Fernanda Perrone is the Archivist and Head of the Exhibitions Program and Curator of the William Elliot Griffis Collection, Special Collections/University Archives. She received her B.A. and M.A. from McGill University, D. Phil in history from Oxford University, and an M.L.S. from Rutgers University. Since 1992, she has worked as an archivist at Special Collections and University Archives, New Brunswick Libraries (SC/UA), specializing in manuscript collections, especially the documentation of women’s higher education and women=s organizations. In 2003, she was appointed Head of the Exhibitions Program at SC/UA and Curator of the William Elliot Griffis Collection, a special collection on Westerners in Japan and Japan’s sphere of influence in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.
Fernanda has published several articles related to the Griffis Collection, including “Invisible Network: Japanese Students at Rutgers during the Early Meiji Period,” Kindai Nihon kenkyu (2017); and “The Rutgers Network in Meiji Japan,” Rikkyo American Studies (2017). She also co-authored The Douglass Century: The Transformation of the Women’s College at Rutgers (Rutgers University Press, 2018).
In her community, Fernanda serves as vice president of New Brunswick Sister Cities, Inc., where she regularly collaborates with New Brunswick’s sister cities in Japan, Fukui and Tsuruoka. She has visited Japan six times.