The Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center fosters innovative research and interdisciplinary collaboration centered around the Sheridan Libraries’ rare books, manuscripts, and archives, focusing on the 19th century through the present. By promoting historical inquiry and creative scholarship, we strive to foster dialogue, develop new ways of telling our histories, and collectively imagine just futures. The Center achieves these goals by collaborating with publics within and beyond the academy to co-produce, preserve, and share new knowledge.
Student Learning
The Center sponsors opportunities for mentored research as well as student-initiated learning inside and outside the classroom. Semester-long and intersession courses delve into a wide array of topics through the analysis of rare books, manuscripts, and archival documents. Initiatives like the annual Edible Book Festival, the Trans Histories Lab, and vintage game nights offer unique opportunities for creative exploration, blending research with playful and community-based engagement.
Support Our Work
Your generosity directly enhances the quality of our exhibitions, educational opportunities, and public programs.
The Tabb Center is an arm of Sheridan Libraries Special Collections, which houses a vast collection of rare books, oral histories, historic documents, and other materials.
Community-Engaged Research
Our initiatives cultivate an exchange of knowledge between the university and broader community, bringing together faculty, students, artists, and performers as partners in research and education. The Center’s approach to community-engaged research emphasizes cross-departmental collaboration with historically marginalized publics. Working in partnership, we creatively interpret special collections materials, foster restorative justice, and co-produce new knowledge that contributes to movements for racial, sexual, and gender justice.
Research Fellowships
Our fellowship programs promote interdisciplinary research with rare books, manuscripts, and archives. The First Year Fellowships and Dean’s Undergraduate Research Fellowships support independent undergraduate research projects, while our Public Humanities Fellows, comprising non-institutionally affiliated organizers, artists, and public historians, work with special collections materials to projects imaginatively address themes related to racial, gender, and sexual justice.
Programming
Our talks, panels, and workshops play a crucial role in promoting research by encouraging discussions, showcasing research methodologies, and highlighting the significance of special collections materials in advancing scholarly knowledge. Research workshops engage broad publics, while talks often showcase objects from Special Collections, such as oral histories, artist books, and zines.
Established by President Ronald J. Daniels and Johns Hopkins University’s board of trustees, the Tabb Center is named in honor of Winston Tabb for his enduring support of original scholarship. The Sheridan Dean of University Libraries, Archives and Museums from 2002 to 2022, Winston Tabb enjoyed a distinguished libraries career that spanned five decades.