Cristina Bleyer at the Watkinson. Photograph by Julie Bidwell.
Information Services is very excited to welcome Christina Bleyer, the new Director of Special Collections and Archives at the Watkinson Library. Christina brings to Trinity a wealth of knowledge and experience managing special collections. Most recently she was the Head of Special Collections and Senior Archivist for the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Austin. Her notable achievements include securing grants to make collections discoverable through digitization, and the creation of a “virtual museum” to showcase archival material. She is the principal investigator on a Latin American Materials grant “Digitizing the Los del Valle Oral History Collection,” and a Latin Americanist Research Resources Project “Illuminating the Genaro Garcia Collection through Digital Preservation Metadata Collection.”
In 2011 Christina was awarded a PhD in Philosophy by the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale, where she then worked until 2016 managing their special collection. She received undergraduate degrees in Philosophy from Loyola and Russian Language and Literature from Tulane. She is fluent in Portuguese, Spanish, and German, along with reading knowledge of Latin and French.
In a field that included several outstanding candidates, Christina impressed the search committee with both her passion for her work and her warm personality. We are thrilled to have her here and know that she will help write the next great chapter in the development of the Watkinson.