I, William S. Monroe am a librarian, historian, folk musician, and Quaker, living in Providence, Rhode Island (RI). Known generally as Bill Monroe, which gets a little confusing in folk music circles (but easy to remember), I tend to use my full name “William S. Monroe” in publications and official documents, and WS Monroe for my music. I grew up in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a small (formerly) industrial city on the Schuylkill, about 40 miles from Philadelphia, and worked in factories there after high school, until I ‘d had enough and moved on to study history at Temple University. Since then I have added an MS in Library and Information Science from Drexel University, and a PhD in medieval history from Columbia University. The latter degree was done entirely part-time while working as a librarian at New York University and at Brown University where I was, for 31 years, the subject librarian for Classics, Medieval Studies, Renaissance & Early Modern Studies, Religious Studies, Philosophy, and a number of other subjects, as well as well as the curator of medieval manuscripts and early printed books. I retired from Brown in July of 2024. I still maintain an affiliation with the History Department at Brown and am the manager of a Google Group for discussion of Medieval History, mediev-l:
mediev-l@group.brown.edu
You can find more about my academic work at:
http://brown.academia.edu/WilliamMonroe, or
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/
ORCID : 000-003-3252-2121
My research interests lie mostly in the early Middle Ages, and I defended my dissertation at Columbia University on the life, career, and infamous afterlife of Pope Formosus (pope from 891-896) in March 2021.
Musical interests lie chiefly in folk music of all sorts, but especially in the traditional music of the British Isles and North America, and music of the “folk music revival” of the 1960’s and ’70’s. For more about that, see the Music page, and for some songs, see the Bandcamp page at: https://wsmonroe.bandcamp.com/. I put out a full-length CD in 2022, and that music can be found on the bandcamp site as well as the major streaming services, under WS Monroe.
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