Rebecca Baumann is the Head of Public Services at the Lilly Library of Indiana University. Rebecca has worked in a number of positions at the Lilly Library since 2012, and she is obsessively passionate about sharing the library’s eclectic and wide-ranging collections with visitors of all sorts. Over the past five years, she has taught over 500 individual class sessions on the Lilly’s collections, covering topics from medieval manuscripts to modern poetry and everything in between. As adjunct faculty with the Department of Information and Library Science, she also teaches semester-long courses on The History of the Book, 1450 to the Present; Rare Book Librarianship; and Rare Book Curatorship. She curated the Lilly’s 2012 exhibition on Charles Dickens, the 2014 exhibition on Magic and the Supernatural, and a 2018 exhibition to celebrate the bicentennial of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Rebecca’s research interests are centered on the history of the book, with special emphasis on 19th and 20th-century British and American science fiction, horror, crime, and other pulp genres. She is also an avid collector of pulp paperbacks and books and ephemera related to horror film. She considers herself a friend to monsters and a defender of weird and ugly books.