Deborah Stewart

As Head, Deb oversees all aspects of the Penn Museum Library and the Daniel G. Brinton Collection, as well as collection development, subject reference, and liaison duties for the Department of Anthropology and the Penn Museum. She came to the Penn Libraries from the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, where she served as the Librarian for Byzantine Studies and was responsible for maintaining and developing the world's most comprehensive collection for Byzantine studies while handling the full range of patron services. 

Currently, Deb serves on the Penn Libraries' Exhibits Committee and the Access Services Steering Committee. Previously, she has worked on the Research Data and Digital Scholarship Team and Penn Libraries' Strategic Planning Steering Committee among others. Outside of Penn, she is closely affiliated with the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS), Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), Consortium for Hellenic Studies Librarians, and the Forum for Classics, Libraries and Scholarly Communications Interest Group of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS), under whose sponsorship she has organized conference panels such as "Managing Archaeological Data in the Digital Age" and "Humanities Publishing in Transition" at the AIA/SCS annual meetings. Currently, she serves as the founder and Chair of the Digital Archaeology Interest Group of AIA and a representative on the Managing Committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. In 2024, she contributed an article, "Once Again from the Beginning: Re-Inventing the Museum Library at the University of Pennsylvania" to a special issue of the International Journal of Librarianship, edited by ARLIS colleagues Anne Evenhaugen and Celia Emmelhainz. 

Before embarking on her career in libraries, Deb pursued an M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College, an M.A. in Classical Studies from Florida State University, and a B.A. in Classical Studies and Mathematics from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. She worked on several archaeological projects in Tunisia, Greece, Britain, and the eastern U.S., including cultural resources management fieldwork in the mid-Atlantic states. She has curated or co-curated over 15 exhibits at Dumbarton Oaks and at Penn. The archaeology of houses and households continues to be among Deb's personal research interests, and, as former chair of the AIA's Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology Interest Group, she co-edited an open-access collection of papers on Deserted Villages: Perspectives from the Eastern Mediterranean (2021). Her professional research focuses on cultural heritage informatics, particularly emerging needs for responsible management of archaeological and anthropological fieldwork data.