In Conversation with... Melissa Adler

Join Western Libraries for In Conversation..., our lunchtime series featuring Western faculty discussing their latest books. Bring your lunch and drop in for a casual conversation about new scholarship from our campus community. Geoffrey Robert Little, Vice Provost and University Librarian, will moderate.

Everyone is welcome. No registration required.

Our October guest: Melissa Adler, Faculty of Information and Media Studies
Author of Peculiar Satisfaction: Thomas Jefferson and the Mastery of Subjects (Fordham University Press, 2025)

About the book
As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Peculiar Satisfaction traces how the ideals and contradictions of the nation's founding live on in libraries, archives and museums. Thomas Jefferson championed an informed citizenry as essential to democracy, yet the systems he built to organize knowledge reinforced racial and ideological hierarchies that persist today.

Adler examines Jefferson's personal library, which became the foundation of the Library of Congress, his record-keeping practices in government, and his museum at Monticello as a site of colonial knowledge production. Drawing on archival research and critical theory, she argues that understanding these structures is essential to defending the role of knowledge in public life at a moment when censorship and disinformation threaten democracy.

About the author
Melissa Adler is an interdisciplinary scholar working across library and information science, gender and sexuality studies, literary studies and American studies. Her research sits within critical classification studies, and it explores tensions between standardization and local control, and between institutions and personal experience, in libraries and archives.