Julia is a bench-trained conservator who in recent years has turned her focus to the study and teaching of historical binding structure and style, with a special emphasis on early Coptic book structures. Julia has taught a variety of early structures around the U.S. and beyond, and has had the opportunity to travel to Cairo twice to study the bindings that originally sparked her interest in early bindings, the fourth century single-quire bindings known as the Nag Hammadi codices.
In 2008 Julia received a Kress Foundation/FAIC conservation publication fellowship to support the writing of a book on historical structure and style titled Books Will Speak Plain: A handbook for identifying and describing historical bindings, published by The Legacy Press and just released in December 2010 (go to www.thelegacypress.com for details). The book is directed toward curators, collectors, and conservators, and will be of interest to book artists who like to draw on historical structure as a platform for their own work.
Early American bindings have been an area of growing interest; as a group they have been largely ignored in scholarly histories of binding. An example is a style described as American scaleboard (scabbard) bindings; Julia was in Philadelphia in the fall of 2010 on a month-long research fellowship at The Library Company to study scaleboard examples in the collection and develop a typology of these interesting, eccentric bindings, and she plans to write about and teach workshops on these neglected bindings in the future.