Eve Lacey
MA (Cantab), MA (UCL), MCLIP
College roles
Fellow (D)
Librarian
Skilliter Centre Librarian
Biography
Eve Lacey is Librarian of Newnham College Library and the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies. She is a Chartered Member of CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals). Before joining Newnham Library in 2014 as a Graduate Trainee, she worked for the Social and Political Sciences Library and Cambridgeshire County Council library service. She studied English at the University of Cambridge and Library & Information Studies at University College London.
Research Interests
Eve is interested in reader services, classification, and accessibility. Eve has worked with colleagues across the University to address the way subjects are described in our catalogues (inspired by her dissertation, “Aliens in the library: the classification of migration”, Knowledge Organization 45.5 (2018): 358-79). In 2021, she co-authored a chapter on “Cataloguing, classification, and critical librarianship at Cambridge University”, in Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries (ed. Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt; Facet Publishing, 2021).
Eve also enjoys researching Newnham Library’s history and special collections. She won the Persephone Essay Prize for her work on cataloguing Persephone Press books (published in Katherine Mansfield and Psychology, ed. Clare Hanson and Gerri Kimber; Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and, with Debbie Hodder, she contributed a chapter on Newnham Library’s early years to Walking on the Grass, Dancing in the Corridors: Newnham at 150 (ed. Gill Sutherland and Kate Williams; Profile Editions, 2021).
She has investigated the provenance of various collections in Newnham’s rare books room, including the Renouf collection of German Romanticism (‘Relics of the Brentano Family Library: The Edith Renouf Collection in Newnham College, Cambridge’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, special issue ‘Migrating Collections: Translocation Research in British Archives and Libraries, 1850–2025’, ed. Sophia Buck and Stefanie Hundehege, forthcoming November 2026) and a collection shared across several generations of women and girls reading between 1782 and 1916 (‘Recollecting a family library: Jane Lane and her literary heiresses’, The Library, forthcoming 2027).
In her role as Librarian of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Eve has written about and presented on the digitised Eckstein Albums, coordinated Ottomans Online seminars and the Gems on Shelves series, and contributed translations of Turkish entries to the Encyclopaedia of Islam Three. She is interested in Turkish library history (“The role of Halkevi libraries in the early Turkish Republic”, Library & Information History 39.2 (2023): 92–109 won the 2024 Donald G. Davis Article Award and the Library History Essay Award 2024). She has also published on the relationship between the British Council and the Turkey in the 1940s: “‘A Purely Cultural Mission’: The British Council and Turkey 1940–7”, Journal of Contemporary History. She is currently researching Winifred Lamb (NC 1913) and her work in Turkey in the 1930s.
