Upcoming Exhibits

Winter/Spring Quarters 2025

A Pressing Call: Five Centuries of Women Printing
January 6 through April 18, 2025

Quick, name a printer! Johannes Gutenberg, Aldus Manutius, or John Baskerville might come to mind--men whose printer's devices hang across the hall outside the Special Collections Exhibition Gallery. If asked to name a woman who worked as a printer, however, many of us will draw a blank – though it is not for a lack of women participating in the printing industry. From the earliest era of hand-press printing in late 15th-century Europe, women have worked in the print trade in a variety of roles including as publishers, print shop proprietors, typesetters and compositors, and booksellers. The history of women's contributions to book production have been obscured by the societal constraints placed on women’s labor, and they were often hidden behind the names of men or corporate bodies. If one knows how and where to look, however, it becomes clear that thousands of books in the Library’s rare books collections were printed by women.

Using case studies and the works of women printers from Yolande Bonhomme to Virginia Woolf, this exhibition will explore the following questions: Who qualifies as a printer, and how has that definition changed during 500 years of technological innovations to printing in the West? How did women get into printing professions, and what were the social and economic drivers that facilitated their involvement? How does one identify the work of women printers when women are rarely named in the books they printed?

Spring/Summer Quarters 2025

Seeing Connections: The Art of Richard Penn

April 28 through August 29, 2025

Inspiration for art can come from many sources. Retired UChicago Medicine neurosurgeon and artist Richard Penn finds inspiration in nature, philosophy, science, and the images of other artists. Penn combines disparate objects, pages of books, art, and the natural world through digital manipulation to highlight unexpected connections—such as blending a Newtonian trigonometric illustration found in the University’s rare book collection with a detail from a Hyde Park viaduct mural to produce a layered abstract composition.

The exhibition includes art from Penn’s personal collection, accompanied by materials from the University of Chicago Library’s rare book, science, and art collections.

Autumn Quarter 2025

Charting Imaginary Worlds: Why Fantasy and Games are Inseparable

September 15 through December 12, 2025

Since the emergence of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons and the digital text adventure Zork, both in the 1970s, gamers have been enchanted by the iconography and underlying structures of the fantasy genre—mages, castles, monsters, and rogues; fated quests and unlikely fellowships; magic spells and ancient riddles. But the relationship between fantasy and games is one of reciprocal influence: after all, both games and fantasy carve out separate worlds, imbuing them with rules, boundaries, goals, and roles. This exhibit charts how games and fantasy have converged over time, as exemplified by the heavily rule-oriented magic systems of the LitRPG genre and blockbuster games set in fantasy worlds such as the Hugo Award-Winning Baldur’s Gate III. Key examples from gaming and fantasy culture, including game manuals, character figurines, literary texts, film clips, and interactive game play demos, help to show how creators, players, and fans have developed a shared language for building and playing with imaginary worlds.

Winter/Spring Quarters 2026

Media Revolutions: Then and Now

January 5 through April 10, 2026

Media Revolutions: Then and Now explores how the Protestant Reformation and innovations in printing technology coincided to catalyze a sweeping revolution that paved the way for media culture as we know it today. The exhibition upends traditional narratives that center on printing technology as the driving force of the Reformation, and instead shows how essential religious thought and practice were for the emergence and success of modern media. The exhibition holds up a mirror to our contemporary media landscape, illuminating what the early modern reformation of media can teach us about today’s media culture and hint at what it might look like in the future.

Spring/Summer Quarters 2026

History on the Edges: Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Caribbean

April 20 through August 21, 2026

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, passed away in 2012 at the age of 62. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti into a family of professionals and intellectuals, Trouillot is best known for his magnum opus, Silencing the Past, which meditates on the question of power and the production of history in colonial archives, academic writing, and popular memory.

This exhibition traces Trouillot’s intellectual development alongside his status as a Haitian national exiled by the Duvalier dictatorship and an anthropologist who understood history to be shaped equally by peasants and professional historians. This exhibition will feature materials found in Trouillot’s personal archive of writings, manuscripts, and ephemera.

Autumn Quarter 2026

Declaration of Independence: Origins, Meanings, and Afterlives of America's Founding Document

September 7 through December 11, 2026

The story of the making of the Declaration of Independence often centers on its revolutionary authors, prominent politicians such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and (above all) Thomas Jefferson. But the Declaration we know today is equally a product of generations of readers, individuals, and groups who discovered divergent meanings among its self-evident truths.

What story, then, best suites our moment?

This exhibition, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the document in 2026, invites visitors to experience the diverse responses to the Declaration in the age of the American Revolution, consider unfolding understandings over time, and explore conflicting interpretations individuals and groups have proposed at significant moments in history.