The measles ‘is not a benign disease’
March 5, 2025
Becoming Northwestern’s new University archivist has been a fitting homecoming for Matthew Richardson ’06, ’13 MA.
As a child, Richardson spent countless afternoons in his dad’s comic book store, surrounded by mylar sleeves and acid-free boards designed to protect treasured superheroes from the wear of time. Combine that with a mother who worked in higher education administration, and you’ve got something that looks a lot like Richardson’s current day to day.
“Now that I look back, if you add those two things together, it’s pretty much my job,” he said.
The answer feels natural now, but it took Richardson time to get there, including a stint in Northwestern Libraries’ preservation department before taking a position in the University of Houston Libraries Special Collections. There, Richardson reported to the university archivist and began to work with people donating and using the library’s archival materials. “Something about it just sort of clicked,” he said.
A decade later, Richardson is now the one at the helm of his own alma mater’s archives, taking over the position from now-University Historian Kevin Leonard ’77, ’82 MA. Since his arrival in August, he’s been familiarizing himself with as much of Northwestern’s stories and collections as he can (One thing that caught his eye? Original “Dick Tracy” panels by Chester Gould, Class of 1923).
With an ever-growing collection spanning Northwestern’s more than 150 years of history, there’s always something new to learn, and Richardson is happy to tackle it. In a day on the job, he might talk to a potential donor about how their work could fit into the archive’s performing arts collection, help process recently acquisitioned correspondence at the archives’ off-site storage facility and find historical photos for Northwestern Athletics.
Richardson welcomes those niche questions and requests. After all, for any given piece, he said, “it isn’t any good if it just is stored here and kept here, it actually has to go to somebody else, to find its person, find its audience,” Richardson said. “I love the idea of getting people to connect to it and […] do something I couldn’t have imagined doing with it.
