Throughout the year, the Library sponsors lectures on a variety of subjects related to the collection. Recent talks have treated such diverse topics as cochineal and the color red, the life of Francisco de Miranda, the Waldseemüller map, Marco Polo, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History.

These activities, together with occasional conferences, are sometimes co-sponsored by academic departments at Brown University. In 2000 the publisher Berghahn Books, as part of a series on the history of European expansion in the early modern period, issued two new titles derived directly from JCB conferences: The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492 to 1800, and The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800. The presentations at the Library’s conference on Portuguese Oceanic Expansion were published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press in a book edited by Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto, Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400-1800.

The Library staff regularly prepares public exhibitions of material selected from the collections. Most recently, an exhibition first displayed in the Library traveled to the Boston Public Library’s Cheverus Room. Called “Champlain’s America: New France and New England,” it showcases the Library’s exquisite collection of Champlain materials while integrating them into the bigger arena of France and England’s struggle for power in North America. In the summer, part of the exhibition will move to Quebec City to help celebrate that city and province’s founding four hundred years ago.

 In 1988 the Library mounted a major exhibition for the IBM Gallery of Science and Art in New York City entitled “Encountering the New World, 1493–1800,”—a sort of Best Hits of the JCB. In 1992, this exhibition traveled to Fort Worth, Nashville, and Los Angeles. An exhibition of Library items related to maritime history, “‘The Boundless Deep...’: The European Conquest of the Oceans, 1450–1840, ” was featured at the Newport, R.I., Art Museum in the spring of 2003. It was accompanied by a lecture series and richly illustrated catalogue.