The Friends of Princeton University Library welcomes Dr. Daria Rose Foner ’11, who recently joined Sotheby’s New York after having served as the research associate to the director at the Morgan Library & Museum, to discuss the life of Belle da Costa Greene (1879-1950).

Da Costa Greene started her career at the Princeton University Library and arguably was one of the greatest librarian-scholars of the 20th century. Foner’s talk will explore da Costa Greene’s origins in an upper-class African American community in Washington, D.C., through her ascension to the pinnacle of her profession, and how the racial barriers of Jim Crow America led Greene, her mother, and her siblings to “pass” as white of Portuguese descent.

(Image credit: Adolph de Meyer, Belle da Costa Greene, 1912. Biblioteca Berenson, I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.)