John H. Pollack
John H. Pollack is Curator, Research Services, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. He has worked in this department since 1995. His responsibilities include providing assistance to students and scholars, and teaching and organizing class sessions centered on the collections. He is also responsible for the Furness Shakespeare Library, which is part of the Kislak Center.
John holds a PhD in English from Penn and a BA from Washington University in St. Louis. He specializes in Early American literature and history, and early modern book history. His research has focused on topics including Native American languages; colonial writings from New France; and Benjamin Franklin and colonial education.
In 2018, the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts acquired through gift and purchase the scholarly library of Professor Peter Way (1941 - 2017).
A Classical scholar, Way mastered Greek, Latin and Chinese. But in the late 1980s, Way moved to Paris where worked with the Greek and Latin Lexica Project that seeks to transcribe, process and publish open-source digital editions of the primary lexical sources for the Greek and Latin languages. While living in Paris, he began to delve into the history of French printing in the Renaissance and he discovered Charlotte Guillard (d. 1557), France’s first women printer. In this curatorial talk, David McKnight will introduce Peter Way, describe his collection and focus briefly on the art of print in Paris in the mid 16th century and the four Charlotte Guillard texts that were among Peter Way’s most revered books.
