Nicholas G. Meriwether is Grateful Dead Archivist at the University of California–Santa Cruz. He studied history at Princeton and Cambridge and library and archival science at the University of South Carolina. His work on the Dead has appeared in numerous popular and scholarly books and periodicals, including Reading the Grateful Dead: A Critical Survey (2012), All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead Phenomenon (2007) and the scholarly series Dead Letters: Essays on the Grateful Dead Phenomenon (2001-2009), which he edited. He is Series Editor of the forthcoming University of California Press series, Studies in the Grateful Dead. His scholarship includes articles, chapters and books on the counterculture and American Southern literature and history.