The Poetry of Slavery,” in Ezra Tawil, ed. Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 115-13.
• “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry,” in Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Stein, eds., Early African American Print Culture. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 53-74.

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• “Digitizing Black Bibliography and the Politics of Linked Data,” with Jacqueline Goldsby. Society for Textual Scholarship panel, Modern Language Association, Toronto ON, January 2026.
• Presentation with the Black Bibliography Project Core Team, “Reparative Bibliography: A Preview of the Black Bibliography Project,” Rare Book and Manuscript Section of the American Library Association conference, Yale University, New Haven CT, June 2025.
• “Building Knowledge Infrastructure: The Black Bibliography Project.” Book History Seminar, The University of Chicago, October 2024.

Previous Organizations: 

• Rutgers University
• Harvard University

Accomplishments:

• Mellon Foundation grant for the Black Bibliography Project

The Black Bibliography Project is dedicated to the recovery of the practice of Descriptive Bibliography for Black-authored texts and the development of cutting-edge digital tools for exploring the rich publication histories of Black writing.

Bibliographic Study has long been an invigorating field of scholarship, but in the past five years it has become a thriving site of breakthrough initiatives and collaborations among scholars, librarians, curators, artists, and digital humanists.

Led by Co-Directors Meredith McGill (Professor of English at Rutgers University and the 2019-20 Beinecke Distinguished Fellow in the Humanities at Yale University) and Jacqueline Goldsby (Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University), The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) aims to revive and transform Descriptive Bibliography—the systematic description of print materials as physical objects—for African American and Black Diaspora literary studies. The goal is to create a digital database whose capacities can reveal the dynamic social formations and aesthetic practices that are specific to Black print culture in the U.S. and beyond.

McGill and Goldsby believe that the digital environment is ideally suited for bibliographic information: unlike codex bibliographies, a digital bibliographic database can be queryable, expandable, revisable, and re-organizable (no longer ordered only by the lives of authors); it can include images of covers, illustrations, and vital bibliographic details; it can also be crowd-sourced and publicly accessible. By tapping the explanatory potential of digital technologies (specifically, the revolutionary metadata approach called “Linked Data”), the goal of this project is to build an electronic database whose networking capacities can reveal the social formations and aesthetic practices that are specific to Black print culture, in the U.S. and across the Black Diaspora.  

In April, 2026, the BBP convened the Networking Black Print: Reimagining Black Bibliography gathering as a chance to lift up and reflect on work that is re-shaping the practices of Black Bibliography—including the database our project has been building for the past 8 years.