This comprehensive history of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—a groundbreaking American Jewish cultural organization, library, and research center—details its longstanding efforts to preserve eastern European Jewish culture during a century of genocide and mass emigration. Founded in 1925, YIVO was a global organization with headquarters in Vilna until World War II. It represented the symbolic pinnacle of building a modern, secular Yiddish culture.

Yet post-war, YIVO struggled to establish itself on a new continent, to reclaim what had survived of its Vilna collections, to document a lost world, and to impart the value of eastern European Jewish history and culture to new generations. Through the institute's steady commitment to establishing itself in New York and beyond, Yiddish language learning and scholarship became a crucial part of post-Holocaust Jewish life in a time when Hebrew was increasingly promoted in Jewish communities. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, Weiser focuses on the transitional period of the YIVO Institute from 1940 to 1970 and showcases how the institute carved its own path toward scholarship and public engagement that remained true to its founding ethos—"from the folk, for the folk, and with the folk"—while acclimating to American society and mainstream Jewish culture.

Kalman Weiser is the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and director of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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With the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe’s cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. Andrew Hui tells the remarkable story of the Renaissance studiolo—a “little studio”—and reveals how these spaces dedicated to self-cultivation became both a remedy and a poison for the soul.

Blending fresh, insightful readings of literary and visual works with engaging accounts of his life as an insatiable bookworm, Hui traces how humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Montaigne created their own intimate studies. He looks at imaginary libraries in Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Marlowe, and discusses how Renaissance painters depicted the Virgin Mary and St. Jerome as saintly bibliophiles. Yet writers of the period also saw a dark side to solitary reading. It drove Don Quixote to madness, Prospero to exile, and Faustus to perdition. Hui draws parallels with our own age of information surplus and charts the studiolo’s influence on bibliographic fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco.

Beautifully illustrated, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (Princeton UP, 2026) is at once a celebration of bibliophilia and a critique of bibliomania. Incorporating perspectives on Islamic, Mughal, and Chinese book cultures, it offers a timely and eloquent meditation on the ways we read and misread today.

Andrew Hui is associate professor of humanities at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton) and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. 

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Librarians as Researchers: Developing Our Scholarly Identity (Bloomsbury, 2025) edited by Paul C. Campbell and Sarah Nagle is designed to empower librarians to develop their research skills and embrace their identities as scholars. Many librarians, particularly those in academic libraries, are expected to engage in research and scholarly output. However, unlike disciplinary faculty, most librarians have not completed a PhD program, and many have never designed or participated in original research upon embarking on their career. This edited volume provides inspiration and support for academic librarians looking to develop or refresh their research skills and develop their scholarly identities. The focus of this book is toward empowering librarians as researchers, rather than librarians supporting student or faculty research. This book provides a venue for librarians to share their knowledge on different aspects of research as well as build community for other librarians to actualize their own identities as researchers. The existing literature and research in the realm of librarian identity development often touches on librarian identities in the face of emerging technologies and new library types, or how librarians can support research at their institutions. However, there is a gap in the literature around librarians developing their own identities as researchers. Librarians have a unique role in the scholarly community; we often sacrifice our own research interests so that we can provide support and instruction to others, whether it be faculty, students, or the public. But the library world holds immense opportunity for developing and executing original research. Additionally, conducting research is beneficial to librarians' individual practice as well as the library community as a whole. This edited volume will provide guidance as well as actionable methods for librarians to develop foundational research philosophies, create communities of practice, and hone practical skills in a wide range of research areas.

Guests: Paul C. Campbell is an Assistant Professor and the Social Science & Assessment Librarian at Kent State University Libraries.

Sarah Nagle is the Creation and Innovation Services Librarian at Miami University in Ohio

Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is a Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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