Eric Gardner Elected to Membership in the American Antiquarian Society

November 11, 2024

Eric Gardner Elected to Membership in the American Antiquarian Society

Eric Gardner, professor of English and chair of the English Department at Saginaw Valley State University, has been elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), a national research library and community of learners dedicated to discovering and sharing a deeper understanding of the American past. Gardner joins a distinguished roster of members including a range of prominent scholars, artists, writers and librarians elected for their achievements in academic and public life. Since the Society's founding in 1812, 14 U.S. presidents, more than 75 Pulitzer Prize winners, and diverse Guggenheim and MacArthur award winners have been elected to membership. Only 12 other Michigan residents are current members. According to AAS President Scott Casper, Gardner was recognized for his "field-changing scholarship in Black print culture."

Gardner joined SVSU in 1996 after earning a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches a range of courses in American literature and culture, African American literature and culture, and literary history. He is the author of two prize-winning books - "Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature" (2009) and "Black Print Unbound: The 'Christian Recorder,' African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (2015) - and editor of five more. His work has previously been recognized with, among other awards, an SVSU Braun Research Fellowship, SVSU's Roosevelt Ruffin Diversity Award, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Located in Worcester, Massachusetts, the American Antiquarian Society holds the world's largest and most accessible collection of original printed, handwritten, and visual sources from before 1900 in what is now the United States. The library of over four million items includes books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, periodicals, children's literature, music, and graphic arts material. In 2013, President Barack Obama presented the Society with the National Humanities Medal in a White House ceremony. The library is free and open to anyone with projects or interests related to the collections. To learn more, visit americanantiquarian.org.