Archive Feature: The Black Bibliography Project at Rutgers University-New Brunswick
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.
Tajah Ebram, Black Studies Subject Specialist Librarian, is a scholar, teacher and the Black Studies Librarian at Rutgers University New Brunswick and is the Rutgers University lead for the Black Bibliography Project, which seeks to revitalize the practice of bibliography for African American literary and cultural studies.
About 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.
About Jacqueline Goldsby
Jacqueline Goldsby is Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of the prizewinning A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and other articles about African American literature and book history during the long century of Jim Crow segregation, from 1865-1965. In 2015, she edited the Norton Critical Edition of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. And she’s currently at work finishing Writing from the Lower Frequencies: African American Literature and Its Mid-Century Moment.
The research required to launch Writing from the Lower Frequencies led Goldsby to design and direct “Mapping the Stacks: A Guide to Black Chicago’s Hidden Archives.” She managed that project from 2005-10, while she taught at the University of Chicago. “Mapping the Stacks” helped transform the practice of archival recovery and description in Chicago and across the U.S, as the project became the model for the Council on Library and Information Resources’ $27.4 million grant program, “Cataloguing Hidden Collections and Archives” (2008-14).
About Tajah Ebram
Dr. Tajah Ebram is the Black Studies Librarian at Rutgers University Libraries. In addition to supporting faculty and students working in Black studies, Dr. Ebram also serves as the Rutgers lead for the Black Bibliography Project, which seeks to revitalize the practice of descriptive bibliography for African American literary and cultural studies. She collaborates across the campus and with BBP colleagues at Yale University.
Dr. Ebram received her PhD in 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in 20th-century Black literary and cultural studies, with a focus on Black radicalisms. Her dissertation was an interdisciplinary cultural history of the MOVE Organization. Dr. Ebram comes to us from Haverford College, where she taught courses on Black Philadelphia, race and ecology, and Black feminisms and the carceral state. She brings additional expertise in cultural geography, public humanities, and digital humanities.
The Networking Black Print: Reimagining Black Bibliography Conference
Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Thursday, April 9 - Friday, April 10, 2026
In April, 2026, the BBP convened the Networking Black Print: Reimagining Black Bibliography conference, at Alexander Library on the Rutgers New Brunswick campus, as a chance to lift up and reflect on work that is re-shaping the practices of Black Bibliography—including the database the project has been building for the past 8 years. The conference culminated in two exciting, impactful and transformative days, which featured plenary conversations, hands-on sessions and insightful panels on the future of Black books. Acclaimed scholars, librarians, curators, and collectors came together to celebrate the launch of the Black Bibliography Project Database during this signature two-day conference!
Read A Movement to Preserve and Protect the Work of Black Writers Across Generations Takes Hold at Rutgers, by John Chadwick—Rutgers New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences, here, to learn more about the conference.
