Mindi Zhang Receives Inaugural Jon A. Lindseth Fellowship

Jon A. Lindseth (Photo by Spyros Simotas)

Rare Book School’s Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (SoFCB) is pleased to announce its new Jon A. Lindseth Fellowship, along with the Society’s inaugural Lindseth Fellow, Mindi Zhang.

A businessman with a background in mechanical engineering, Lindseth is passionate about book collecting and bibliography. He has developed multiple landmark collections that he has gifted to public institutions, often working in close collaboration with scholars, bibliographers, and editors as part of his endeavors. Over the years, Lindseth has gifted multiple collections to his alma mater, Cornell University, including a collection on women’s suffrage, and, more recently, a collection of Hebrew fables accompanied by an award-winning catalog written by the internationally renowned scholar Emile Schrijver. In 2024, Lindseth donated his Lewis Carroll collection to Christ Church, Oxford. Containing more than 200 original letters, as well as photographs, books, and illustrations, Lindseth’s gift has been described as “one of the world’s largest privately held collections” on Carroll.

The Lindseth Fellowship supports one outstanding scholar in each cohort of the SoFCB Junior Fellows Program whose work substantively focuses on one of the following areas: Hebraica and/or Judaica; nineteenth-century British literature; translation studies; women’s suffrage and/or women’s history; in-depth single author studies; global bibliography and/or comparative bibliography across cultures; and analytical bibliography and/or bibliographical description.

We are excited to award the inaugural Lindseth Fellowship to Mindi Zhang for his work on cultural exchange between Chinese and Western libraries. Currently a Ph.D. candidate in UCLA’s Department of History, Zhang’s research examines the transformation and continuity of Chinese book-collecting in the early twentieth century, especially in the context of the institutionalization of Western-style libraries in China. He is interested in the process by which libraries incorporated late-imperial practices, such as identifying book editions, cataloging, and composing bibliographical annotations amidst the rapid intellectual, political, and technological changes of the period. Zhang additionally explores how change in the technology of textual duplication from hand-copying to photography affected the ways texts were preserved and exchanged.

We offer our sincere thanks to Jon A. Lindseth for his generous support of bibliographical scholarship in the SoFCB, and our warm congratulations to Mindi Zhang for receiving the inaugural award.