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In this presentation, Associate Curator Alison Fraser and Curator James Maynard will discuss the history and holdings of the University at Buffalo James Joyce Collection and present a virtual tour of highlights. Part of the University Libraries’ Poetry Collection, the library of record for 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone poetry, the UB James Joyce Collection is the world’s largest and most comprehensive compilation of manuscripts and other materials related to the renowned Irish author. It comprises more than 10,000 pages of Joyce’s working papers, notebooks, manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, portraits, publishing records, important memorabilia, and ephemeral material, as well as Joyce’s Paris library. Supplementing the archive is a complete set of first editions including most issues and states of every book published by Joyce, translations, a large number of his magazine appearances, and virtually all significant criticism. Together, these materials thoroughly document Joyce’s artistic life and provide unmatched glimpses into his writing process and literary relationships. For Bloomsday 2021 the Poetry Collection launched a James Joyce mural in downtown Buffalo and they are currently designing a UB James Joyce Museum for which they received $10 million in New York State funding.

As Curator of the University at Buffalo (UB) Libraries Poetry Collection, James Maynard directs the UB James Joyce Collection. In 2009 he helped organize the exhibition Discovering James Joyce: The University at Buffalo Collection and edited the exhibition catalogue of the same title. He has published widely on and edited a number of collections relating to the poet Robert Duncan, including Ground Work: Before the War/In the Dark (2006), (Re:)Working the Ground: Essays on the Late Writings of Robert Duncan (2011), and Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime (2018). His edition of Robert Duncan: Collected Essays and Other Prose (2014) received the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. His most recent publication (coedited with Judith Goldman) is Soundings in Context: Poetry's Embodiments (2024), the second volume in the University at Buffalo Robert Creeley Lectures in Poetry and Poetics series.

Alison Fraser is Associate Curator of the Poetry Collection and Curator of the Rare & Special Books Collection at UB. In 2022, she curated the exhibit “That all books might published be”: Sylvia Beach’s Ulysses as part of the Poetry Collection’s celebration of the centennial. She has edited The Collages of Helen Adam (2017) and co-edited Nice: Collected Poems by David Melnick (2023), and has published on the history of twentieth-century literary archives, teaching in special collections, and the homemade ephemeral book objects of twentieth-century poets. She is a senior fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.

Damien Keane is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Ireland and the Problem of Information (Penn State UP, 2014), as well as articles on radio broadcasting, intelligence monitoring, and literary recordings. He is currently working on two projects: in the shorter term, one on the afterlives of James Joyce's recordings in the LP era; and in the longer term, one that centers on record keeping and so-called grey literature.