The Morgan Announces New Curatorial Appointments and Advancements
New York – The Morgan Library & Museum is proud to announce four curatorial appointments. 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 ofAssistant Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts.
Dr. Colin B. Bailey, Director of the Morgan Library & Museum, states, “The Morgan is recognized as one of the world’s preeminent repositories of drawings, printed books, literary and historical manuscripts, medieval and Renaissance illuminated texts, and music manuscripts. Our curators are the driving force behind our exhibitions and the Morgan’s scholarly and public programs. It is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Philip, Dr. Robinson, and Dr. Deirdre to the Morgan and to acknowledge Sal’s advancement within the curatorial department. I look forward to working with them all to shape the Morgan’s programs in the years to come.”
Dr. Philip S. Palmer joins the Morgan as Robert H. Taylor Curator and Department Head of Literary and Historical Manuscripts. Dr. Palmer is an expert on sixteenth- and seventeenth-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 PhD and an MA in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a BA 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. At the Clark, he managed large digital humanities grants from CLIR and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Palmer’s curatorial interests extend well beyond early modern Britain, to include Oscar Wilde and the fin de siècle as well as modern and contemporary literature.
Sal 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 BA 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.
Dr. Robinson 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 Musicand 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 working life 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.
Dr. Deirdre Jackson joins the Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts team as Assistant Curator. From 2011 to 2018, Dr. Jackson was a Research Associate in the Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books at the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, where she conductedresearch as part of the internationally acclaimed Cambridge Illuminations project. She also contributed to the exhibition Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts and previously served as a Royal Manuscripts Project Researcher at the British Library, helping to curate and produce the catalogue for the major exhibition Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination. Dr. Jackson received her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
