This news appears in the Winter/Spring 2025 edition of The Bridwell Quarterly. The Spring 2025 edition of The Bridwell Quill, the library director’s thought piece, is available now.
Transformative developments underway at Bridwell Library
Exciting changes are in the future for Bridwell Library. With the announcement of a $2.5 million Religion and Culture grant from the Lilly Endowment, Bridwell looks forward to the construction of a new papermaking and historical printing press lab on the lower level of the library, an antiquities museum on the second floor, and updated spaces in the Blue Room and Prothro Galleries on the first floor. The timeline for the grant will cover the next five years, but the primary design and construction will take place over the next two years, with programming and events incorporated into the projects in the latter years of the grant schedule. The extent to which this grant and the projects involved will expand Bridwell’s cultural footprint is yet to be seen, but it is expected that all aspects of these renovations and upgrades will attract visitors from around the world, especially the papermaking and printing press labs and the antiquities museum.
Building momentum with the Bridwell Press
Not only has Bridwell experienced success in this regard, but it has also made notable progress in its other endeavors. The Bridwell Press – the professional publishing arm of Bridwell at SMU Libraries and the Perkins School of Theology – has seen tremendous development and production with new partnerships and initiatives that have led to unexpected but positive growth.
The press, which recently became the official publishing partner with NYU’s Initiative on Global Italian Religious Networks, covers a comprehensive range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, with a focus on cultural and linguistic heritage. Works in translation—primarily texts published before 1930—have become central to the focus and output of the press across several disciplinary series, including the East & Central Asia Series, Armenian Series, and Cambodian Series. The publisher for its poetry series, Bridwell Press also supports the vision and efforts of SMU’s Project Poëtica.
Exploring archival and publishing relationships through global partnerships
The Bridwell Press has a mission to “engage with a broad community of authors, who seek to publish creative, quality, and freely accessible works on a global scale.” The press embodies this mission through its recent work in a city thousands of miles away: Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Almaty is more than seven thousand miles from Dallas, Texas, yet it has a number of cultural, historical, and literary connections. In this case, the work being done at Bridwell Library on the history of manuscripts, traditional papermaking and printmaking, and associated studies on the history of the book forms a connection to the rich and diverse cultural history of Kazakhstan’s major cities. Almaty, especially, has a long history of arts, music, literature, and history, which today can be found in an array of organizations and institutions around the city. Almaty is known for its location just below the foothills of the magisterial Tian-Shen mountains, designed with broad boulevards and populated with grand gardens and scores of mountain-fed water fountains all around the city. Its cultural institutions are rich with manuscripts in a variety of languages collected from the region, and many locals still hold personal family archives of rare manuscripts in their homes. Scholars from around the world regularly gather in this area and discuss implications of manuscript studies and history of the region and consider the possibilities of expanding publishing on the themes of Central Asian history, literature, and culture, for example.
The work of Bridwell Press in the last couple years has focused on the gaps in the publishing world of works in English from this part of the world. In particular, many early Kazakh literary works have never been translated, and now with these initiatives, Bridwell Press will begin publishing works translated from Kazakh into English in 2025–2026. Manuscript studies too have become a focus of publishing needs, and places like Almaty have proven distinctly important for supporting ongoing efforts to locate, identify, and ultimately publish long-neglected texts from Central Asia. For more on Bridwell’s engagement with global partners, The Bridwell Quarterly features additional content.
The Winter and Spring double issue of The Bridwell Quarterly features a range of topics, including more details about the Lilly Endowment grant, research on museum and exhibition design, manuscript studies and special collections engagements in Central Asia, partnerships with the Houston MFA, literary and cultural events, lectures on museum curation at the World Methodist Conference in Sweden, and reports from the annual Guild of Book Workers Conference, this last year held in Providence, RI. The Guild brings together a great gathering of book and paper arts enthusiasts, specialists, and professionals, to learn about the most recent trends in the field. Among those interested in these specialized arts are many who also participated in the most recent triennial DeGolyer American Bookbinding Competition and Conference, held at Bridwell Library the week of May 26th.
