The Rare, The Medium-Rare, and The Well-Done: Thinking about Books, Microchips, and Libraries as the Skillman Turns 50

Michael F. Suarez, S.J., University Professor and Director of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, is a distinguished scholar and superb speaker in the fields of book history, bibliography, and eighteenth-century English literature. He was co-editor of the acclaimed Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), a million-word reference work on all aspects of book history from the invention of writing to e-books. It was chosen as a “Best Book of the Year” by the Times Literary Supplement, as was his Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume V, 1695-1830 (2009). He is currently co-editor of the eight-volume Oxford University Press edition of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, one of the largest digital humanities projects extant today. His forthcoming books from OUP are a scholarly edition of The Dublin Notebook of Gerard Manley Hopkins and The Book: A Global History. A Jesuit priest, Suarez has taught at Fordham University and Campion Hall, Oxford University. He holds bachelor’s degrees from Bucknell University and Oxford; two master’s degrees from the Weston Jesuit School of Theology and two from Oxford; and a D.Phil in English literature from Oxford. A former Marshall Scholar, he has won awards for his poetry, as well as for bibliography and literary criticism. He has been the recipient of research fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. He has been elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society and the Grolier Club. In 2014-15, he will hold the J.R. Lyell Readership in Bibliography at Oxford University.