“I feel very welcome at Emory and am excited to work with its world-class collections and scholars.” – Peter Shirts

Peter Shirts has joined the Woodruff Library as the newest music librarian. Prior to coming to Atlanta, he was the music and audiovisual librarian for over two years at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Peter also spent time as the Junior Fellow Intern in the Music Division of the Library of Congress.

A native of Utah, Peter holds a bachelor’s degree in music education from Brigham Young University, a master’s degree in musicology from the University of Michigan, and a master’s degree in library science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Peter moved to Atlanta with his wife, Katherine, who just finished her degree in library science after completing a PhD in British literature. He enjoys singing, birdwatching, traveling, reading speculative fiction, blogging about music, and collecting musical instruments—someday he may actually learn to play them all. Peter recently made this awesome parody music video about Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.

You are probably wondering why Peter decided to leave Hawaii—”While I enjoyed my time there, it turns out Hawaii is an expensive place to live, and being 2,500 miles from land makes travel costly and communicating with anyone on the mainland difficult,” said Peter. “Besides, I’m not much of a beach person. I feel very welcome at Emory and am excited to work with its world-class collections and scholars.”

You can reach Peter at pshirts [at] emory [dot] edu.