John Hoover

John Hoover has been the director of the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association at the University of Missouri-St. Louis since 1994. The Mercantile is the oldest library in Missouri and one of the oldest cultural institutions of any kind west of the Mississippi. Starting at the Mercantile in 1983, he was previously the Library’s Head of Special Collections. Before coming to the Mercantile, he was the Fine Arts Librarian at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. John has an MLS from the University of Missouri at Columbia and an advanced degree in history from Southern Illinois University. He has designed many rare book exhibitions for his institution and concentrates his own research on American studies, especially Indian Captivity literature. He is currently the president of the Bibliographical Society of America, one of the oldest learned societies in the United States, and the vice-president of the Missouri Center for the Book. He is on the history faculty of the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the Graduate Museum Studies faculty there as well, where he teaches courses on National History based on the holdings of the Mercantile and on History Curatorship.
Address: St. Louis Mercantile Library
E-mail: jhoover@umsl.edu
Committees: Executive/Nominating Chair
Year of Current Appt.: 2009