Students in English professor Betsy Tontiplaphol’s Jane Austen seminar helped curate an exhibit of rare Austen editions in Elizabeth Huth Coates Library’s Special Collections & Archives. This was in celebration of the author’s 250th birthday while turning a semester of literary study into a public display titled “Jane Austen: a Semiquincentennial Exhibition.”
The exhibit started with an idea by Colleen Hoelscher, Special Collections librarian and associate professor, who partnered with Tontiplaphol’s English seminar, Seminar on Individual Authors, in spring 2026.
For their final projects, students selected and displayed artifacts from Trinity’s Special Collections, newly-purchased editions and Tontiplaphol’s personal library, and wrote the accompanying display label. The exhibition is open to the public through the fall semester.
The exhibit asks visitors to consider how a book’s format changes the reading experience. Hoelscher explained that Austen’s novels can be read in many formats, such as a recently printed paperback, an e-reader, an audiobook, a smartphone or an older print edition, while the words essentially remain the same.
“There’s the story that’s inside the book, but t...