Libraries and Visual Resources

SMU Meadows art history students enjoy a deep well of research resources right on campus. Libraries are typically open until the late evening during the semester.

The Jake and Nancy Hamon Arts Library, adjacent to the Owen Arts Center, contains more than 180,000 items relating to the visual and performing arts. In addition, the Hamon has over 300 subscriptions to arts periodicals and provides access to more than 40 online resources specific to the arts.

The Bywaters Special Collections in the Hamon Arts Library focuses on the cultural history of the American Southwest, especially from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, with supporting materials on American art, theater, film and music.

The G. William Jones Film and Video Collection also part of the Hamon Library’s holdings, is housed in the Greer Garson Theatre’s 3,800-square-foot refrigerated storage vault, with screening rooms also in the building.

The Lady Tennyson d’Eyncourt Visual Resources Laboratory, located in the Hamon Library, hosts a growing digital collection of nearly 60,000 images and 275,000 slides of art and architecture from pre-historic to contemporary. The collection contains licensed images from the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Archivision World Architecture Collection and images for costume and theatre set design. Of particular interest for the SMU community are digital images of the Meadows Museum collection.

The Meadows Museum is one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Iberian art outside Spain, ranging from early Renaissance works to 19th century Realist and Impressionist works to modern. Works by Picasso, Juan Gris, Ribera Goya and Fortuny are part of the collections emphasizing painting, works on paper, sculpture and Texas Regionalist art.  Annually, the Meadows Museum awards the William B. Jordan Undergraduate Internship to an SMU art history major.

Bridwell Library is the principal bibliographic resource at Southern Methodist University for the fields of theology and religious studies. Subject area strengths are Christian thought and theology, Biblical studies, church history and American Methodism. Materials include books, serials, microforms, audio/visual media, databases, digital items of all types, and rare materials. The collection includes 365,000 volumes, subscriptions to 1,200 periodicals and a wealth of information available through numerous microform and digital resources.

Bridwell Special Collections includes more than 1,000 incunabula (printing in Europe before 1501) covering the fields of theology, religion, and philosophy.  More than one-third of these titles are the first printed editions and/or translations of the texts. Torah scrolls, bibles, Wesleyana and Methodistica and more are part of the 50,000-item collection, which also includes modern publications.

DeGolyer Library is the principal repository at SMU for special collections in the humanities, the history of business and the history of science and technology.  The DeGolyer holds 120,000 rare books, over 2,500 separate manuscript collections, about 700,000 photographs, approximately 3,000 early maps, over 2,000 periodical and newspaper titles and a sizable collection of printed ephemera. Its collection of Western Americana is numbered among the finest in the country.