Timothy Barrett

Timothy D. Barrett is an American papermaker, researcher, and paper historian. He is professor emeritus and a former director of the University of Iowa Center for the Book. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2009.

Early life Barrett grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, once known as the "Paper City" due to its prominent papermaking industry. His father, an English professor at Kalamazoo College, would take the family to visit local factories, including a paper mill on one occasion. He built his own papermaking mould and deckle before ever making paper himself.

In 1975, Barrett received a two-year Fulbright Fellowship to study papermaking in Japan. With no previous knowledge of Japanese culture or language, he explored the countryside to find papermakers and learn about their process. In the same year, along with book conservators Hedi Kyle and Gary Frost, he co-founded the Paper and Book Intensive (PBI), an annual series of bookbinding, papermaking, and conservation workshops at the Ox-Bow School of Art. He researched early European handmade papers for several years with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kress Foundation.

University of Iowa Center for the Book In 1986, Kim Merker founded the University of Iowa Center for the Book (UICB) and invited Barrett to join the faculty, making Iowa one of the only universities in the country to employ a papermaker. In 2012 he was again director of the UICB, and he remained in that role until his retirement in 2020. a companion to his 1983 publication on Japanese papermaking; the book was described as "the first comprehensive how-to book about traditional European hand papermaking since Dard Hunter's renowned reference, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft".

Retirement and legacy Barrett retired from the UICB in 2020 with plans to set up a workshop in his basement to continue making paper.

Awards Fulbright Fellowship, 1975 European Hand Papermaking: Traditions, Tools, and Techniques (Ann Arbor, Mich.: The Legacy Press, 2018; )

Websites Paper Through Time: Nondestructive Analysis of 14th- Through 19th-Century Papers (The University of Iowa, 2012)