Profile

As Western Art Specialist, in addition to contributing to the acquisition and care of the general collections, Nicola Shilliam devotes much of her time to selecting, acquiring, and promoting Marquand’s endowed rare books to support the teaching and research of Marquand’s constituents, especially faculty and students. She has curated many displays for Marquand’s Rare Books Case, selected and wrote labels for items exhibited in Firestone’s Milberg Gallery, and regularly contributes to ReMarquable, Marquand’s rare books blog, and to Ampersand (formerly, the A&A Newsletter). Before joining Marquand, she was an Assistant Curator of Textiles and Costumes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she curated numerous exhibitions on topics ranging from Tudor and Stuart needlework to twentieth-century American textiles, lectured at American and European cultural institutions, and taught courses to students in the Boston area, and the Cooper-Hewitt Master’s program in the Decorative Arts in New York.  She arrived in the USA as the first graduate student Mellon Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, was a graduate Teaching Fellow for Renaissance art at Yale University, and worked as a research assistant for Henry-Louis Gates’s Image of Blackness project and as an editorial assistant for the Frederick Douglass Papers while finishing her Ph.D. During her time at Princeton, she has completed courses on the history of book illustration processes and bookbinding at the Rare Book School, University of Virginia.

Current Research

Nicola maintains an active interest in textiles, is a member of CIETA, and is currently finishing an article about the historiography of medieval textiles. She is also creating an online exhibition: “Early Modern Women in Print” [working title], on the topic of women as authors, illustrators, printers, and patrons, etc., ca. 1500–1800, of books in Marquand’s collection of rare books.