Enfilade

From the Yale Library, as reported by Deborah Cannarella (3 September 2026) . . .

On October 5, Dr. Abigail Swingen joined Yale Library as the W. S. Lewis Librarian and Executive Director of the Lewis Walpole Library. A scholar of British history, Swingen will lead the library in furthering its goals as an internationally recognized research center for British 18th-century studies. Swingen will also serve as a key leader in Yale Library’s special collections community, which includes Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.

“Dr. Abigail Swingen brings to the Lewis Walpole Library an exceptional combination of administrative experience and scholarly achievement in the study of eighteenth-century Britain,” said Michelle Light, associate university librarian for Yale Library Special Collections and director of Beinecke Library. “Under her leadership, I am confident she will strengthen the Lewis Walpole Library’s connections across Yale, create new opportunities for faculty and students to engage with its extraordinary collections, and extend the library’s reach and impact among scholars worldwide.”

Swingen’s research interests include the origins of the British empire, ideas of political economy, and the cultural and political consequences of economic change. Her scholarship has been supported with fellowships from the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Beinecke Library. Her publications include Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (Yale University Press, 2015) and the forthcoming book The Financial Revolution and the Politics of Moral Crisis in Early Modern Britain.

An award-winning teacher, Swingen joined the faculty of Texas Tech University in 2009 and has been associate professor of Early Modern British and European history there since 2015. From 2019 to 2021, she served as Associate Vice President for Research in the university’s Office of Research and Innovation. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago.

In addition to her research and teaching, Swingen is active in the broader academic community. She is a longtime member of and regular presenter at the North American Conference on British Studies and the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. She also serves as the 2026 program co-chair for the regional Western Conference on British Studies.

In an editorial role, she regularly peer-reviews book and journal manuscripts for top publishers, including Yale University Press, Boydell & Brewer, and Oxford University Press. She was also associate review editor for the American Historical Review and a general editor for the series Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain, published by Manchester University Press.

The Lewis Walpole Library houses one of the largest collections of 18th-century British graphic art and satirical prints outside of the United Kingdom. It also holds the world’s finest collection of materials related to the English politician and writer Horace Walpole, gathered and documented by the library’s founders, W. S. Lewis (B.A. 1918) and his wife, Annie Lewis, who bequeathed the collections to Yale in 1979.

Swingen, who grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut, returns to the Farmington Valley, where the library is located, to assume the position formerly held by Nicole Bouché from 2014 until her retirement in 2026.

“I am looking forward to working with the fantastic people at the Lewis Walpole Library to expand scholarly programming and public outreach,” Swingen said, “so more people will learn about the library’s wonderful and unique collections.”