Book historian Michael Suarez, S.J., examined how collections of antiquities in richly illustrated books, many calling themselves museums , flourished in the eighteenth century when the public museum became a significant cultural institution in western Europe. These beautiful books mobilize the museum, bringing new forms of knowledge organization to readers far and wide. The books display cultural capital and, often, political power as well. He used case studies from Florence, Paris, and Naples.

University of Chicago Visiting Scholar Michael F. Suarez, S.J., is the Director of Rare Book School, professor of English, and University professor, and Honorary Curator of Special Collections at the University of Virginia. He writes extensively on a variety of eighteenth-century English literary authors and genres, bibliography, and book history, and has held research fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Since 2010, Suarez has served as Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online . His recent books include The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume V, 1695–1830 , co-edited with Michael Turner, and The Oxford Companion to the Book , a million-word reference work co-edited with H. R. Woudhuysen. The Book: A Global History , also co-edited with H. R. Woudhuysen, first appeared in 2013. Oxford University Press published his edition of The Dublin Notebook in 2014, co-edited with Lesley Higgins, in The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins . Suarez delivered the 2015 Lyell Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Oxford. His 2020 Rosenbach Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania , “Printing Abolition” examined the British campaign to end the slave trade through the lens of bibliography and book history.

He is a CLIR Distinguished Presidential Fellow, a member of the Advisory Board of the Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program, the Council of the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Board of Managers of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University.