Nick Richbell has lived in several countries over the course of his life — the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Canada and now the United States. His career, similarly, has taken quite a few turns, all of which have led him to Clemson University, where he is now the head of Special Collections and Archives.
Richbell came to Clemson from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, but his accent gives away the fact that Canada is not his native country. He grew up in Peterborough, a city in England located north of London. He graduated from the University of Westminster with a BA in modern languages, focusing on French and Spanish with the original career goal of being an interpreter. Instead, he spent the first phase of his career in customer service, managing customer service teams in a variety of industries, including car rental, video game development and airline loyalty programs.
Richbell was managing at call center with a team of 50 people for Aeroplan, which he said was very stressful, when he started to think about making a career change. He had never really considered archives as a career path until a friend mentioned it to him as a possibility. After some research into the field, he enrolled at McGill University where he earned his Master of Library and Information Studies in 2011.
One of his first roles after completing his master’s was serving as the last corporate archivist for the Canadian Pacific Railway. The company was donating its collections to Exporail, the Canadian Railway Museum in Quebec, and Richbell was involved with that process.
“That was kind of unusual. That’s how my career started, was closing an archive,” he said.
The collection included around 500,000 images, original railway timetables, a hotel collection and a collection from CP Ships, which was a large Canadian shipping company. Richbell has fond memories of his time in that role, including working with CBS Sunday Morning and the television show “Boardwalk Empire,” both of which used images from Canadian Pacific’s archives in episodes.
In 2015, he accepted the position of head of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. The collections there were heavily focused on women’s history, Spiritualism, and local history, as well as the photo archives of a local newspaper that contained about 3 million negatives taken from 1938 to 2001.
Richbell said one thing he enjoys about his work is the variety of requests that come in from patrons and researchers.
“I always remember that a guy writing in — he was in his 40s or 50s — he was in the paper as a teenager, and he wanted to find the photo to show his kids that he had hair,” he said. “There is a lot of serious, academic scholarship in what we do, but there are also these little moments where we’re touching people’s lives.”
During his time at Waterloo, Richbell was particularly interested in the Spiritualism collection, and wanting to learn more, he decided to pursue a Ph.D. in history, which he completed this past April.
“We had two notable séance collections that were fascinating, and I’m fascinated with the people involved in Spiritualism,” Richbell said. His doctoral dissertation explores the life and career of Maurice Barbanell, British businessman, journalist, medium and pioneer of Spiritualism, which is a religion based on the belief that the human spirit survives death and that it is possible to communicate with spirits. Richbell has talked about his research on two episodes of the podcast “Haunted History Chronicles,” and has another episode coming out soon.
In 2023, Richbell accepted the role of head of Special Collections and Archives at Clemson. He was drawn to the position, in part, because he has family ties in the Upstate — his husband’s family is in the Spartanburg area. But he was also drawn by the University’s reputation and by the opportunity to work with different types of collections and archives.
“As much as I miss and love the collections at Waterloo, it’s super fun to have this new learning opportunity with new collections and a new team,” he said.
Richbell has big plans for Special Collections and Archives, with a focus on growing both the collections and the team. He plans to hire a military heritage archivist, a digital collections archivist and an oral historian to establish a true oral history program at Clemson to provide resources and support for people working on collecting oral histories. There are also some renovations to Special Collections and Archives’ space in the Strom Thurmond Institute to create a permanent exhibit of Thomas Green Clemson’s will and other estate papers, which were recently loaned to Special Collections and Archives by the Oconee County Probate Court.
“The hope is to keep building strong research collections that will be used by a variety of researchers in whatever they are studying,” he said.
Even though he has only been at Clemson for a year, Richbell has already gotten very involved with several programs and organizations at the University, state and national level. He is a participant in Clemson’s new Chair Academy, which is a leadership development program for department chairs. He is serving as vice president of the South Carolina Archival Association and was recently elected chair-elect/vice president of the College and University Archives Section of the Society of American Archivists.