Trinity English Department and Special Collections Collaborate to Curate Exhibition on Jane Austen

As you descend the softly curving stairs in Coates Library, a progressive hush settles over you. The collaborative chatter and noise that greeted you by Starbucks at the library’s entrance fade away. You’ve entered the second floor, the designated quiet floor of the library, where students come to focus, read, and get their work done. This floor is also home to Trinity’s Special Collections and Archives, slightly offset from the main reading room and where you currently can visit an exhibition on Jane Austen, curated in collaboration with students from an English seminar.

“From learning how to properly handle texts in the collection, to studying the misprints on the pages, to curating the exhibition itself, I loved every part of this project,” reflects Samara Gerstle ’26, one of the students who contributed to the exhibition.

December 16, 2025 marked the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, an occasion celebrated internationally by Austen fans, academics, literary enthusiasts, and preservationists with various special events like balls, museum collections, and festivals. Trinity is offering its own celebration of Austen’s semiquincentennial anniversary with this special exhibition, open to viewers during Special Collections’ regular hours through Fall 2026.*

For more than 200 years, Jane Austen’s stories have captivated readers around the world. Austen’s beloved novels like Pride and Prejudice and Emma frequently rest on home bookshelves, and her writing has inspired countless retellings and adaptations, like the popular film Clueless. One professor at Trinity regularly offers a “Seminar on Jane Austen” course that allows students to dive into Austen’s works from an academic perspective. Professor of English Betsy Tontiplaphol takes Austen’s seven novels and brings them to life for students, encouraging them to think about how Austen fits into both the literary canon and our own lives now. Tontiplaphol’s Spring 2026 section of the Austen seminar collaborated with Special Collections Librarian Colleen Hoelscher to curate the exhibition of Trinity’s Austen-related holdings. 

“A project like this encourages students to think like public humanists, to remember that they're cultivating knowledge that has value beyond the classroom,” says Tontiplaphol.

In lieu of a traditional end-of-term paper, Tontiplaphol asked students to prepare didactic labels—informative “tags” associated with the individual items in the collection—for the exhibition. Each student was responsible for writing didactic labels for three items in the exhibition. Part of the challenge of this assignment came from making academic research approachable for the public, while still representing the breadth and depth of their studies. After studying their items and conducting thorough research, students were able to shape a meaningful narrative about each item’s significance and relationship to Austen.

Students enjoyed the unique opportunity to write something other than a typical final paper. “This was the first time I had gotten to explore the course's content through something as creative as curating a special collections exhibition,” says Gerstle. “It was so satisfying to see all of it come together—to be able to show your work off and have it displayed to everyone.”

Trinity’s Special Collections holds beautiful editions of Austen’s novels (such as the 1894 “peacock edition” of Pride and Prejudice), important milestones in Austen scholarship (such as the 1923 Oxford critical editions of the novels), and valuable works related to Austen’s life, times, influences, and legacies (such as Samuel Johnson’s 1786 Dictionary of the English Language). “Despite being a small university, we have so many incredible works in our Special Collections and Archives, and it has been a joy and a privilege to get to work with these physical objects as we studied and wrote about them,” says Emma Buhrman ’26.

In contrast to what you might expect, Special Collections isn’t just a room full of books that you can look at, but not touch. In fact, Hoelscher describes Special Collections as being “a lab space for the humanities,” where hands-on, interactive experience with the materials can greatly expand students’ learning. Students learned how to handle the rare books and study them as objects themselves. “In the increasingly digital world, there is something special about rare books,” says Hoelscher. “The contents of a book are important in a class like this, of course, but thinking about the publication history and how different people have interacted with a given text over the centuries provides another lens that deepens the students' understanding of the original work.”

While reflecting on their experience working on this project, students expressed an appreciation for the new perspective they gained. “The opportunity to work with Special Collections gave me a new angle to explore literature through,” says Gerstle. “I was excited by the amount that I could learn about a text through this exercise.”

As enjoyable as they found the project, students still encountered difficulty and challenges while researching their objects. As Monse Munoz ’26 shared, “The research process was a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. This work really just showed me how intense the editing process can be, especially when you are creating something for the public.” These challenges, however, paid off, with Munoz remarking on how the research, despite being difficult, was deeply fascinating and that seeing the final exhibition come together was “super rewarding.” 

One of the most surprising yet fulfilling results of this project was the sense of community that students gained, in large part due to having a physical result to humanities research that they could share with others. The class hosted an opening celebration for the exhibition at the end of the spring semester, inviting the broader Trinity community to view and celebrate their work. View additional photos from the opening event here.

Buhrman found the work incredibly inspiring and is taking that motivation with her as she prepares to begin her first year as a Ph.D. student in the fall. “It has been so illuminating to consider humanities research in new ways,” says Buhrman. “I’ve felt so grateful to be a student at a university that invests so greatly into the humanities so that undergraduate students have the opportunity to participate in research that results in not only an interesting research project but something that brings the Trinity community together.”

The students aren’t the only ones who gained something from this course. Tontiplaphol, who has taught the Seminar on Jane Austen since early in her career at Trinity, reflects on her own learning experience that takes place in community with students. “In recent years, I've really come to appreciate how roomy Austen still seems—that is, how many angles one can take on her stories and characters,” she says. “In addition to talking about Romanticism, political revolution, free indirect discourse, and other conventional literary-critical and literary-historical issues, my students have talked about the questions Austen's corpus raises about queerness, neurodiversity, empathy, femininity, and home. It's really special.”

We invite you to explore the exhibition yourself to appreciate the work prepared by the students, Tontiplaphol, and Hoelscher. To borrow Austen’s own phrasing, as you take a turn about the room, discovering exciting books and reading students’ well-researched labels, you might be surprised by how much research and learning one author and her seven novels can inspire—a physical representation of that “roominess” which Tontiplaphol has found—and that’s just in one Special Collections room in San Antonio. Despite this vastness, there is a deep sense of community: Austen brought together these two Trinity professors, a close-knit class of students, and now you, along with a readership that extends across the globe and has existed for more than two centuries.