What's Collectible?

Please join USC's and the for their Fall Event. Speakers Lana Burgess, Ramon Jackson, Nathan Saunders, and Michael Weisenburg will discuss what makes items collectible.

(Top photo: Abby Cole, USC Libraries Communications)

Dr. Lana Burgess is Interim Director of USC's McKissick Museum and teaches art history for the School of Visual Art and Design. Prior to coming to USC, Burgess coordinated the museum studies program at Florida State University and worked as the associate curator of paintings and sculpture at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama. She co-authored “Sharing Credit: Public Historians and Scientists Reflecting on Collaboration,” with Soumitra Ghoshroy, Allison Marsh, and Sarah Scripps in The Public Historian, Vol. 35 No. 2, May 2013. She has presented her research at the American Alliance of Museums Annual Meeting, the College Art Association, the Southeastern Museums Conference, and the South Carolina Federation of Museums.

Dr. Burgess was a fellow in the inaugural class of Association of Academic Museums and Galleries’ sponsored Kellogg School of Management's Center for Nonprofit Management in 2012. She was a recipient of 2014-2015 Teaching Excellence Grant in Integrative Learning from USC’s Center for Teaching Excellence and the 2016 SCOER! Faculty Award from Thomas Cooper Library. She is a field reviewer for the Institute of Museum and Library Services and sits on the board of the Museum Studies Network (formerly the Committee on Museum Professional Training), a professional network of American Alliance of Museums. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries. (Text source, photo source)

Dr. Ramon Jackson is Curator of African American Culture and History Collections and Curatorial Affairs at the SC State Museum. He completed the doctoral program in History at the University of South Carolina in 2019. He served as co-historian of Columbia SC 63: Our Story Matters, a landmark public history initiative that commemorated South Carolina’s Civil Rights Movement and its dramatic impact on our nation’s broader freedom struggle.

Prior to joining the South Carolina State Museum in May 2023, Dr. Jackson worked as the African American Heritage Coordinator at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, where he assisted the agency and the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission (SCAAHC) with a host of public programs, exhibits, and historic preservation initiatives. He also was an Assistant Professor of History at Newberry College, where he taught survey courses in 20th century American History and special topics courses on Black student activism, South Carolina civil rights, and African American sport history. (Source)

Dr. Nathan Saunders is Director of South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina Libraries. He completed a doctoral degree in American history from USC in 2015. He became Curator of Manuscripts at South Caroliniana in 2014. In 2017 he accepted the position of Associate Director of Randall Library at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where he supervised Special Collections, University Archives, Government Information, and the Visual Art Collection. At Randall Library he became the founding director of the Center for Southeast North Carolina Archives and History. He was also an affiliate faculty member with the UNCW history department, where he taught courses on local history and the modern U.S. South.

Dr. Saunders returned to South Caroliniana Library as its director in November 2023. (Photo: Abby Cole, USC Libraries Communications)

Dr. Michael C. Weisenburg is the Director of the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina Libraries. He has worked in academic libraries for 12 years and in rare books for the past 10 years.

Dr. Weisenburg has had articles appear in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, The New England Quarterly, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, American Periodicals, and, most recently, a chapter on comic books as rare books in an edited collection on Comic Books, Special Collections, and the Academic Library published by ACRL. He received his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of South Carolina in 2017. (Photo: Abby Cole, USC Libraries Communications)

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