Morgan Library Announces New Appointments in Book and Manuscripts Departments

The Morgan Library & Museum has announced three new appointments to its curatorial departments. Sheelagh Bevan is promoted to Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Printed Books and Bindings, Dr. Pınar Durgun joins the Morgan as Jeannette and Jonathan Rosen Associate Curator of Ancient Western Asian Seals and Tablets and Department Head of Ancient Western Asian Seals and Tablets, and Dale Stinchcomb is named Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts. 

Since joining the Morgan in 2010, Sheelagh Bevan has focused on expanding and interpreting the museum’s 19th and 20th century collections, with particular attention to the history of the illustrated book, the European avant-garde, and modernist literature. She has curated numerous exhibitions at the Morgan, the most recent of which include Blaise Cendrars: Poetry Is Everything (2023), Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being (2020), and Delirium: The Art of the Symbolist Book (2017). Bevan collaborated with Colm Tóibín and Philip Palmer to co-curate One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (2022). Bevan also oversees the annual Kenneth A. Lohf Poetry Reading and, for several years, organized the Collections Spotlight installations in J. Pierpont Morgan’s historic library. Prior to her arrival at the Morgan, Bevan worked as an Assistant Librarian at the Museum of Modern Art Library. 

Dr. Pınar Durgun will oversee the Morgan’s Ancient Western Asian Seals and Tablets Department which contains one of the most distinguished collections of cylinder seals in the United States. The seals span a continuous artistic and chronological sequence of more than 3,000 years, covering all significant styles of Mesopotamian engraving. The holdings are particularly strong in seals from the second millennium BC made outside southern Mesopotamia, as well as Middle Assyrian seals. From 2021 to 2024, Durgun was Curator at the Vorderasiatisches Museum (Museum of the Ancient Near East), one of the three museums that make up the larger Pergamon Museum complex in Berlin. 

Dale Stinchcomb joined the Morgan as Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts in February 2024. Prior to his Morgan appointment, he worked at Houghton Library beginning in 2011 as Assistant and then Associate Curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection, where he curated exhibitions on Shakespeare, dance notations, Black theater, Chicano protest posters, and the artwork of actor John Lithgow. He is the author of the photographic history Boston’s Theater District (Arcadia, 2021) and his curatorial interests extend beyond plays and performance to include the role of women in the history and development of typewriting, collections as data, and Latin American history. Stinchcomb holds an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons University, as well as an M.T.S. in Religion and Literature from Harvard University. 

“I am thrilled to welcome Pınar, Dale, and Sheelagh into these new curatorial positions,” said Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner Director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “Our curatorial departments are central to every part of our work as an institution, from exhibitions to research to public programs. All three curators have a record of outstanding scholarship, and have demonstrated a firm commitment to exhibitions and programming that share their fresh perspectives and expertise with our various communities. I look forward to seeing how they help shape the collections and legacy of the Morgan.”