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Melissa Adler, "Peculiar Satisfaction: Thomas Jefferson and the Mastery of Subjects" (Fordham UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Melissa Adler
New CBS Sunday. The Grammys, baby. History will be made live, unfiltered, unexpected. Bigger than ever. Bigger stars, bigger performances. Music's biggest night is getting bigger.
- [00:20]
Marshall Poe
Now you see what all the hype is about.
- [00:21]
Melissa Adler
Trevor Noah hosts the Grammy Awards live.
- [00:24]
Jen Hoyer
Anything is possible.
- [00:26]
Melissa Adler
CBS Sunday and streaming on Paramount.
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Marshall Poe
Hello, everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
Jen Hoyer
Welcome to the Library Science Channel of New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer, and today I'm speaking with Melissa Adler, author of Peculiar Thomas Jefferson and the Mastery of Subjects, published by Fordham University Press. In December 2025, as the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Peculiar Satisfaction examines how 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. And I am really thrilled to be speaking today with Melissa Adler, author of Peculiar Satisfaction. Melissa, welcome to New Books Network.
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Melissa Adler
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Jen Hoyer
Before we talk about your book, I would really love if you could introduce yourself to listeners. And it's always really great to hear where authors are coming from, both literally and figuratively. So maybe you can share a bit about where you grew up and the path your education has Taken and the work that you're doing now.
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Melissa Adler
Sure, yeah. So I was actually born in Madison, Wisconsin, but I grew up in Green Bay, home of the Packers. And yeah, so it was an interesting place to grow up for a kid like me who was quiet and kind of nerdy. And it wasn't a place that had a lot of bookstores, let's say, or cafes or things that I kind of required in my upbringing. But we did have libraries, and my dad took me to the public library all the time. And my grandmother actually was a librarian in another town called Marshfield, Wisconsin. And so she was a huge influence. My dad was an influence. We spent a lot of time in the library. And so that was absolutely formative for me. And then fast forward to adulthood. I found myself in a small town called Green Lake, Wisconsin. It's on the largest spring fed lake in Wisconsin, or the deepest spring fed lake. And that's where my kids were born. And so we spent some time there. And then I did my Mlis from Milwaukee through their online program on a dial up system from this cabin that I lived in out in the woods when we were in Green Lake. Yeah, so I was one of the early cohorts. And this was sort of influenced by my grandma, actually, because my grandmother had gotten her library education by correspondence after her kids were grown. So she. I had had an English major and I didn't know what to do with myself. Here I was in Green Lake, my daughter had already been born and she said, maybe there's something like correspondence courses for librarianship. And then I found out, oh, that you can do this online. And this is like 2002, 2003. So that's what I did. So I finished that program in 2004. My son was born. And then I got a job in a small Catholic university in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. And I was a librarian there. But it was one of those things where I was actually a librarian and an archivist, which doesn't usually, like, people in our field know that those are very different trainings. So. But I was trying to do that and it was okay. But one of the things that I had to do in my job was manage the subject authorities. And so I actually downloaded authority records from the Library of Congress about, you know, look for subject headings. And I started noticing then that there were problems. So it was really on the job that my questions arose. And I started to keep a log of these cases of, you know, other categories or women accountants, but not male accountants, things like that. So it was a It was something I learned on the job that was a problem. And I started looking into the critical cataloging community library Juice and Sandy Berman, and I was like, oh, okay, there is a conversation here. So I decided to pursue the PhD at Wisconsin Madison. And that was sort of where I arrived at the question about how to do the history of sexuality through the perspective of libraries, archives, and museums and so on. And Cruising the Library is my first book that came out of that research. So I did my dissertation, and really what had happened there was another kind of sort of accident of looking for materials. And I knew I wanted to do the dissertation on something that had to do with sexuality and Library of Congress subject headings. I didn't know what it was. So I searched the catalog using the terms bisexuality and history, and I arrived at this Wilhelm Steckle book. And the subject headings for this book about bisexuality were Sexual perversion or. No, it was paraphilias, which means sexual perversion. The heading was Paraphilias and Neuroses. Those were the two subject headings. And I was like, what is paraphilias? What is. I didn't even know what that meant. And so I was like, well, that sounds like an old term or something. I didn't know. So I. I looked in the catalog. I clicked on the heading and noticed, oh, wait, there's 300 bibliographic records that have this heading. That's strange. So then I go to the Library of Congress catalog, and I was like, is that heading there? And sure enough, it was for around 600 records. So then, of course, then I had to go and find out, when was this authorized? What's going on here? What does this term mean? What is this? And it was authorized in 2007 to replace sexual deviations, which had replaced sexual perversion. So there was my research question, and then that became Cruising the Library, and. Yeah, and so I wrote Cruising the Library based on the dissertation while I was at Kentucky, which is where I had my first assistant professor job. I was there for four years. And then we came to Canada back in 2017, just a few months after Cruising the Library came out. And then, yeah, I immediately started working on this Jefferson material. And here we are.
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Jen Hoyer
Amazing.
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Melissa Adler
Yeah.
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Jen Hoyer
Well, so let's talk about Thomas Jefferson in Peculiar Satisfaction. You're exploring Thomas Jefferson's impact on libraries, archives, and museums. And so maybe if you want to talk a little bit more about what motivated you to really, really dive into Jefferson and then write a whole book about him.
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Melissa Adler
Yeah, so I've actually Written two books. So there's another one that's out yesterday on surveillance. And so maybe we'll do this again. But yeah, that one's. They were meant to be one long book and then I realized I had to break them into two. Anyway, that's an aside. So, yeah, I mean, this all started out. I thought that this was going to be an article. I really thought this was just going to be a small project and I wanted to find out whether we could discern some patterns in Jefferson's catalog. So I knew that he had sold his books to the Library of Congress after the books had been burned with the Capitol building in the War of 1812 by British troops. And along with his books, his classified catalog was transferred. And so I didn't know if I was going to be able to, but I had a hunch that we might be able to find some emerging categories for race or gender or things like this. And sure enough there were. But I thought I was, yeah, I thought I was going to write this article that was going to say, yes, we can trace and find some connections between our current catalog, the Library of Congress classifications, and Jefferson's. And I thought that this would be an interesting take on sort of the current, this course about critical classification studies and so on, and the ways that our library classifications our hidden infrastructures and have this problem embedded in them, which is there's these ways that we have these other categories and so on. So, yeah, I was able to find evidence that there were these emerging categories for race especially. And I think that this is interesting for us to be able to sort of see how we arrived at the present condition that we are in. And so, yeah, so then it ended up being sort of an eight year obsession. And then just the questions just keep, they just kept coming. And I think I'm going to continue and do more if these are well received because I just have more and more questions about Jefferson and information because nobody's really done a work on Jefferson information management techniques a little bit. There's studies of his libraries and there's another book about that sort of puts Jefferson into dialogue with cyber culture and so on, but nothing that I've really encountered really centers information and information institutions and information infrastructure. So this, it turns out, is. There's a lot to be said about this totally.
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Jen Hoyer
Well, and then one of the. I guess we'll get more into some of his own information practices. But in the introduction of the book, you presented this framing that I found to be a really useful and fascinating lens for reading the book, and that is the framing of documents as monuments. Can you explain what you mean by this and how it was useful for your own research and writing about all this?
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Melissa Adler
Yeah, for sure. So, yeah. So this. This framework of monumentality, it comes from Jefferson himself, but it actually is something I've been thinking about for a long time. I've really, like, I would say that one of the fundamental questions I've been pursuing in all of my research is sort of how do we explain or how do we understand the durability of information infrastructures? And so in the case of Jefferson, for example, like the way that he organized his library, we can say what I did find was the condition of universalizing whiteness and patriarchy. Right. That the assumed reader is a white man, that the. That the cataloger is Jefferson and his books are cataloged, of course, for his own use. But what we know also about Jefferson is that he was aware that he was a public figure. He was aware that his archives, that his papers would be read in the future. So I think that when he's cataloging his books, he knows that this is going to be seen and used by others. And so for the fact that it was transferred to the Library of Congress and then informs the way that members of Congress, again, white men of a certain class and so on, It plays a huge role in how they come to know and how they organize their books. And so the fact that that still exists today, the condition of the universalization of whiteness, the universalization of man, as Sylvia Wynter would say, and then the placing of racialized and gendered others in the margins, that they are what is read about or studied or researched, but they are not assumed to be the reader. That. That's still in the structures that we have today in our libraries and also online in our algorithms and everything else. Right. So that condition seems to me to be in line with what we're talking about when we're talking about monuments and the fact that monuments have become this flashpoint, especially in the States, and that there's all these questions of, do we take them down? Do we provide context? Do we keep them in place? What do we do? I think that those questions are really relevant to library archives and museums classifications. Like, what do we do? Can we fix them? Can we alter them? Emily Drabinski is. Her article on the politics of correction, particularly with queer subjects, is so relevant here that she asked this question, like, if we change it, okay, that's. That's a useful project. But our terminologies and Everything. They're going to change over time. And fundamentally, it's really hard to change the structure, because if you reclass or redesign the classification, then you have to reclass and reorder all the books on the shelves. And in the case of the Library of Congress, then you're maybe asking all the libraries that use your classification to modify and change. That's a huge undertaking. So how do you do that? It's one of the ways that these things endure. And so this question about monuments, I think, helps to frame questions about what do we do about these problems? Do we fix them? Do we melt them down? Do we make something else? Do we provide context? Which is a practice that a lot of. A lot of us are doing, sort of adding information in the record, content, warnings and so on, even in bibliographic records. Is that enough? Right. So it's hard to. It's hard. That's a really, really naughty question. And I think the conversations about monuments can help us. And I also think that sort of, as I said, that Jefferson himself used this terminology to describe documents, and he also used this terminology to describe the United States government as it was forming itself. So I was wondering, can I read. I want to read this passage, because I think it's so vital. So these are Jefferson's words, and to me, it resonates so well, and I think it presents really important questions for us now. So, okay, he says, we are all Republicans. We are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this union or to change its Republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it. I know indeed that some honest men fear that a Republican government cannot be strong, that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world's best hope, may by possibility, want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. So, in other words, I think Jefferson saw the Republic itself as a monument and a testament to his own strength, and that it would stand as an example to other nations. And then he goes on and he says, a just and solid Republican government maintained here will be a standing monument and example for the aim and imitation of the people of other countries. And I join with you in the hope and belief that they will see from our example that a free government is, of all others, the most energetic. Yeah. So I think that this is a really interesting question, especially in this moment in which we find ourselves. And I think that the fact that libraries, archives, and museums have been targeted by the right, that they are indeed the institutions on which a democratic society relies on sort of, I guess it. To my mind, I think that libraries, archives, and museums are monuments in of themselves as well, monuments to this vision and so on. But then the contradictions that you mentioned in the beginning, they are also monuments to whiteness, white supremacy and genocide and slavery. Because if we understand the ways that these information architectures were born out of a vision for a white society, a white settler society, then we can understand how these subjects end up in the margins or not at all, where they're silenced.
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Jen Hoyer
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess let's talk about Thomas Jefferson's information work a little bit more. Your book is in three sections, and the first section focuses on archives. So could you give some examples of what we might understand as Jefferson's own archival impulse and what we should then identify as his influence on the emerging sphere of archiving in the US Coming out of that period in history?
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Melissa Adler
Sure, yeah. So I think that a lot of archive scholars, not incorrectly, but they focus on the French Revolution as a really important moment in the formation of archives. But I think that the American Revolution is a bit overlooked in this conversation. And Jefferson was a key player, not the only player, but he was a huge player. And he was aware that he was in a moment where history was being made, and he knew that preserving that history was essential for the durability of that democracy. He wanted people to be able to learn from the documents of the formation of that country. And he collected the documents and preserved them in such a way that future generations would be able to learn. And so he really, I think, documented every aspect of his life. He wrote thousands of letters, and he got really excited when a copy press was invented, and he wrote to James Madison, holy cow, have you seen this? This is amazing. You must get this. And basically the idea was you could make copies by pressing into the paper through this press. But then he got really excited about the polygraph, which was basically, there was a parallel pen with this instrument, and so he could write two copies of the same letter in real time and preserve one. And so that's what he did. He preserved everything he wrote, and he supported Ebenezer Hazard in his project to preserve the documents of the British colonies in the early United States. He also listed all the essential documents and made this sort of archive that was not only a list of those essential documents of the colonies and the early states. But scholars have actually described his only published book, the Notes on the States of Virginia, as an archival project. And so Jefferson responded to this list of queries that the French diplomat Marpois had sent to all the governors in the colonies, in the new states. And Jefferson was the only one that decided to turn this into a book. And it's been analyzed by lots and lots of scholars, but really what he's doing is he's making a record of everything that should be known about the state of Virginia, its peoples, its minerals, its geography and its papers. And that spirit. He carries that spirit all throughout his life. He housed documents in his own home. He built archives in his public offices. He understood that documents were monuments. And these are words that he said, documents were monuments to the early infancy of the country. And so throughout his archive, we see that there was an intention there, that he was purposeful in what he collected, how he organized it, and that it would be used in the future.
- [24:15]
Jen Hoyer
And then, I guess, I mean, reading your book, I could see the clear lines between libraries and archives and museums. But some of it also, some of that behavior definitely bleeds over into his work with libraries, which is the focus of the second section of your book. And I guess Jefferson's impact on libraries is huge, just through his impact on collections and classification systems at Library of Congress. And you wrote in this section, I'm quoting here, that Jefferson's mastery of knowledge is intrinsic to and entangled with the mastery of human subjects. So when we look at the knowledge organization systems that we've inherited from Jefferson, what are some of the things that we should know or that we can learn from him, about him by looking at the classification systems he developed?
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Melissa Adler
Yeah, I love this question, and there's so many ways to answer this, but I think that, yeah, I sort of the name of one of those chapters is the Blueprint of His Own Mind. And that comes from Arthur Bester, who had done a study in the 1950s of presidents in their libraries. And he's saying that Jefferson's library should be considered a blueprint of his own mind. And so I think there is something to be said for not necessarily psychoanalyzing this man. I'm not really interested in doing that, but others have actually. Kevin Hayes, Fawn Brody, they have already looked at his catalog and made a connection between the loss of his wife and the cataloging of his books. And so it's no accident, I'm sure, that he was writing both the notes on the state of Virginia and his classified catalog around the same time that his wife was dying. And she died from complications from. From childbirth, but over time, not immediately. And so we know that his daughter described the way that he. He wrote constantly at the. And stayed home while his. While his wife was dying. And so there's something to be said for the way that he's organizing his books. And again, Fawn Brody has. Has said that. And Fawn Brody is really the. The first person who really sort of unveiled the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Yeah. So the enslaved half sister of Martha, his wife, and Fawn Brody wrote this study before we had the DNA testing, before we had confirmation that, in fact, the children that Sally Hemings for were Jeffersons. So she wrote this very bold, daring work. And in that, one of the claims she makes is that perhaps we can see his cataloging project as an act of mourning, as an act of trying to get control when his whole world was out of control and he was experiencing this tremendous loss. And so I think that if you see it that way, there's something really compelling, I think. So in this moment, he's also turning to Diderot and d' Alembert's encyclopedie as a model from which to organize his library. And their encyclopedia was based on Francis Bacon's plan for the organization of knowledge. And Bacon had organized knowledge into these categories of memory, reason, and imagination for the purpose of unifying all knowledge. And Dennis Diderot and d' Alembert, in their Encyclopedie, used that framework to organize all the entries in their massive encyclopedia. And then Jefferson used it to classify his books. And in that. Then in that framework, when we dig deeper, we can find these patterns within those sections about how he saw the world. And so he used the concept of memory. And it just should be said that Bacon is talking about the faculties of the mind. So memory, reason, imagination. And so Jefferson operationalizes this in his catalog into history, philosophy, and the arts. And so then within that, what ends up. What I try to do is look at his analytic order. So he has a shelf order in his catalog, but he also has an analytic order. And it's there that you can discern his worldview and how he sees the subjects in his own personal collection. And again, people like Kevin Hayes and Douglas Wilson, they have looked at his catalog and they've found some patterns. So Hayes says we can see a north, south orientation to his histories and so on. And here's where I wanted to find out if we could find some evidence of racializing techniques through classification of his books. And in his philosophy section, for example, the books about slavery are all grouped together within this section on ethics. And so I think, yeah, if you look there, you can kind of see, oh, yeah, there is an emerging category. It's not just about. It's not just the fact that it's about slavery, but that we can find that there are patterns where his concerns about slavery and race are grouped together. And so I think the most striking example. This is kind of a windy way to get here. It's a long sort of prologue. But the point I want to make, and I think one of the most interesting findings of this research is that that these acts of placing works by or about black people or indigenous peoples is not an accident. He was writing the notes on the state of Virginia at the same time that he was writing his catalog. And when he was writing the notes, he included a section and a long commentary about slavery and race based on early racial science. And he uses examples from literature, Ignatius Sancho and Phillis Guidley in particular. And he highlights those two writers. And the case of Sancho is particularly striking because he says that he goes on to this sort of really negative description of Sancho's work, despite the fact that Jefferson's favorite author, Lawrence Stern, was in dialogue with Sancho, was an abolitionist, and really supported the work of Sancho. Jefferson said that his work has to be regarded as being at the bottom of the class, bottom of the category. And not only that, the category in which Jefferson placed Sancho's work was the epistolary chapter of his book catalog in Literature and Fine Arts. But arguably, this collection of letters from Sancho should be in history, right? They were real letters. They weren't fictional. They weren't made up. And of those letters, some of them, yeah, Stern and Sancho had exchanged letters. So why didn't that go in history? Why didn't that go in the history section? Why did that go in literature, fine arts, or basically fiction? So these classificatory choices were intentional. He's writing about this in the notes in the State of Virginia at the same time that he's actually classifying his books. And that's exactly what he did. He placed Sancho at the very bottom of the column in the epistolarity chapter. And so to my mind, that signals a technique of marginalization, of racialization, of othering at the level of information architecture. And then I found that, yeah, we can discern a pattern like that across all three sections in the memory, the history section, the way he orders the history books according to geography. And then also in the literature section we can. Or in the philosophy section as well, that ethics part where I talked about the slavery. And not only that, then I also am making a claim that the critical classification research that has found that the Library of Congress's classification of the category of Indians of North America, so books about Indigenous peoples and nations in North America is located in the east section of the Library of Congress classification, but it's in this pre historical section. So other scholars have argued that that serves the sort of so called vanishing Indian narrative, that it serves to erase Indigenous people in the present. And so what I found is that he did something similar with his geography section. So the geography section of his library catalog is really based on scientific exploration expeditions, early ethnographic studies. And so he classifies most of the works that are about Indigenous peoples in this geography section. And again, rather than placing them in history. And so I think that that's a similar act. I think that that's something that the Library of Congress sort of inherited. They placed a lot of the books that he placed put in his G section or in his geography section. A lot of them went into this sort of prehistorical section of American History. And then some of them also stayed in the geography section of the current Library of Congress. Yeah, so it's these kinds of. You can see his worldview. You can see how he sees race and racialized people and these acts of erasure or othering throughout his catalog, in fact.
- [35:57]
Jen Hoyer
Absolutely. Thank you for such great examples. And so then moving along to the third part of the book, this is where you explore Jefferson's impact on museums. And in chapter seven, you describe a museum collection he installed in his own home. And you talk about his creation of specimen collections as a feature thingification of life. Can you explain what that means and what worldviews Jefferson brought to building specimen collections?
- [36:26]
Melissa Adler
Yeah. So the stingification concept, of course, comes from IM Cesaire and the discourse on colonialism. And I wanted to understand the ways that information management techniques like ledgers and other kinds of documents that Jefferson kept contributed to the thingification of life of people. And so a lot of that actually goes into that ledger stuff is in that surveillance book that I mentioned. But in this case, I think using the example of specimens in the museum and animal life actually provides an interesting lens through which to understand this thingification problem and how it's related to information. And so what I was able to do is put that concept of Thingification into dialogue with some really important work in the field of library and information studies, specifically documentation studies, that has been built around this early work in the 50s by Suzanne Brier, who wrote this treatise called what is Documentation? In French? And it's been translated by Rondet and some others. But this treatise has become the sort of formative document in arriving at this sort of canonical set of papers by Michael Buckland called Information as Thing and what is a Document? And in these papers, Buckland is referring to Brier's conceptualization of the antelope as a document. And this has become totally canonical in our field. I think we still in library schools assign these papers. The information is thing. What is a document? And it's important because what Brier says back in the 50s is an antelope in the wild is not a document. But once we capture it and we put it in a zoo, it's a document in and of itself. This animal, this creature, is a document. And so this notion of taking life out of its habitat and turning it into something like a utility for human use, an informational object to be studied, examined, viewed, exhibited, that to me, is a process of thingification. And the fact that we talk about information as thing, and the fact that is using this antelope as a document example to create a theory of documentation and information, and that these have become canonical, I think that's what I try to unpack in that chapter. And she goes on to say that there are all these other secondary documentation processes. And then she'll say, okay, so you place the animal in a cage, or then when it's killed, then perhaps it's mounted and placed in the museum. And then all of these other things happen. It's described. There's a scholarly literature that's written and shared in associations, in meetings and conference proceedings, and all of this material is classified and categorized so that we can use it. And so that connection between classification and thingification, to me is a core, core question that our field really needs to confront. And so I can, in this, I bring this into dialogue with the ways that the animal is also in Jefferson's era, on the Lewis and Clark mission, they found what they thought was an antelope in the wild and their expedition. And in fact, they didn't know what it was. It was this mystery creature. They didn't. They couldn't figure out what it was. Is it a deer? Is it a goat? What is this thing? And so what. What they do is they. They send a specimen to Jefferson from their expedition and he then sends it to Charles Wilson Peale, who. Who founded the Philadelphia Museum. And there's this huge negotiation of, what is this animal? What should we call it? What to what genus does this belong? All these things they were trying to figure out, what. How do we classify this? What do we call it? And Peale, the. The specimen that he received, it had. It had been sitting in a box, and so it was starting to deteriorate. And so he was worried that he wasn't going to be able to put. Put it together through his methods of taxidermy, but he did. So he mounts this antelope. They talk about it at the American Philosophical Society, everything that Suzanne Brier was saying about taking an antelope from the wild and doing all these various procedures to try to figure out what it is and exhibit it. And in the case of the Philadelphia Museum and also Jefferson's museum that he had at his house, they're really trying to cultivate this narrative of what this nation is. They're trying to refute claims that America has a poor climate and that it only results in degeneration and so on. He's using indigenous bodies, he's using animal bodies, he's using life to show that, no, this is vibrant and alive and good and worthy of preserving and exploring and knowing. And so all of that goes into these museum projects. And of course, at the end of the day, the antelope's not an antelope at all. It's a pronghorn. And they were. And the pronghorn is such a extraordinary animal and so essential to indigenous communities and culture. And the way that they just, just like with bison, eliminated this animal to the point where it was almost extinct, it's now come back. But all of these things were happening, and I. So I'm really. I guess the questions I have are like, what can that tell us about our information practices about museums and this sort of national natural history project?
- [43:42]
Jen Hoyer
And I guess, like on the theme of asking questions in your last chapter, the coda, you ask, where does this awareness of the mechanisms of racialization and information leave us? And so some of your writing in this section reflects on where it leaves us in the specific context you were writing, in which, you know, it was May 2025, but you also mentioned that even that was a moment of rapid change. And so I just wanted to give you a chance, like, eight months later to sort of extend that coda and maybe share any other insight you want to add on where you think this leaves us now and what work you want to highlight is especially important both in this moment and against the background of the context that we have from Jefferson.
- [44:26]
Melissa Adler
Yeah, I think it comes back to this question about the role of libraries, archives, and museums in American democracy and the fact that they were among the earliest targets by the right because they know these are essential institutions. So even if you can identify our limitations in the structures and so on, the reality is libraries, archives, and museums are, I think, places where democracy is expanding. These are places where drag queen story hours are happening, where we are displaying books on really difficult questions and problems in society and putting them in the hands of readers. And we value privacy, and we value. We don't always live up to our values, but we aspire to really important ideas and ideals. And at the end of the day, these institutions are based in the idea that information in the hands of the people will hopefully contribute to greater participation in our democracy. And I think that's true. So, yeah, so I'm in Canada, and Mark Carney just delivered this speech that is rocking the world right now. And he described this moment as a rupture in the world order. And I think that that is a really alarming and poignant thing to say in this moment. And when we're looking back at the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, a kind of rupturing moment in and of itself. But that libraries, archives, and museums were essential to Jefferson's vision, if we understand that democracy is meant to be expanding. Jefferson did imagine a day where future generations were going to abolish slavery. He didn't think it could be done in his time, but he. He imagined a day when future generations would do that. I think he imagined democracy to be expanding. He imagined it to be something that we do have to revisit. We have to revisit the Constitution. We have to revisit who we are and what we care about. And so here we are. We find ourselves in this critical moment where we have to examine ourselves. And I think libraries, archives, and museums are among the most important places to protect. So Timothy Snyder has said that to guard against tyranny, choose an institution that you care about and defend it. And so I guess I would say that this work, this project is sort of me standing up for libraries and archives and museums. And I would suggest that that's something that I see workers doing themselves defending these institutions. And as long as that's happening, I guess I still have hope. The people that work in these institutions and the frameworks on which they are based are. They still stand. So, yeah, I Don't. I don't know where to close.
- [47:56]
Jen Hoyer
Well, I mean, I guess, I guess maybe a place to close in was the last thing I wanted to ask you is it's. You mentioned, you hinted earlier that you're still doing a lot of work on Jefferson, and I wanted to give you a chance to share about other projects like ways that you're continuing this research or new directions of research. You're taking new questions you're asking as you wrestle with all this.
- [48:22]
Melissa Adler
Yeah, so one of the ways that I work is that I always have to have a creative project alongside these kinds of critical projects because I think that doing critique and doing history is essential for knowing who we are. But I think we also have to work toward envisioning and realizing other potentials. And so one of the projects I'm working on right now, I just received with a research group of about 15 people, a social Science and Humanities Research Council grant to bring people to London, Ontario around this question of what the antelope knows. We're going to invite indigenous and non indigenous people from a variety of disciplines, the arts, information studies, biology, and also practitioners and community members to talk about the antelope and the documentary tradition. And as part of that project is also building a solar powered digital archive. So I've got two PhD students who are designing this solar powered digital archive. And in consultation with a group called the Copes Collective here, a group of indigenous and non indigenous artists and activists, we're going to create this archive to document the work that they do. I've also got that book on surveillance out with Bloomsbury Academic and I'm co authoring two books, one with a current PhD student who's about to finish. His name is Jack Kaush. We're working on a book on the concept of instauration, which is this strange concept that Francis Bacon used when he imagined creating new institutions and the new Atlantis. And so we're going to be looking at American colonization, early institutions like Harvard in the context of this concept of installation. And installation is also a concept that Bruno Latour uses in his inquiry on the modes of existence. And so we're going to bring put these moments into dialogue with each other and ask, what does this mean? What is installation for knowledge organization? And then the other one is a project on thresholds, on libraries as thresholds between public and private. And that's with Greg Nightingale, who did his PhD here at FIMS in 2020 and he now is a public librarian. And that's really, I would say, methodologically based. Largely on his dissertation and Walter Benjamin's method of montage. So we're playing around with that. So, yeah, lots of more kind of creative and different kinds of projects. Yeah, lots on the go.
- [51:43]
Jen Hoyer
Fantastic. Thank you for sharing all of that. And thank you. Thank you again for talking about this book today. Once again, I've been speaking with Melissa Adler, author of Peculiar Thomas Jefferson and the Mastery of Subjects, published by Fordham University Press in December 2025. My name is Jen Hoyer, and you're listening to New Books at Work.