Who, What, Why: Alicia Meyer on the wonders of the Kislak Center

Alicia Meyer gestures at the rows of leather bound books on the sturdy shelves that line the dark paneled walls of the Lea Library in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. “They’re my emotional support objects,” she teases during an interview with Penn Today. Carefully flipping open a 12th-century manuscript about science, Meyer points to a passage on how childbirth was censored. She notes how the varying roughness and smoothness of pages show how the book was put together. “I’m going to keep making you touch this book,” she says.

This is the enthusiasm that Meyer brings to her work and the encouragement she offers to the many students with whom she interacts as curator of research services at the Kislak Center. She has been in this role since 2023 but at Penn for longer. Meyer received her Ph.D. in English literature here, writing her dissertation on a medieval English hospital that transitioned into a prison predominantly housing poor women, including sex workers and unwed mothers.

Outside of work, she may be found visiting Clark Park, gardening, or “reading like a thousand things.” At the moment, that includes the mystery novel “Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet,” a nonfiction book about U.S. immigration, and a biography of Dr. Seuss.

On a given day Meyer might be hosting students from a class and holding one-on-one meetings with students conducting independent research.

For example, she recently hosted music professor Jasmine A. Henry’s Seminar in African-American Music and showed students the Kislak Center’s most used collection: the Marian Anderson Collection, which includes sheet music, correspondence, photos, press clips, and more. While the collection has been at Penn for decades, Meyer says she always wants to “revisit what we think we know.”

She is also researching the Kislak Center’s collection on the late children’s book author and illustrator Wanda Gág, a task which sparked her goal of reading the biographies of all the major children’s authors—hence the Dr. Seuss biography. Meyer is curating an exhibition on Gág for 2028, the 100th anniversary of the author’s book “Millions of Cats.” She incorporated materials from the Gág collection for class visits led by English professor and children’s literature scholar Melissa Jensen.

Growing up in Nebraska in the ’90s, Meyer loved American Girl dolls—and read all the books. “I am a Molly,” she says. She even wrote plays about her American Girl dolls.

“It’s maybe too simple of a story to say that’s why I do what I do,” says Meyer, “but I think having access to stories about girls in moments of historic importance was a really valuable thing for me.” She can see the parallels between her interest in American Girl stories and her passions for material culture, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of health and medicine.

But her current work is not a career she even knew existed when she was younger. “No one is born into this world,” she says. While once she thought this type of work was too closed-off to be accessible, she says, “now I have the opposite feeling about it, where I want everybody here, every day, all the time, using our things and learning from them.”