The Daily Bulletin Archive

By Tony Astran

Lisa Berglund never knew how exhausting sitting in a library for eight to 12 hours a day could be—or how rewarding. A spring 2009 sabbatical gave her the opportunity to travel to two renowned libraries and tackle three major projects.

Berglund, an associate professor of English, has long enjoyed studying eighteenth-century works to examine their influence on modern-day reading and trace the historical development of people’s engagement with books as objects. She first traveled to the Houghton Library at Harvard University for five weeks, and later to the John Rylands University Library in Manchester, England, for three weeks.

Having received the Donald and Mary Hyde Fellowship for the Study of Dr. Samuel Johnson and His Circle shortly before her sabbatical, Berglund was able to direct funds for her travel to research at both libraries. During her stays, she gathered the materials needed to prepare a forthcoming book from Valancourt Books, an edition of Hester Lynch Piozzi’s 1789 Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany.

Two years before her death in 1821, Piozzi, formerly Mrs. Thrale, the friend of Dr. Johnson’s, revisited her work and made notes in the margins of a copy for a protégé to read. Berglund’s book will be the first to include Piozzi’s notes in print.

“Piozzi was a compulsive annotator,” she said. “From the time she first wrote Observations to the time she went back and made notes, the world had drastically changed. Piozzi’s notes help us understand how people read books back in that era and how major events, such as revolutions, affected people. She’s an undervalued, important writer of late-eighteenth-century nonfiction.”

Berglund also spent time developing an analysis of what people wrote in dictionaries between 1785 and 1840, around the time that Noah Webster first published An American Dictionary of the English Language.

“People wrote many different things inside their dictionaries,” Berglund said. “Sometimes, the dictionary was the only paper a family had available, so inside you’d find grocery lists, family histories, and even areas where children practiced handwriting.” Berglund is using the information gathered at the two libraries to contribute to her planned database of marginalia from 100 American dictionaries during the period.

Finally, Berglund also developed a graduate-level course in lexicography during her sabbatical. Upon return to campus in the fall, she taught her first section of ENG 670: Advanced Linguistics.

“I developed the class to help students learn how dictionaries are written and see how they function as tools and reflections of cultures,” she said. “Together, we worked on how to improve the way dictionaries are presented to secondary school and college students, making them more exciting to read and have more of a ‘book’ feel.”

Berglund said the experience of having to maximize limited time in libraries helped her become a better teacher and mentor. “It was eye-opening to spend days on end in research libraries,” she said. “I’m now able to share real experiences with my students and guide them effectively when they need to work with reference materials.”

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Read previous Focus on Sabbatical stories:

Felix Armfield
Betty Cappella
Ann Colley
Daniel Cunningham
Michael De Marco
Rob Delprino
Mark Fulk
Musa Abdul Hakim
Katherine Hartman
David Henry
Susan Leist
Andrew Nicholls
Wendy Paterson
M. Stephen Pendleton
Stephen Phelps
John Song
Carol Townsend
Jonathan Thornton
Mark Warford
Michael Zborowski