Elaine Tennant | 150 Years of Women at Berkeley

Elaine Tennant became the first woman to direct The Bancroft Library in 2011 and is slated to retire from that position this year. She graduated from Stanford in 1970. Tennant was appointed to the Berkeley faculty in 1977, having earned her PhD at Harvard in Germanic Languages and Literatures. She is Professor in the Departments of German and Scandinavian and affiliated with the Program in Medieval Studies, specializing in medieval and early modern German literature. She will continue as Professor of the Graduate School. Tennant has served the University in many capacities, taking leadership roles in the Academic Senate, the College of Letters and Science, and on countless committees. She served three times as Chair of the Department of Scandinavian and Program in Celtic Studies, from 1989-92, in 1995, and from 2001-04.

The accomplishments of her decade-long tenure as director of Bancroft include her strong support of the curatorial effort to document the histories and current experiences of many cultural communities and social groups in the American West, Mexico, and Central America. She encouraged a focus on materials produced by and for the members of these groups. Tennant also increased emphasis on women in the collections and activities of Bancroft, acquiring rare books and other historical and contemporary materials by and about women and establishing the Women Leaders at Berkeley Fund. Many significant women’s oral histories and archives, including those of U. S. Senator Barbara Boxer and California Supreme Court Chief Justice Rose Bird, were added during her tenure.

Elaine Tennant opened Bancroft’s doors to new audiences by organizing the first open houses that turned the library into a museum for a day and invited in the public, as well as the campus community, to experience Bancroft treasures firsthand. She supported a series of Bancroft Gallery exhibitions that showcased the contributions of individual Western communities and their intersections with each other in California.

As director, Tennant led Bancroft fundraising activities that resulted in more $32 million in financial gifts (including grants and gifts-in-kind the total is closer to $48 million). The gifts include significant endowments to support the Program in Western Americana, the Mark Twain Papers & Project, and the Oral History Center. There have also been significant capital improvements, such as the creation of the state-of-the-art Logan Seminar Room, and the installation of more than $1 million in new compact shelving to greatly increase on-site storage capacity at Bancroft.

Throughout her career Professor Tennant has brought her students to Bancroft. “It’s a point of pride with me not to let the classes I teach leave Berkeley without having had a chance to work directly with the Bancroft collections,” Tennant said. “The Bancroft Library is one of the most dynamic teaching centers on the Berkeley campus.”

On the eve of retirement after more than four decades of service to the University of California, James D. Hart Director of The Bancroft Library Elaine Tennant was honored with the Berkeley Citation, awarded to those “whose contributions to UC Berkeley go beyond the call of duty and whose achievements exceed the standards of excellence in their fields.” In nominating Tennant, German department Chair Karen Feldman joined University Librarian Jeffrey MacKie-Mason in applauding her as a “selfless and tireless campus citizen,” with manifold accomplishments, including bolstering diversity in Bancroft’s collections, boosting digitization efforts, spearheading successful fundraising initiatives, and lowering the barriers to access the library’s treasures, in addition to her extensive work for the Academic Senate and the departments of German and Scandinavian.