Terry Belanger

Terry Belanger
Terry Belanger (photograph by Adam Mastoon)
Born	1941 (age 75–76)
Nationality	United States
Education	Haverford College Columbia University
Occupation	University Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia
Known for	Founding Rare Book School
Awards	American Printing History Association Individual Award (1994) MacArthur Fellow (2005)

Terry Belanger is the founding director of Rare Book School (RBS), an institute concerned with education for the history of books and printing, and with rare books and special collections librarianship. He is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia (UVa), where RBS has its home base. Between 1972 and 1992, he devised and ran a master's program for the training of rare book librarians and antiquarian booksellers at the Columbia University School of Library Service. He is a 2005 MacArthur Fellow.

Born in 1941, Belanger attended public schools in Bristol, Connecticut. He has degrees from Haverford College (A.B., 1963) and from Columbia University (M.A., 1964; Ph.D., 1970), where he studied under James L. Clifford, Allen T. Hazen, and John H. Middendorf. Between 1966 and 1971, while working on his dissertation on aspects of the 18th-century London book trade, he taught advanced prose composition courses at the Columbia University School of General Studies, an activity leading to the 1972 publication of The Art of Persuasion, a writing manual co-authored with J. Steward LaCasce. While in England on a Columbia traveling fellowship in 1968–69, he revised the book production sections of the 18th-century volume of the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL), working with Graham Pollard, who had compiled the original sections for the first edition of CBEL, published in 1940. With Jane Marla Robbins, he co-authored and co-directed a one-character play starring Robbins called Dear Nobody, based on the life of the 18th-century diarist and novelist, Fanny Burney. The play ran Off-Off-Broadway in 1968; it later had a five-months' Off-Broadway run at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 1974.