Anne Garner is a doctoral candidate in Drew University's History and Culture program. Her research interests include nineteenth-century American print culture, the history of medicine, library history, and the history of the blues. Her work has been published in Book History, RBM (A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage), and American Libraries.  She has forthcoming work in the journal Info & Culture and in an edited anthology, The Civil War on Drugs. 

Before beginning her PhD work, Anne was Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at The New York Academy of Medicine and Librarian in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at The New York Public Library. She co-curated the exhibition Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis and the online exhibition Facendo Il Libro: The Making of the Fasciculus Medicinae: An Early Printed Anatomy.  Her virtual exhibition, Between the Lines: Graphic Narratives in the Chesler Collection is hosted by Drew University here. 

Anne's current research focuses on early twentieth-century patent medicine campaigns in the rural American South from 1890-1950.  Using an interdisciplinary lens to analyze oral histories, trade cards, blues lyrics, liner notes, and broadsides, she considers the medicine show as an influence in shaping ideas about fitness for citizenship among postbellum citizens in the Jim Crow South.  Her research has been supported by the Bibliographical Society of America, The Margaret and Marshall Bartlett Fund for History and Culture, Drew University, and Duke University.

Banner image from the Bingville Bugle, published in the Asheville Citizen, August 15, 1916, via North Carolina Newspapers.