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Staff Spotlight: Veronica McGurrin, Reference and Instruction Librarian/Archivist

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Photo of Veronica in a white coat pointing to a building sign which reads, "No, I'm a Veronica"

Veronica McGurrin, Reference and Instruction Librarian/Archivist

Welcome back to our staff spotlight series! Over the next few weeks, we’ll catch up on featuring recent hires and new roles of staff in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library here at the University of Virginia. 

Veronica McGurrin (she/her) recently joined the Small Special Collections Library as a Reference and Instruction Librarian/Archivist in Public Services. Previously, she was the Librarian for Art and Art History at UNC Chapel Hill, where she received her Dual Master’s Degree in Art History and Library Science. Outside the library, you can find Veronica reading outside on her porch with her cat, Morty, and beagle, Woody.

What was your first ever job with books or libraries?
I started volunteering at my local library when I was 12 and pretty much never left! I volunteered with the children’s department, then worked at circulation through high school and college before starting my MLS degree at UNC. 

What was the first thing you collected as a child? What do you collect now? (oh, c’mon, admit it).
I think I am horribly boring and will say that books are really the only thing that I collected when I was younger (besides rocks + shells from the beach). My house is overflowing with books, and my partner and I have begun a (modest) record collection as well. I’ve had to restrict myself, but I’m thinking that zines are going to worm their way in as a new collection. 

Hopefully you’ve been roaming Grounds and Charlottesville a bit since your arrival. What’s your favorite new discovery other than Special Collections?
Carter Mountain! One of our first stops after the frantic haze of unpacking was to go to Carter Mountain for some peaches and a peach milkshake. 

Tell us what excites you about your job?
Currently, it’s just being able to explore the depth of the collection here.You could be working and staring at your computer for a few hours, and then pop down into the stacks and pick out a first edition Little Women or Gone with the Wind off the shelf. I’m currently scheduling the instruction sessions for the fall semester, so I am really excited to get started working with students in their exploration of the collection. 

Tell us something about Special Collections or UVA that is different from what you expected.
It is so much colder than I thought it would be!! Remember to bring your cardigan when coming to the Reading Room, even in the dead heat of the summer. 

If you could be locked in any library or museum for a weekend, with the freedom to roam, enjoy, and study to your heart’s content, which one would you choose?
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston! Ever since I was a kid, it has been my absolute favorite museum. For those who don’t know, Gardner imported a Venetian palace into Boston and turned her home into this magnificent museum, open to the public. Her portrait, by John Singer Sargent, is stunning! 

Staff Spotlight: Rosalind Calhoun, Processing Archivist

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Welcome back to our staff spotlight series! Over the next few weeks, we’ll catch up on featuring recent hires and new roles of staff in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library here at the University of Virginia. Let’s go!

Photo of Rosalind Calhoun

Rosalind Calhoun, Processing Archivist at the Small Special Collections Library

As a Processing Archivist, Rosalind Calhoun works with the Patrick Oliphant Artwork and Papers, documents the history of enslavement at UVA for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project On These Grounds, edits and revises the Inclusion and Reparative Action Plan for Special Collections Technical Services, and improves discovery of collections. Previously, she was the Librarian and Archivist of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum. She has a MLIS from the University of Maryland and a MSc in Book History and Material Culture from the University of Edinburgh. Her interests include art, history, travel, and her Rottweiler, Gumbo (@gumbotherottie).


What was your first ever job with books or libraries?
Working in Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Maryland’s Hornbake Library as a graduate student. While I was there I was fortunate enough to work with several books from the Kelmscott Press, which inspired my love for all things William Morris.

What was the first thing you collected as a child? What do you collect now?
As a child of the late-90s and early-2000s: Beanie Babies. Now I collect antique wax seals, Japanese netsukes, stirrup cups, Hermès silk scarves, Christmas ornaments, taxidermy, oddities, and curiosities.

Hopefully you’ve been roaming Grounds and Charlottesville a bit since your arrival. What’s your favorite new discovery other than Special Collections?
I’ve lived in Charlottesville since 2020, and my husband and I love the North American Sake Brewery. We enjoy eating on their patio next to Ix Art Park with our Rottweiler, Gumbo. There are also so many fantastic places in the area to go antiquing!

Tell us what excites you about your job?
All the wonderful things in the collections I get to see and the histories I get to help make discoverable and accessible, so we can share that knowledge and wonder with the world. 

Tell us something about Special Collections or UVA that is different from what you expected.
I am surprised that the atmosphere in Special Collections is so down-to-earth. It makes being here a lot less intimidating! Everyone has been kind and welcoming.

If you could be locked in any library or museum for a weekend, with the freedom to roam, enjoy, and study to your heart’s content, which one would you choose?
The Morgan Library and Museum in New York. I think the East Room is one of the most beautiful library spaces in the world, and their collections are amazing. I would love to see the Black Hours in person.

New Exhibition: American Modernisms

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American Modernisms: Modern Stories, Types, & Aesthetics, curated by the Spring 2024 graduate seminar ARTH 9545 led by Elizabeth Hutton Turner,  is on view through October 12, 2024 in the First Floor Gallery of Harrison/Small. Find our hours and directions online. 

Poster for Issuing Modernisms: Modern Stories, Types, Aesthetics featuring a repeating design of Gibson Girl caricatures

In the aftermath of the Civil War, great industrial, scientific, and technological changes fostered a revolution in print culture. Photomechanical reproduction and chromolithography disrupted conventional distinctions between fine and applied arts by introducing more direct graphic means of personal expression into image production of all kinds. By the turn of the twentieth century, printed images became ubiquitous and synonymous with modern life itself. The printed image was attuned to the fast-paced realities of mass production, marketing, and readymade products, as well as aspirations for new ways to live, work, and prosper in the modern world.  

Photo of First Floor Gallery exhibition space, showing half the gallery with objects in cases.

Issuing Modernisms: Modern Stories, Types, & Aesthetics is on view through October 12, 2024

During the spring 2024 semester, four graduate students enrolled in ARTH 9545 American Modernisms located and analyzed visual evidence of modern types and modern stories in a variety of print genres in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. These included cartoons, caricatures, advertising illustrations for American periodicals, graphic novels, illustrated dust jackets, and playbills over a range of dates from 1900 to 1939. 

Exhibited are the results of their multi-faceted investigations. Andi Laska surveyed a run of Gustav Stickley’s The Craftsman magazine from 1904 to 1913, selecting images and articles advocating for social reform and the promise of the single-family home and garden whose furnishing combined preindustrial craftsmanship with machine production. 

Photo of installation of The Craftsman magazine issues.

The Craftsman: Aesthetics and Reform Through Design, curated by Andi Lanka

Matias Hendi located photographs of experimental productions starting 1916-1920 of the Provincetown Players in the archives of playwrights Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell. The rudimentary sets, some designed by Marguerite and William Zorach, frame bold veristic characters such as Minnie Wright on trial for murder in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles or the conversation between the dying sailor Yank and his friend Driscoll in O’Neill’s East of Cardiff.

Photo of installation of archival materials related to the Provincetown Players

The Provincetown Players: The Life and Death of a Modern Theater, curated by Matias Hendi

Emmy Monaghan explored modern innovation through simplification and subtraction in Lynn Ward’s wordless novels such as God’s Man (1929), which tells of a Faustian bargain engaged by a cosmopolitan artist in exchange for a magic paint brush that leads only to corruption and despair. 

Photo of installation of wordless novels

The Wordless Novel, curated by Emmy Monaghan

Surveying illustrated advertisements in runs of popular periodicals such as Life, Collier’s Weekly, and The Saturday Evening Post, Leo Palma located modern attitudes towards gender, beauty, and sexuality in alluring characters such as Charles Dana Gibson’s Gibson Girl and George Leyendecker’s Arrow Collar Man. Similarly, Emmy Monaghan followed the careers of three female illustrators/cartoonists from the 1920s—Helen Hockinson, Barbara Shermund, and Margaret Trafford—whose work explored the outlook of urban middle- and working-class women for The New Yorker, Esquire, Life, and Collier’s. 

Photo of installation of archival materials related to the

The Leyendecker Man and Advertising Masculinity, curated by Leo Palma

Photo of installations of archival materials exploring women's role in both their work and as decoration through the lens of the Gibson Girl—featuring sketches, magazine covers, and magazine illustrations.

The Working Girl: Women Sketching a New Life, curated by Emmy Monaghan; The Gibson Girl: The New Woman and Male Anxieties, curated by Leo Palma

Analyzing Civil War-Era Correspondence and Portrait Photographs: Lesson Plans for the John L. Nau III Civil War History Collection

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This post is by Elizabeth Nosari, Project Processing Archivist at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, who is currently working with the William Faulkner Collection. In her previous role, she served as the Nau Project Archivist for the John L. Nau III Civil War History Collection.

Black and white tintype portrait of two Black soldiers in uniform seated; American flag in background. Tintype portrait is encased in ornate gold frame.

Tintype double portrait of two unknown soldiers, ca. 1861–1865. John L. Nau III Civil War History Collection, MSS 16459, box 166, tray 1, PT0321, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

Lesson plans for the John L. Nau III Civil War History Collection are now available to view and download directly from the collection’s finding aid, under the “External Documents” heading at the bottom of the page. The two lesson plans—Analyzing Civil War-Era Correspondence and Analyzing Civil War-Era Portrait Photographs—engage students with the two most significant record types in the Nau collection in terms of scope. These two mediums also speak to one of the greatest strengths of Mr. Nau’s collection: the documentation of personal, lived experiences during the United States Civil War, 1861–1865.

Yellow envelope with red stamp on upper left corner. Addressed to Miss Sarah A. Platt, Naugatuck, Conn.

Goodyear, Robert B., February 14, 1863. John L. Nau III Civil War History Collection, MSS 16459, box 43, folder 31, DL0006, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

The Nau collection letters, found in Series 1 and written by white men as well as white women, connected men away fighting to loved ones and business associates at the home front; letters reflect their role as wartime lifeline and contain exchanges of everyday news about families, friends, and finances. Letters also offer firsthand accounts of camp life, hospital conditions, battlefield experiences, and political views. The portrait photographs in Series 2—in early photograph formats, including daguerreotype, ambrotype, tintype, and carte de visite—visually capture and document their mid-nineteenth-century subjects, including their wartime roles as evidenced in uniforms, insignia, and weaponry. Digital facsimiles pulled from Series 1 and 2 of the collection are an important part of the lesson plans and encompass a selection of letters written by white men and women as well as portraits of soldiers, including white men, Black men, a Native American man, and a white woman.

Tintype portrait of Frederick L. Rainbow, ca. 1861–1865. John L. Nau III Civil War History Collection, MSS 16459, box 157, tray 2, PT0424.0001, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

The lesson plans engage with letters and photographs from the Nau collection as artifacts of history and material culture that served real and practical functions in the context of war. The reading materials and activities are designed for students to learn about the technologies that made letter writing and portrait photography possible on a mass scale in the mid-nineteenth century as well as their democratizing influences. As both practices increased in popularity over the course of the Civil War, literacy rates rose and a new, larger swath of American society was able to read and write. Portrait photography, which proliferated in part due to its convenience and affordability, allowed Americans across the social strata of the country to participate in portraiture for the first time. Mid-nineteenth century people could readily and self-consciously construct, capture, and memorialize their identities. They could also share their likenesses with friends and loved ones and mail these mementos back to the home front.

The Nau collection lesson plans invite students to read about Civil War-era letter writing and photographic portrait making, look at and analyze real-world examples, and create their own letters and portraits. Designed for grades 9 and up as well as grades K–8, they allow instructors to pick and choose which materials and activities best suit their students’ learning objectives.

Access the lesson plans and explore the John L. Nau III Civil War History Collection here.