Skip to main content

Trudi Abel

Senior Fellow
Duke University Libraries
Box 90185, Durham, NC 27708-0185
166 Rubenstein Library, Box 90185, Durham, NC 27708

Overview


Trudi Abel is a cultural historian and archivist at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Senior Fellow in Information Science & Studies at Duke University. She founded the Digital Durham Project (digitaldurham.duke.edu) in 1999. This digital repository provides a range of maps, photographs, manuscript letters, printed matter, ephemera and 1880 census data for Durham, North Carolina.

She currently directs the Archives Alive initiative at the Rubenstein Library and “Teaching with Archives,” a Duke Summer Doctoral Academy seminar.  She frequently teaches the Digital Durham seminar with Victoria Szabo.

Abel's scholarship focuses on the history of the book in America--particularly the rise of juvenile popular fiction in the early twentieth century and e-books and price fixing in the early twenty-first century.

Current Duke Appointments & Affiliations


Recent News Items


Published November 21, 2018
ABC News11
Duke Library Houses Letters Penned by Alexander Hamilton
Published November 18, 2018
WRAL.COM
Letter from Alexander Hamilton Held in Duke University Library
Published August 2, 2010
Lenovo.com
Putting a Digital Touch to Durham's Historical Walltown Neighborhood

View All News Items

Recent Scholarly Works


“The ‘Pleasure and Profit’ of Reading: Adolescents and Juvenile Popular Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century”

Book section · April 28, 2020 Featured Publication Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the ages Bringing together the latest scholarship from all over the world on topics ranging from reading practices in ancient China to the workings of the twenty-first-century ... ... Cite
View All Scholarly Works