Travis McDade

Professor McDade is the country’s foremost expert on crimes against rare books, maps, documents, and other printed cultural heritage resources. He is the author of four books on the subject. Articles about and reviews of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Times Literary Supplement, and he has been quoted in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Paris Review, amongst other places.

Professor McDade has published articles in academic journals in disciplines ranging from law to history to rare books. But most of his articles, like his books, are aimed at a more general audience. These articles have been featured in The Atlantic’s The Week’s Best Pop Culture Writing, The New Yorker’s Page-Turner, and Arts & Letters Daily.

He lectures extensively on the subject of book theft. In 2013, he gave the Rare Books Public Lecture at the University of Melbourne and in 2019 the keynote to the Oxford Conference for the Book. For the 2016-17 school year he was the interim Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois. He is an active member of the Mystery Writers of America.