Gabrielle Dean is the William Kurrelmeyer Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts in the Sheridan Libraries and Adjunct Professor in the English Department and the Program in Museums and Society. Dean also serves as Associate Editor of Archive Journal and as Executive Director of the Society for Textual Scholarship.

Dean's published scholarship focuses on authorship and photography, race and gender in the archival record, and the exchanges between textual and visual cultures during the industrial era of print—ie, the mid 19^th century through the mid 20^th century.

In the Sheridan Libraries, Dean is responsible for 19^th-, 20^th-, and 21^st-century collections of rare and archival materials. Dean pays special attention to women’s, LGBTQ+, and African American history, literature, and culture, the latter in concert with the Africana Archives Initiative of the Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts, led by Lawrence P. Jackson, Bloomberg Professor of History and English. In collaboration with the Billie Holiday Project and the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship, Dean is affiliated with the Inheritance Baltimore project.

Dean has been the lead curator of over fourteen exhibitions at Hopkins, including major exhibitions about H. L. Mencken (with the George H. Thompson Collection of Henry Louis Mencken), Stephen Crane (with the Richard Frary Collection of Stephen Crane Materials), John Barth (with the John Barth Collection), and Edgar Allan Poe (with the Susan Jaffe Tane Collection of Edgar Allan Poe). In 2019-2020, Dean co-curated (with Denis Curatorial Fellow Christina Thomas, a PhD candidate in the Department of History) City People: Black Baltimore in the Photographs of John Clark Mayden and (with Shane Butler and students in the John Addington Symonds Project) Queer Connections: The Library of John Addington Symonds, which featured a copy of Symonds’ A Problem in Greek Ethics, a very scarce, privately printed essay that laid the foundations for the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.

With Shane Butler, the Nancy H. and Robert E. Hall Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics, Dean co-pilot the John Addington Symonds Project, the inaugural manifestation of the Classics Research Lab. Dean also teaches courses about 19^th– and early 20^th-century American literary culture focused on rare, archival, and digital materials, which frequently involve students in curatorial and editorial projects—for example, in spring 2020, Scribbling Women: Gender, Writing, and the Archive. Dean has also engaged students in community-led work to discover, recover, and maintain Baltimore's Black cemeteries (see write-up in the Hub).

I am keenly aware of the power and privilege that curators, archivists, and librarians wield, through the assemblage, description, and interpretation of materials (for assemblage and description, in themselves, are forms of interpretation). I am, therefore, particularly dedicated to collecting, preserving, and illuminating the material traces of people, places, ideas, and events that have been distorted, marginalized, or suppressed in the historical record—as well as the “minor” threads within dominant narratives. These histories are often carried by material forms that are themselves vulnerable to misinterpretation, physically fragile, or simply outside the norms that book-focused scholarship has emphasized. Ongoing interests in this respect are postcards, photographs, short-lived periodicals, ephemera, private and limited publications, inexpensive multiples, artist books, and text-image relationships across many kinds of media—as well as archival formats like personal papers, letters, diaries, manuscripts, and digital records. These materials, and the voices they bear through time, require conscientious care in terms of organization and description, and even new collecting paradigms. Only through such care, guided by strong principles, can we hope to gradually unravel the legacies of inequity that our collections have helped to perpetuate.