Dorothy Miner (historian)

Dorothy Eugenia Miner was born in New York City, New York, on 4 November 1904. She attended the Horace Mann School before she enrolled in Barnard College in 1922, receiving her bachelor's degree four years later. Miner became the first Barnard International Fellow and studied at the Bedford College of the University of London. She studied medieval manuscript illumination with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University in 1928–29 and received a fellowship to continue working on her dissertation on a Carolingian Apocalypse manuscript the following year. Miner was hired by the Pierpont Morgan Library to prepare an exhibition of illuminated manuscripts in 1933–34 and the director of the library, Belle da Costa Greene, recommended her for the position of keeper of manuscripts at the Walters Art Gallery, in Baltimore, Maryland. She got the job and became of the first professionally trained art historians working in an American museum. She was also curator of Islamic and Near Eastern Art as well as the head of the reference library for several years. From 1938 to 1969 Miner edited the Journal of the Walter Gallery and many catalogues published by the museum. She died of cancer in Baltimore in May 1973.[1]

• Scanlon, Jennifer & Cosner, Shaaron (1996). American Women Historians, 1700s–1990s: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-29664-2.