All posts by Arianne Hartsell-Gundy

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club Reads Remote Control

Join Low Maintenance Book Club as we read Hugo Award-winning novelist Nnedi Okafor’s novella, Remote Control. Our discussion will take place over Zoom from noon-1pm on Tuesday, March 26th. Copies of the print and ebook are available from Duke University Libraries and many public libraries.

As always, you’re welcome regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read. Just RSVP to receive the Zoom link the morning of the meeting. We hope to see you there!

If you have any questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu).

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club Reads Romancing Mister Bridgerton

Grab your dance card and a glass of ratafia and join the Low Maintenance Book Club as we read Romancing Mister Bridgerton, the inspiration for the third season of Bridgerton. Our discussion will take place from noon-1pm on Tuesday, February 20th over Zoom. We have access to a physical copy and an audiobook on Overdrive. Also check your local public library for copies.

As always, you’re welcome regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read. Just RSVP to receive the Zoom link the morning of the meeting. We hope to see you there!

If you have any questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu).

What to Read this Month: January

Looking for something new to read?  Check out our New and Noteworthy, Current Literature, and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy!


The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa by Jonathan B. Losos. The domestic cat– your cat–has, from its evolutionary origins in Africa, been transformed in comparatively little time into one of the most successful and diverse species on the planet. Jonathan Losos, writing as both a scientist and a cat lover, explores how researchers today are unraveling the secrets of the cat, past and present, using all the tools of modern technology, from GPS tracking (you’d be amazed where those backyard cats roam) and genomics (what is your so-called Siamese cat . . . really?) to forensic archaeology. In addition to solving the mysteries of your cat’s past, it gives us a cat’s-eye view of today’s habitats, including meeting wild cousins around the world whose habits your sweet house cat sometimes eerily parallels. Humans are transforming cats, and they in turn are transforming the world around them. This charming and intelligent book suggests what the future may hold for both Felis catus and Homo sapiens. To learn more, check out this Washington Post review or watch this interesting presentation he did for The Schwarzman Animal Medical Center.


Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer. ASSISTANT WANTED: Notorious, high-ranking villain seeks loyal, levelheaded assistant for unspecified office duties, supporting staff for random mayhem, terror, and other Dark Things In General. Discretion a must. Excellent benefits. With ailing family to support, Evie Sage’s employment status isn’t just important, it’s vital. So when a mishap with Rennedawn’s most infamous Villain results in a job offer—naturally, she says yes. No job is perfect, of course, but even less so when you develop a teeny crush on your terrifying, temperamental, and undeniably hot boss. Don’t find evil so attractive, Evie. But just when she’s getting used to severed heads suspended from the ceiling and the odd squish of an errant eyeball beneath her heel, Evie suspects this dungeon has a huge rat…and not just the literal kind. Because something rotten is growing in the kingdom of Rennedawn, and someone wants to take the Villain—and his entire nefarious empire—out. Now Evie must not only resist drooling over her boss but also figure out exactly who is sabotaging his work…and ensure he makes them pay. After all, a good job is hard to find. If you haven’t already discovered this story on TikTok, you can read a review on Reactor Magazine.


A History of Fake Things on the Internet by Walter J. Scheirer. Computer scientist Walter J. Scheirer takes a deep dive into the origins of fake news, conspiracy theories, reports of the paranormal, and other deviations from reality that have become part of mainstream culture, from image manipulation in the nineteenth-century darkroom to the literary stylings of large language models like ChatGPT. Scheirer investigates the origins of Internet fakes, from early hoaxes that traversed the globe via Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs), USENET, and a new messaging technology called email, to today’s hyperrealistic, AI-generated Deepfakes. An expert in machine learning and recognition, Scheirer breaks down the technical advances that made new developments in digital deception possible, and shares behind-the-screens details of early Internet-era pranks that have become touchstones of hacker lore. His story introduces us to the visionaries and mischief-makers who first deployed digital fakery and continue to influence how digital manipulation works–and doesn’t–today: computer hackers, digital artists, media forensics specialists, and AI researchers. Ultimately, Scheirer argues that problems associated with fake content are not intrinsic properties of the content itself, but rather stem from human behavior, demonstrating our capacity for both creativity and destruction. To learn more you can read a review in the Washington Post or in The New Yorker.


The Absent Moon: A Memoir of a Short Childhood and a Long Depression by Luiz Schwarcz (translated by Eric M.B. Becker). A literary sensation in Brazil, Luiz Schwarcz’s brave and tender memoir interrogates his ordeal of bipolar disorder in the context of a family story of murder, dispossession, and silence–the long echo of the Holocaust across generations. When Luiz Schwarcz was a child, he was told little about his grandfather and namesake, Láios–“Luiz” in Hungarian. Only later in life did he learn that his grandfather, a devout Hungarian Jew, had defied his country’s Nazi occupiers by holding secret religious services in his home. After being put on a train to a German death camp with his son André, Láios ordered André to leap from the train to freedom at a rail crossing, while Láios himself was carried on to his death. What Luiz did know was that his father André, who had emigrated to Brazil, was an unhappy and silent man. Young Luiz assumed responsibility for his parents’ comfort, as many children of trauma do, and for a time he seemed to be succeeding: he blossomed into the family prodigy, eventually growing into a groundbreaking literary publisher in São Paulo. He found a home in the family silence–a home that he filled with books and with reading. But then, at a high point of outward success, Luiz was brought low by a devastating mental breakdown. The Absent Moon is the story of his journey to that point and of his journey back from it, as Luiz learned to forge a more honest relationship with his own mind, with his family, and with their shared past. Check out this NYT review or this Forward review for more details.


Investing in the Era of Climate Change by Bruce Usher. A climate catastrophe can be avoided, but only with a rapid and sustained investment in companies and projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To the surprise of many, this has already begun. Investors are abandoning fossil-fuel companies and other polluting industries and financing businesses offering climate solutions. Rising risks, evolving social norms, government policies, and technological innovation are all accelerating this movement of capital. Bruce Usher offers an indispensable guide to the risks and opportunities for investors as the world faces climate change. He explores the role that investment plays in reducing emissions to net zero by 2050, detailing how to finance the winners and avoid the losers in a transforming global economy. Usher argues that careful examination of climate solutions will offer investors a new and necessary lens on the future for their own financial benefit and for the greater good. Companies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions will create great wealth, and, more importantly, they will provide a lifeline for humanity. You can find out more in this Publisher’s Weekly review or this Author Talks.

Happy Birthday to Jane Austen!

A Page from Jane Austen’s handwritten music book

Today (December 16th) is Jane Austen’s birthday! Every year I like to write a blog post to celebrate. This year I’m going to focus on music. Her whole family loved music, and she made a point to practice the piano every day.

You can see the Austen Family Music Books because they have been digitized by the Library Digitisation Unit, University of Southampton. They consist of eighteen printed and manuscript music books owned by members of the family, including Jane herself.

If you want to learn more, you can listen to performances of many of the songs found in these music books or mentioned in her letters or novels.  We also have several scholarly books that discuss the importance of music in Jane Austen’s life and work.

Performances 

The Jane Austen Companion

Jane’s Hand: The Jane Austen Songbooks

Entertaining Miss Austen

Jane Austen’s Songbook

You can also listen to a Spotify playlist, and you may be interested in the ongoing Jane Austen Playlist project.

Books

The Innocent Diversion: A Study of Music in the Life and Writings of Jane Austen

The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen (see chapter 17)

A Dance with Jane Austen: How a Novelist and Her Characters Went to the Ball

‘Yes, yes, we will have a Pianoforte, as good a one as can be got for 30 Guineas — & I will practise country dances, that we may have some amusement for our nephews & neices, when we have the pleasure of their company.’
Jane Austen to Cassandra, 28 December 1808, Chawton

What to Read this Month: December

Looking for something new to read?  Check out our New and Noteworthy, Current Literature, and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy! Since many people will soon be traveling, this month we are focusing on audiobooks.


Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo is the second in a series (see the first one). Find a gateway to the underworld. Steal a soul out of hell. A simple plan, except people who make this particular journey rarely come back. But Galaxy “Alex” Stern is determined to break Darlington out of purgatory—even if it costs her a future at Lethe and at Yale. Forbidden from attempting a rescue, Alex and Dawes can’t call on the Ninth House for help, so they assemble a team of dubious allies to save the gentleman of Lethe. Together, they will have to navigate a maze of arcane texts and bizarre artifacts to uncover the societies’ most closely guarded secrets, and break every rule doing it. But when faculty members begin to die off, Alex knows these aren’t just accidents. Something deadly is at work in New Haven, and if she is going to survive, she’ll have to reckon with the monsters of her past and a darkness built into the university’s very walls.


The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler. Simon Watson, a young librarian, lives alone in a house that is slowly crumbling toward the Long Island Sound. His parents are long dead. His mother, a circus mermaid who made her living by holding her breath, drowned in the very water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, ran off six years ago and now reads tarot cards for a traveling carnival. One June day, an old book arrives on Simon’s doorstep, sent by an antiquarian bookseller who purchased it on speculation. Fragile and water damaged, the book is a log from the owner of a traveling carnival in the 1700s, who reports strange and magical things, including the drowning death of a circus mermaid. Since then, generations of “mermaids” in Simon’s family have drowned—always on July 24, which is only weeks away. As his friend Alice looks on with alarm, Simon becomes increasingly worried about his sister. You can listen to an excerpt here.


Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen. Ava Wong has always played it safe. As a strait-laced, rule-abiding Chinese American lawyer with a successful surgeon as a husband, a young son, and a beautiful home—she’s built the perfect life. But beneath this façade, Ava’s world is crumbling: her marriage is falling apart, her expensive law degree hasn’t been used in years, and her toddler’s tantrums are pushing her to the breaking point. Enter Winnie Fang, Ava’s enigmatic college roommate from Mainland China, who abruptly dropped out under mysterious circumstances. Now, twenty years later, Winnie is looking to reconnect with her old friend. But the shy, awkward girl Ava once knew has been replaced with a confident woman of the world, dripping in luxury goods, including a coveted Birkin in classic orange. The secret to her success? Winnie has developed an ingenious counterfeit scheme that involves importing near-exact replicas of luxury handbags and now she needs someone with a U.S. passport to help manage her business—someone who’d never be suspected of wrongdoing, someone like Ava. But when their spectacular success is threatened and Winnie vanishes once again, Ava is left to face the consequences. To learn more, you can read this NYT review or this Asia Media website review.


Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin. The seven houses in these seven stories are strange. A person is missing, or a truth, or memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty. But in Samanta Schweblin’s tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back inside: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, a child’s first encounter with darkness or the fallibility of parents. In each story, twists and turns will unnerve and surprise: Schweblin never takes the expected path and instead digs under the skin, revealing surreal truths about our sense of home, of belonging, and of the fragility of our connections with others. Find out more at Harvard Review or by reading this NYT review.


Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world’s only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner. So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived amongst Earth’s mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle—are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture. And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist . . .

LIFE Summer Research Grant Reflections: Scramble for Western Sahara

This is the third blog post in a series written by the 2023 recipients of the Duke University Libraries Summer Research Fellowship for LIFE Students. You can read the first post here and the second post here. Jurica Miklobusec is a junior majoring in Political Science.

Even though released from Spanish occupation in 1976, Africa’s last colony is still undergoing the process of decolonization. Why is that?

After the Berlin Conference (1884-1885) during which European empires carved up the African continent, the territory of present-day Western Sahara was given to the Kingdom of Spain. After the decolonization of Morocco in 1956, the country has been claiming rightful and historical ownership of the Western Saharan territory, contending that European colonization separated the two geographical entities. Since its independence, Morocco has unremittingly insisted on the incorporation of Western Sahara within its territory, despite the clear resistance and desire for self-determination of the Indigenous Saharawi population that inhabits the area.

The dynamic between Western Sahara and Morocco has long been a perplexing geopolitical riddle. The clash between a collective memory of historical ties and the modern aspirations of a people seeking to define their identity in the post-colonial era piqued my interest. To me, it wasn’t just a question of territorial claims, but one of identity, historical legitimacy, and the complex relationship between the past and the present.

At the heart of my research was a quest to unravel the complex interplay of legal, historical, and social threads that have woven the fabric of Western Sahara’s aspirations for statehood. The primary focus was to understand the influences causing legal and social issues that this territory faces in its pursuit of self-governing and statehood. These questions took me on a journey to Morocco to find the root of Moroccan endeavors to incorporate Western Sahara,
based on what they believe are historical connections predating European colonization.

Morocco’s claim to historical and legal ties to Western Sahara is largely based on religion. In Islam, the sultan is given sovereignty by the population’s pledge of allegiance; historically, several tribes of Western Sahara have offered their pledge of allegiance to Moroccan
sultans. Morocco traces these ties back to the eleventh century. Therefore, Morocco considered that the end of French and Spanish colonial rule over Morocco and Western Sahara would enable the restoration of the old sultanate (now a kingdom). The people of Western Sahara claim that Morocco’s desire for proprietorship has no relation to historical or religious ties, but the exploitation of natural resources. Polisario Front (a Saharawi liberation group) considers Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (a partially recognized state) to be the only legitimate entity representing the desires of the Indigenous population. It considers that Saharawi people bear no more connections to Moroccan sultans.

The problem that I was trying to understand in this research was twofold. First, similarly to the majority of contemporary African countries, Western Sahara lacks a historical antecedent. The Saharawi people never constituted a nation in pre-colonial times, and their present-day nationalism can be described as a recent phenomenon, which took root only in the latter part of the Spanish colonial period. Second, the desire to realize its national project has led Morocco to unrelenting suppression of human rights and defiance of the United Nations and International Court of Justice’s resolutions for holding a referendum that would allow the Indigenous population to choose whether it wanted to be incorporated within the Moroccan territory or establish an independent nation.

Since the end of the armed conflict between the two parties in 1991, the case of Western Sahara has been considered a frozen conflict. Since most of the world’s countries want to retain a neutral influence over the sovereignty issue, they do not express any real desire to negotiate or advocate in favor of any party. This political limbo is an indispensable problem worth researching and solving due to the lack of exposure to International Law, the statelessness of the Saharawi people, and the complete lack of their cultural and national identity.

Engaging with the Indigenous Sahrawi population as well as Moroccans was the most enlightening and enjoyable aspect of this research. Listening to their stories, hopes, and dreams painted a more vivid picture than any document or scholarly article ever could. Their oral history, combined with their modern aspirations, provided an authentic human perspective often overshadowed by political debates. What truly took me by surprise was the resilience and determination of the Sahrawi people. In the face of external pressures and political maneuvers, their unwavering belief in their right to self-determination was both humbling and inspiring. On the other hand, understanding Morocco’s perspective and the genuine belief in a shared history underscored the nuanced complexities of the situation.

I believe that the best approach to conducting research of this kind is to dive deep into the local narratives and engage directly with the communities involved. While scholarly articles and official documents are invaluable, the pulse of such issues can often be best felt by immersing oneself in the lived experiences of the local populace. For anyone wanting to conduct research of this kind—remember that it’s a delicate balance of empathy, objectivity, and thorough analysis. Research, I realized, is as much about listening as it is about questioning. The power of local narratives, the importance of cultural sensitivity, and the need to approach subjects with an open heart were invaluable lessons. Furthermore, the realization that not every question will find an answer, but that every answer will surely lead to more questions, is what keeps the research going.

I am very grateful to Duke Libraries for giving me the guidance, resources, and support to deepen my understanding of this issue and refine my research skills. Being able to personally visit both Morocco and Western Sahara has allowed me to gather firsthand perspectives from different parties involved in this intricate issue. Since the literature on the topic of Western Sahara is quite scarce due to media blockade and journalism suppression in Morocco, conducting this research would have been that much more difficult without hands-on experience. The summer spent researching Morocco and its past was definitely one of the best educational opportunities I’ve had so far at Duke.

LIFE Summer Research Grant Reflections: A New Look at Cleopatra: Egypt, Rome, and Beyond

This is the second blog post in a series written by the 2023 recipients of the Duke University Libraries Summer Research Fellowship for LIFE Students. You can read the first post here. Jason Liang-Lin is a Duke senior.

Growing up, I was always fascinated with  the Ancient World. How could it be possible to piece together what life was like from over four millennia ago? Books on Greek myth, Roman culture, and Egyptian history always populated my hauls from the public library. However, there was no way to dive deep into these timeless civilizations in primary or secondary school. When I stepped onto Duke’s campus my first year, I was eager to delve into a rich variety of subjects, including the study of classical antiquity. For me, I valued the diverse viewpoints that a liberal arts education brings, and Classics gave the bang for the buck. With Classics, I was learning about foreign language, political philosophy, visual art, drama, and literature all at once.

I was first hooked on studying the Late Republic (~130 B.C.-31 B.C.) and Julio-Claudian (27 B.C.-68 A.D.) eras of Roman history from the course “Age of Nero.” There, I learned how the prototypical image of Emperor Nero as an egotistical maniac who fiddled while Rome burned in a self-inflicted fire was far from the truth. My professor Dr. Lauren Ginsberg cautioned us to consider the historiography, the surrounding context for how history is written, of our ancient textual sources. Historiography is critical because of the adage “history is written by the victors.” Though ancient histories written by venerated authors such as Tacitus, Suetonius, and Livy are foundational primary texts, their works often recorded events centuries after they occur and are shrouded by the imposing political currents of the time. This bias complicates any study of history, and disentangling fact from flair is a delicate balance. These lessons were further emphasized in my most recent course “the Romans,” which was also taught by Dr. Lauren Ginsberg and provided the inspiration for my summer project. While transitioning from the Late Republic to the rise of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Gaius Octavian (later Augustus), the prominent figure Cleopatra VII (Cleopatra) became central to the histories of Rome and Egypt. I was drawn to her impressive achievements from independently raising an army to being the first of the Greek Ptolemaic rulers to speak native Egyptian.

From the days of Augustus Caesar to the Renaissance, Cleopatra has been characterized as temptress seducing ordinarily virtuous Roman men with her feminine wiles. Yet, this characterization papers over her status as a genuinely powerful monarch who prevented Egypt’s subordination as a client state, embarked on ambitious infrastructural initiatives, and avidly researched toxicology.

Recent scholarship has been shedding light on the latter narrative, upending the dominant Western paradigm of Cleopatra. However, few resources have synthesized the interplay between sources from classical antiquity and the contrasting perspectives of medieval Islamic scholars on Cleopatra. Further, the rich body of research into Cleopatra has only recently searched beyond the Horatian and Vergilian poetic interpretations of Cleopatra and uncovered diverse Roman and Egyptian perceptions of her. My project aims to be at the forefront of Cleopatra’s image revolution by integrating aspects of her leadership and scientific scholarship, as espoused by non-Roman sources, with traditional classical accounts. This study investigates alternative narratives to the visual forwarded by the Roman elite, taking into account sources both contemporaneous and post-Cleopatra. I aim to use a mixed-methods approach incorporating material, religious, and literary culture to conduct a cross-cultural analysis of Cleopatra, including how the Roman reception of her evolved, how her perception to civilizations beyond Rome deviated, and her ill-discussed scientific endeavors.

With the help of Duke University librarians Arianne Hartsell-Gundy and Greta Boers, Duke LIFE Library program advisor Rukimani Pv, and my research advisor Dr. Lauren Ginsberg, I embarked on a journey for the summer that included reading seminal biographies of Cleopatra, an academic study between Cleopatra and Rome, and literature reviews of modern scholarly research into Cleopatra. These resources were made available by the vast collections of Duke University Libraries. Contrasting popular culture, each book or research article emphasized the lack of evidence that Cleopatra traded sex for political favors or had rampant affairs. In fact, Cleopatra’s beauty did not become a subject in text until centuries after her life. Rather, Cleopatra was a well-educated queen and a shrewd politician who formed multiple beneficial alliances with Egypt’s much stronger neighbor.

In the last part of the summer, I had the privilege of visiting Rome to firsthand examine the material culture created during and after Cleopatra’s rise to power. Specifically, I visited the limited, six month exhibition “The Beloved of Isis. Nero, the Domus Aurea and Egypt,” which displayed the Egyptian influence on Rome the century following Cleopatra’s death. Situated in the excavation site of the “Domus Aurea,” the Golden House that Emperor Nero constructed in 68 A.D., is a section dedicated to Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, healing, and divine motherhood. When Cleopatra was coming to power, Isis’s religious reach was spreading far beyond Egypt because of her appeal to the merchants and sailors of the Mediterranean. Cleopatra, recognizing the popularity of her cult, took advantage of her divine status as a ruling Ptolemy to adopt the persona of Isis on Earth. No doubt Cleopatra accelerated the image of Isis in Rome even after her suicide at the Battle of Actium in 30 B.C.

In addition, I visited the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace. Augustus constructed this monument to promote an image not only of dominion over the western and eastern parts of the empire, but also of the peace and prosperity that only Augustan heirs can continue. In Diana Kleiner’s Cleopatra and Rome, she argues that Cleopatra’s influence permeates throughout the structure, from the design to its figure carvings. First, the Ara Pacis emulated the peaceful procession and ritual sacrifice reliefs found in the Dendera Temple where Cleopatra carved herself with the young Caesarion, the child she bore with Julius Caesar. Further, Cleopatra’s daughter Cleopatra Selene likely appears alongside Cleopatra’s grandson in the north frieze of the Ara Pacis, possibly to represent Egypt’s integration into the Roman empire under Augustus. I also visited the Gregorian Egyptian Museum, a section in the Vatican Museums that holds a rich trove of artifacts from Roman Egypt and Egyptian-inspired Rome. Together, modern scholarly sources and material evidence paint Cleopatra as a powerful woman who had an indelible religious, political, and visual impact on Rome.

In conducting this research, I confronted a number of challenges. Claims regarding Cleopatra’s personality and actions are often difficult to verify, and academic studies readily admit this. All contemporaneous sources on Cleopatra that survive were written by Roman authors who readily employ invectives. Though certain writings are attributed to Cleopatra from a treatise on cosmetics to essays on gynecology and alchemy, there is no definitive evidence of any extant works written by her. Personally, Roman and Ptolemaic lineages were quite difficult to keep track since they have longstanding traditions of incestuous marriages, are rife with political murders, and frequently include adopted children of relatives. Through this research process, I also recognized that organization and focus are two invaluable assets for efficiently conducting in-depth research.

With the summer over, I anticipate exploring deeper into the non-Roman depictions of Cleopatra and how those images clash or complement the Roman view of her. My immediate focus will be to read through Bernard Legras’s Cléopâtre l’Egyptienne (2021), which uses a variety of non-Roman sources to construct a more objective, scholarly picture of Cleopatra. Ultimately I see this project as the cornerstone of a senior dossier for a potential major in Classical Civilizations.

I am grateful for the support of Duke University Libraries and their patrons in providing the intellectual and financial resources for this summer research opportunity. I also greatly appreciate the research suggestions and writing advice of my faculty mentor, Professor Lauren Ginsberg, Duke librarians Arianne Hartsell-Gundy and Greta Boers, and program advisor Rukimani Pv. Finally, I want to thank my 2023 LIFE Summer cohort Axelle Miel and Jura Miklobusec. I can’t wait to see where your research takes you.

What to Read this Month: November

Looking for something new to read?  Check out our New and Noteworthy, Current Literature, and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy! Here is a selection of books you will find in these collections!


Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day by Kaitlin B. Curtice. In an era in which “resistance” has become tokenized, Indigenous author Kaitlin Curtice reclaims it as a basic human calling. We each have a role to play in the world right where we are, and our everyday acts of resistance hold us all together. Curtice shows that we can learn to practice embodied ways of belonging and connection to ourselves and one another through everyday practices, such as getting more in touch with our bodies, resting, and remembering our ancestors. She explores four “realms of resistance”–the personal, the communal, the ancestral, and the integral–and shows how these realms overlap and why all are needed for our liberation. Readers will be empowered to seek wholeness in whatever spheres of influence they inhabit. To learn more about Curtice’s work, you might want to watch this Reader Meet Writer video from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance.


Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. In this gripping, horror-laced debut, a young Cree woman’s dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community and the land they call home.
Night after night, Mackenzie’s dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina’s untimely death: a weekend at the family’s lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too—a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina—Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone. What really happened that night at the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina’s death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was already inside?  To learn more check out this excerpt from CBC, or this BookPage review.


The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk. The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. Blackhawk’s retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America. Ned Blackhawk just won the National Book Award for nonfiction!


A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt. In the stark expanse of Northern Alberta, a queer Indigenous doctoral student steps away from his dissertation to write a novel, informed by a series of poignant encounters: a heart-to-heart with fellow doctoral student River over the mounting pressure placed on marginalized scholars; a meeting with Michael, a closeted man from his hometown whose vulnerability and loneliness punctuate the realities of queer life on the fringe. Woven throughout these conversations are memories of Jack, a cousin caught in the cycle of police violence, drugs, and survival. Jack’s life parallels the narrator’s own; the possibilities of escape and imprisonment are left to chance with colonialism stacking the odds. A Minor Chorus introduces a dazzling new literary voice whose vision and fearlessness shine much-needed light on the realities of Indigenous survival. To learn more, check out this excerpt from CBC, or this review from Colorado Review.


Don’t Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones. December 12th, 2019, Jade returns to the rural lake town of Proofrock the same day as convicted Indigenous serial killer Dark Mill South escapes into town to complete his revenge killings, in this riveting sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw from New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones. Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho. To learn more, check out this review from Tor, or this interview in Esquire.

LIFE Summer Research Grant Reflections: Visualizing Philippine Overseas Employment by Amira Axelle Miel

This is the first blog post in a series written by the 2023 recipients of the Duke University Libraries Summer Research Fellowship for LIFE Students. Amira Axelle Miel is a senior majoring in political science with a minor in music.

Axelle Miel standing in the Plenary Hall of the Philippine House of Representatives in Quezon City, Philippines

Axelle Miel standing in in the Plenary Hall of the Philippine House of Representatives in Quezon City, Philippines

Introduction and Overview

Through the help of the Duke Libraries Summer Research Grant and the Deans Summer Research Fellowship, this summer I undertook a research project that aimed to illuminate the overseas labor migration phenomenon in the Philippines in two ways. First, I wanted to visualize the occupational composition of the overseas workforce throughout history; second, I was interested in exploring the different government agencies involved in overseas employment.

I was drawn to this topic because being from the Philippines, I have seen firsthand how people turn to overseas employment out of necessity, often at a high personal cost. Overseas labor migration began in earnest in the 1970s as a short-term solution for the human capital surplus at home and a simultaneous global demand for labor after the Middle Eastern oil boom. Though initially meant as a temporary labor program, the country continued to churn out Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) at a steady rate as Filipinos increasingly realized that they could earn higher wages by working the same job abroad than if they had done it at home. Not only that, but lower-skilled jobs outside the country sometimes paid even better than higher-skilled jobs in the Philippines.

This persisting wage premium and lack of comparable opportunities for economic mobility in the Philippines have resulted in a contemporary narrative painting OFWs as “modern-day heroes” who sacrifice years of their lives away from their community all so that they could better support their loved ones financially. It is estimated that two million OFWs go abroad for work every year and that the remittances they send back home to their family comprise 10% of national GDP.

Specific project goals

Something that particularly interested me going into the summer was a statistical report that I saw dating from 2021 stating that 43% of OFWs worked in “elementary” or unskilled occupations. I had also heard about an apparent justification and endorsement of the personal costs of being an OFW, especially among those in lower-skilled work. I then became curious about the general occupations in which OFWs were employed abroad. I wanted to know – has our overseas Filipino workforce always been skewed towards elementary workers? What other jobs do OFWs work in that we don’t hear about?

Additionally, despite the pervasiveness of overseas employment in the Philippines, there is currently no clear explanation of the different government agencies involved in the lengthy process of becoming an OFW, from finding work to being deployed abroad to returning home for good after your contract. Even official government sources do not have this information available online – the newly created Department of Migrant Workers, which handles all affairs relating to overseas work, is still in the process of merging directives from different agencies and does not have updated information on their website. I wanted to understand for myself who the key actors were in this bureaucratic process.

I published my findings in this Notion site, where I go in-depth into how I investigated both of these project goals. You can read about my methodology and data by visiting the link. In the rest of this blog post, I will reflect on what I’ve learned this summer and my future plans.

Total Number of Overseas Filipino Workers by Occupation over Time (1993-2019)

Total Number of Overseas Filipino Workers by Occupation over Time (1993-2019). See more findings in the Notion site

Learning #1: Honing my data science and visualization skills

One thing that I had hoped to accomplish with this project was to develop my quantitative research skills. For most of my Duke years, I focused on qualitative research as I felt I was stronger in that area. However, I have increasingly come to appreciate the importance of quantitative methodologies; thus, I decided to challenge myself to use data science to answer my questions about OFWs and their occupations. Over the summer, I learned the fundamentals of Python as I initially wanted to create graphs using the coding language. However, due to time constraints, I ended up using Tableau, a data visualization software, to make and publish my charts.  I am quite proud of the work that I did and plan to continue studying Python and other coding languages!

Learning #2: The limits of labeling and grouping humans into numbers

Other than working with data science, my occupation visualization project allowed me to reflect on the limitations of quantitative research. In a past class, I learned about how statistics often reduce multi-dimensional humans and human experiences to mere numbers. I also learned that the categories that we use to define people in surveys, censuses, and reports contain biases that impose judgment on marginalized groups and paint an inaccurate picture. Consequently, I was especially aware of the implications of the labels in my own project.

Because I was working with data concerning people’s jobs, I wanted to make sure that each occupation group, regardless of their income or education level, was not described in a condescending way. One thing that I knew I didn’t want to do was to use the term “unskilled workers” to describe people doing routine and/or physically taxing work. “Unskilled workers” is seen in literature and legislation, but I believe that every job involves a skill of some sort, whether that is dexterity, endurance, communication, critical thinking, or creativity. Instead, I changed it to “elementary workers.” This is similar to the term “elementary occupations” that is also commonly used to describe similar jobs, but I felt that “occupations” was impersonal and dehumanizing. I acknowledge that the descriptors that I ultimately decided to use are not perfect, as they still operate within a hierarchy that reflects our capitalist economic systems, but I am proud of the intentionality with which I approached something that I would have previously overlooked before coming to Duke.

Learning #3: The importance of bottom-up research

Lastly, while I primarily used statistics and academic literature to answer my research questions this summer, I complemented these sources with an internship at the Philippine House of Representatives, where I was primarily involved with the Committee on Overseas Workers Affairs. It was by meeting people who were actively involved in and were working on issues relating to OFWs that I got to understand which needs were most pressing and which problems I should be focusing most of my academic efforts. Consequently, I am ending my summer with the renewed conviction that scholars should conduct research with both their feet firmly on the ground, not from within the ivory (or Duke blue) tower.

I had intended this summer project as a preliminary research stage for my political science senior thesis, which was supposed to be on overseas migration. The Libraries’ research grant allowed me to delve into data, but also be around advocates and politicians who were doing the much-needed work in the field. This allowed me to paint a richer picture of overseas labor migration.

However, my time working with these politicians led me to discover a topic that was more compatible with my own research interests and theoretical experience – local political dynasties. For decades, Philippine politics has been dominated by families who pass on government seats to different members over generations, with the goal of consolidating wealth and power. These dynasties are a big reason why inequality is still quite high in the Philippines – and consequently, why overseas migration is still so prevalent today. Thus, I am now writing my senior thesis on policymaking differences among political dynasties in the House of Representatives. Though it was not what I initially set out to do, I am genuinely excited for what I will find, and I am grateful that my summer experience led me in this direction.

I look forward to making the most out of my remaining time at Duke, always with an eye towards using my studies to impact my home country of the Philippines.

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club Reads Tiny Beautiful Things

In November Low Maintenance Book Club will be reading selections from Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. We will be reading “Like an Iron Bell, “How You Get Unstuck,” “The Future Has an Ancient Heart,” “Tiny Revolutions,” and “Tiny Beautiful Things.” Some of the themes and topics in this collection are very heavy, so feel free to skip or substitute an essay. We will be meeting on Wednesday November 29th at noon. You are welcome to read either the 2012 or 2022 edition. We have several copies available in our library, and it should be available in most public libraries.

The meeting will be held over Zoom, so make sure to RSVP to receive an invitation link the morning of the 29th. We hope to see you there!

If you have any questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu).

What to Read this Month: October

Looking for something new to read?  Check out our New and Noteworthy, Current Literature, and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy! Here is a selection of books you will find in these collections!


Against Technoableism is a manifesto exploding what we think we know about disability, and arguing that disabled people are the real experts when it comes to technology and disability. When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described “hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn’s disease and tinnitus,” there was no returning to “normal.” Suddenly well-meaning people called her an “inspiration” while grocery shopping, or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don’t want what the abled assume they want—nor are they generally asked. Why do abled people frame disability as an individual problem that calls for technological solutions, rather than a social one? In a warm, feisty, opinionated voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. To learn more, you might want to read this NYT review or this excerpt published in Wired.


When British poet Amy Key was growing up, she envisioned a life shaped by love–and Joni Mitchell’s album Blue was her inspiration. ” Blue became part of my language of intimacy,” she writes, recalling the dozens of times she played the record as a teen, “an intimacy of disclosure, vulnerability, unadorned feeling that I thought I’d eventually share with a romantic other.” As the years ticked by, she held on to this very specific idea of romance like a bottle of wine saved for a special occasion. But what happens when the romance we are all told will give life meaning never presents itself??Now single in her forties, Key explores in Arrangements in Blue : Notes on Loving and Living Alone the sweeping scales of romantic feeling as she has encountered them, using the album Blue as an expressive anchor: from the low notes of loss and unfulfilled desire–punctuated by sharp, discordant feelings of jealousy and regret–to the deep harmony of friendship, and the crescendos of sexual attraction and self-realization. You can read reviews in New City Lit and Chicago Review of Books.


Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa (and translated by by Eric Ozawa) is about a young woman who loses everything but finds herself–a tale of new beginnings, romantic and family relationships, and the comfort that can be found in books. Twenty-five-year-old Takako has enjoyed a relatively easy existence–until the day her boyfriend Hideaki, the man she expected to wed, casually announces he’s been cheating on her and is marrying the other woman. Suddenly, Takako’s life is in freefall. She loses her job, her friends, and her acquaintances, and spirals into a deep depression. In the depths of her despair, she receives a call from her distant uncle Satoru. To learn more, there’s an NPR review.


The automobile was one of the most miraculous inventions of the 20th century. It promised freedom, style, and utility. But sometimes, rather than improving our lives, technology just makes everything worse. Over the past century, cars have filled the air with toxic pollutants and fueled climate change. Cars have stolen public space and made our cities uglier, dirtier, less useful, and more unequal. Cars have caused tens of millions of deaths and injuries. They have wasted our time and our money. In Carmageddon, journalist Daniel Knowles outlines the rise of the automobile and the costs we all bear as a result. Weaving together history, economics, and reportage, he traces the forces and decisions that normalized cars and cemented our reliance on them. Knowles takes readers around the world to show the ways car use has impacted people’s lives–from Nairobi, where few people own a car but the city is still cloaked in smog, to Houston, where the Katy Freeway has a mind-boggling 26 lanes and there are 30 parking spaces for every resident, enough land to fit Paris ten times. With these negatives, Knowles shows that there are better ways to live, looking at Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and New York City. To learn more, you can read this Washington Post review or this Climate Pod recording with the author.


The Ramirez women of Staten Island orbit around absence. When thirteen‑year‑old middle child Ruthy disappeared after track practice without a trace, it left the family scarred and scrambling. One night, twelve years later, oldest sister Jessica spots a woman on her TV screen in Catfight, a raunchy reality show. She rushes to tell her younger sister, Nina: This woman’s hair is dyed red, and she calls herself Ruby, but the beauty mark under her left eye is instantly recognizable. Could it be Ruthy, after all this time? What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is a vivid family portrait, in all its shattered reality, exploring the familial bonds between women and cycles of generational violence, colonialism, race, and silence, replete with snark, resentment, tenderness, and, of course, love. To learn more, you can read this review from Latinx In Publishing or this article from Shondaland about the book and the author’s journey to get it published.

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads Edgar Allan Poe

Low Maintenance Book Club gets spooky with the original master of macabre Edgar Allan Poe. We will be reading the following stories and poems: “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “Annabel Lee” (we promise these are mostly quite short).  We will be meeting on Monday October 30th at noon. As always, you’re welcome regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read. You are welcome to read any edition of Poe’s work. You should be able to find these works in Project Gutenberg, and we have several different copies in the library, including Selected Tales and Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays.

The meeting will be held over Zoom, so make sure to RSVP to receive an invitation link the morning of the 30th. We hope to see you there!

If you have any questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu).

Let Freedom Read During Banned Books Week 2023

Banned Books Week is taking place this week from October 1st-7th. LeVar Burton is the honorary chair. He will headline a live virtual conversation with Banned Books Week Youth Honorary Chair Da’Taeveyon Daniels about censorship and advocacy at 8:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, October 4. The event will stream live on Instagram (@banned_books_week).  Here are some other online events that might be of interest if you are interested in learning more:

From How to Now: Book Bans in the U.S. on Tuesday October 3rd at 9pm EST. Moderated by Ipek Burnett with appearances by Nic Stone, Becky Calzada, Leela Hensler, and Summer Lopez.

Authors and Advocates on Fighting Book Bans on Wednesday October 4th at 1:00pm EST. Join author John Green, writer and illustrator Mike Curato, librarian and Texas FReadom Fighters co-founder Becky Calzada, and Banned Books Week Youth Honorary Chair Da’Taeveyon Daniels for a conversation about the impact of book bans.

LIVE from NYPL and The Atlantic . Banned: Censorship and Free Expression in America on Thursday October 5th at 7:00pm EST.  join The New York Public Library and The Atlantic for a discussion with authors Ayad Akhtar and Imani Perry, moderated by Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance, about the danger of book banning and limits on freedom of expression.

We also have quite a few books about censorship and book banning if you want to learn more:

Book Banning in 21st-century America by Emily Knox

Censored: A Literary History of Subversion and Control by Matthew Fellion and Katherine Inglis

Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times by Azar Nafisi

Young Adult Literature, Libraries, and Conservative Activism by Loretta M. Gaffney

Book Banning and Other Forms of Censorship by Carolee Laine

Censorship Moments: Reading Texts in the History of Censorship and Freedom of Expression edited by Geoff Kemp

Silenced in the Library: Banned Books in America by Zeke Jarvis

Literature and the New Culture Wars: Triggers, Cancel Culture, and the Teacher’s Dilemma by Deborah Appleman

If you know someone impacted by book bans, there are several efforts to make these books available, including The Digital Public Library of America’s Banned Book Club project and the Brooklyn Public Library’s  Books UnBanned project.

What to Read this Month: September

Looking for something new to read?  Check out our New and Noteworthy, Current Literature, and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy! Here is a selection of books you will find in these collections!


Murder your Employer: the McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert Holmes. Who hasn’t wondered for a split second what the world would be like if a person who is the object of your affliction ceased to exist? But then you’ve probably never heard of The McMasters Conservatory, dedicated to the consummate execution of the homicidal arts. To gain admission, a student must have an ethical reason for erasing someone who deeply deserves a fate no worse (nor better) than death. The campus of this “Poison Ivy League” college–its location unknown to even those who study there–is where you might find yourself the practice target of a classmate…and where one’s mandatory graduation thesis is getting away with the perfect murder of someone whose death will make the world a much better place to live. To learn more, you may enjoy this Barnes & Noble sponsored conversation between the author and Neil Patrick Harris.


Jezebel by Megan Barnard. Jezebel. You’ve heard the name. But you’ve never heard her story. “Historical fiction at its finest,” (Louisa Morgan) this propulsive novel is a stunning reimagining of the story of a fierce princess from Tyre and her infamous legacy. Jezebel was born into the world howling. She intends to leave it the same way. When Jezebel learns she can’t be a king like her father simply because she’s a girl, she vows never to become someone’s decorative wife, nameless and lost to history. At fifteen she’s married off, despite her protests, to Prince Ahab of Israel. There, she does what she must to gain power and remake the dry and distant kingdom in the image of her beloved, prosperous seaside homeland of Tyre, beginning by building temples to the gods she grew up worshipping. As her initiatives usher in an era of prosperity for Israel, her new subjects love her, and her name rings through the land. Then Elijah, the prophet of Yahweh and her former lover, begins to speak out against her. Bitter at having been abandoned by Jezebel, he lashes out, calling her a slut. Harlot. Witch. And the people, revering their prophet’s message, turn on her. A stunning revision of a notorious queen’s story, Jezebel is a thrilling lyrical debut about a fierce woman who refuses to be forgotten. Check out this essay “Why the Rise of Morally Gray Women In Fiction Is Good For All of Us” by the author.


The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life by Johan Eklöf. How much light is too much light? Satellite pictures show our planet as a brightly glowing orb, and in our era of constant illumination, light pollution has become a major issue. The world’s flora and fauna have evolved to operate in the natural cycle of day and night. But in the last 150 years, we have extended our day–and in doing so have forced out the inhabitants of the night and disrupted the circadian rhythms necessary to sustain all living things, including ourselves. Swedish conservationist Johan Eklöf urges us to appreciate natural darkness, its creatures, and its unique benefits. He ponders the beauties of the night sky, traces the errant paths of light-drunk moths and the swift dives of keen-eyed owls, and shows us the bioluminescent creatures of the deepest oceans. As a devoted friend of the night, Eklöf reveals the startling domino effect of diminishing darkness: insects, dumbfounded by streetlamps, failing to reproduce; birds blinded and bewildered by artificial lights; and bats starving as they wait in vain for insects that only come out in the dark. Here’s a NYT review and a review from the Geographical Magazine.


American Mermaid by Julia Langbein. Broke English teacher Penelope Schleeman is as surprised as anyone when her feminist, eco-warrior novel American Mermaid becomes a best-seller. But when Hollywood insists she convert her fierce, androgynous protagonist into to a teen sex object in a clamshell bra, strange things start to happen. Is Penelope losing her mind, or has her fictional mermaid come to life, enacting revenge against society’s limited view of what a woman can and should be? American Mermaid follows a young woman braving the casual slights and cruel calculations of a winner-take-all society and discovering a beating heart in her own fiction: a new kind of hero who fights to keep her voice and choose her place. A hilarious story about deep things, American Mermaid asks how far we’ll go to protect the parts of ourselves that are not for sale. You can read a review in the Chicago Review of Books or this blog post by The Bossy Bookworm.


Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People by Erica Abrams Locklear. When her mother passed along a cookbook made and assembled by her grandmother, Erica Abrams Locklear thought she knew what to expect. But rather than finding a homemade cookbook full of apple stack cake, leather britches, pickled watermelon, or other “traditional” mountain recipes, Locklear discovered recipes for devil’s food cake with coconut icing, grape catsup, and fig pickles. Some recipes even relied on food products like Bisquick, Swans Down flour, and Calumet baking powder. Where, Locklear wondered, did her Appalachian food script come from? And what implicit judgments had she made about her grandmother based on the foods she imagined she would have been interested in cooking? Appalachia on the Table argues, in part, that since the conception of Appalachia as a distinctly different region from the rest of the South and the United States, the foods associated with the region and its people have often been used to socially categorize and stigmatize mountain people.  The question at the core of Locklear’s analysis asks, How did the dominant culinary narrative of the region come into existence and what consequences has that narrative had for people in the mountains? To learn more, check out this review from the Southern Review of Books.

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads American Born Chinese


Join us for our first Low Maintenance Book Club of the fall! We’ll be reading and discussing Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (now a Disney+ original series) at our next meeting on Tuesday September 26th at noon. As always, you’re welcome regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read. Copies of the book are available through Duke University Libraries, on our Overdrive, and at your local public library.

The meeting will be held over Zoom, so make sure to RSVP to receive an invitation link the morning of the 26th. We hope to see you there!

If you have any questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu).

What to Read this Month: August

Looking for something new to read?  Check out our New and Noteworthy, Current Literature and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy! Here is a selection of books you will find in these collections!


Swipe Up for More! Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers by Stephanie McNeal. If you’re anything like journalist Stephanie McNeal—aka, a millennial woman—you spend hours every day indulging in Instagram’s infinite scroll. The influencers on the platform aren’t just providing eye candy; these tastemakers impact how we cook, consume, parent, decorate, think, and live. But what exactly is going on behind the curtain of the perfectly curated Instagram grids we obsess over the most? Through intimate, funny, and vulnerable reporting, McNeal takes us through the looking glass and into the secretive real world of three major influencers: fashion and lifestyle juggernaut Caitlin Covington of Southern Curls & Pearls, runner and advocate Mirna Valerio, and OG “mommy blogger” Shannon Bird.  This audiobook is narrated by the author, and you can read an excerpt on Glamour.


American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795 by Edward J. Larson. New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders of the founding who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves: George Washington consistently refused to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation. And we have long needed a history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. We now have that history in Edward J. Larson’s insightful synthesis of the founding. To find out more, read this NYT review or watch this discussion with the author hosted by the National Archives.


This Bird has Flown by Susanna Hoffs. Jane Start is thirty-three, broke, and recently single. Ten years prior, she had a hit song–written by world-famous superstar Jonesy–but Jane hasn’t had a breakout since. Now she’s living out of four garbage bags at her parents’ house, reduced to performing to Karaoke tracks in Las Vegas. Rock bottom. But when her longtime manager Pippa sends Jane to London to regroup, she’s seated next to an intriguing stranger on the flight–the other Tom Hardy, an elegantly handsome Oxford professor of literature. Jane is instantly smitten by Tom, and soon, truly inspired. But it’s not Jane’s past alone that haunts her second chance at stardom, and at love. Is Tom all that he seems? And can Jane emerge from the shadow of Jonesy’s earlier hit, and into the light of her own? In turns deeply sexy, riotously funny, and utterly joyful, This Bird Has Flown explores love, passion, and the ghosts of our past, and offers a glimpse inside the music business that could only come from beloved songwriter and Bangles co-founder Susanna Hoffs. You can read this NPR review or this Los Angeles Times review.


Fire Weather: A  True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant. In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration–the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina–John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for–and from–our new century of fire, which has only just begun. You can find out more with this Washington Post review or this Guardian review.


Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs. In this spellbinding debut novel, two estranged half-sisters tasked with guarding their family’s library of magical books must work together to unravel a deadly secret at the heart of their collection–a tale of familial loyalty and betrayal, and the pursuit of magic and power. For generations, the Kalotay family has guarded a collection of ancient and rare books. Books that let a person walk through walls or manipulate the elements–books of magic that half-sisters Joanna and Esther have been raised to revere and protect. All magic comes with a price, though, and for years the sisters have been separated. Esther has fled to a remote base in Antarctica to escape the fate that killed her own mother, and Joanna’s isolated herself in their family home in Vermont, devoting her life to the study of these cherished volumes. But after their father dies suddenly while reading a book Joanna has never seen before, the sisters must reunite to preserve their family legacy. In the process, they’ll uncover a world of magic far bigger and more dangerous than they ever imagined, and all the secrets their parents kept hidden; secrets that span centuries, continents, and even other libraries. Read an interview with the author or read this review to learn more.

What to Read this Month: July

Looking for something new to read?  Check out our New and Noteworthy, Current Literature and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy! Here is a selection of books you will find in these collections!


An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark! by Florence Hazrat. Few punctuation marks elicit quite as much love or hate as the exclamation mark. It’s bubbly and exuberant, an emotional amplifier whose flamboyantly dramatic gesture lets the reader know: here be feelings! Scott Fitzgerald famously stated exclamation marks are like laughing at your own joke; Terry Pratchett had a character say that multiple !!! are a ‘sure sign of a diseased mind’. So what’s the deal with ! ? Whether you think it’s over-used, or enthusiastically sprinkle your writing with it, ! is inescapable. An Admirable Point recuperates the exclamation mark from its much maligned place at the bottom of the punctuation hierarchy. It explores how ! came about in the first place some six hundred years ago, and uncovers the many ways in which ! has left its mark on art, literature, (pop) culture, and just about any sphere of human activity–from Beowulf to spam emails, ee cummings to neuroscience. You may enjoy this Word Processing podcast interview with the author!


You are Here by Karin Lin-Greenberg. The inhabitants of a small town have long found that their lives intersect at one focal point: the local shopping mall. But business is down, stores are closing, and as the institution breathes its last gasp, the people inside it dream of something different, something more. In its pages, You Are Here brings this diverse group of characters vividly to life–flawed, real, lovable strangers who are wonderful company and prove unforgettable even after the last store has closed. Exploring how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are inextricably bound to the places we call home, You Are Here is a keenly perceptive and deeply humane portrait of a community in transition, ultimately illuminating the magical connections that can bloom from the ordinary wonder of our everyday lives. You can read reviews in the Asian Review of Books and Publisher’s Weekly.


Death of a Dancing Queen by Kimberly G. Giarratano. A female Jewish P.I finds herself involved in a deadly gang war while looking for a murder suspect in this new own voices crime novel. After her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Billie Levine revamped her grandfather’s private investigation firm and set up shop in the corner booth of her favourite North Jersey deli hoping the free pickles and flexible hours would allow her to take care of her mom and pay the bills. So when Tommy Russo, a rich kid with a nasty drug habit, offers her a stack of cash to find his missing girlfriend, how can she refuse? At first, Billie thinks this will be easy earnings, but then her missing person’s case turns into a murder investigation and Russo is the detective bureau’s number one suspect. Suddenly Billie is embroiled in a deadly gang war that’s connected to the decades-old disappearance of a famous cabaret dancer with ties to both an infamous Jewish mob and a skinhead group. Toss in the reappearance of Billie’s hunky ex-boyfriend with his own rap sheet, and she is regretting every decision that got her to this point. Becoming a P.I. was supposed to solve her problems. But if Billie doesn’t crack this case, the next body the police dredge out of the Hudson River will be hers. Read a review in Foreword or at Crime Fiction Lover.


Number One is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions by Steve Martin with drawings by Harry Bliss. An illustrated memoir of Steve Martin’s legendary acting career, with stories from his most popular films and artwork by New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss. He has never written about his career in the movies before. In Number One Is Walking , he shares anecdotes from the sets of his beloved films– Father of the Bride, Roxanne, The Jerk, Three Amigos, and many more–bringing readers directly into his world. He shares charming tales of antics, moments of inspiration, and exploits with the likes of Paul McCartney, Diane Keaton, Robin Williams, and Chevy Chase. Martin details his forty years in the movie biz, as well as his stand-up comedy, banjo playing, writing, and cartooning, all with his unparalleled wit.


My Nemesis by Charmaine Craig. Tessa is a successful writer who develops a friendship, first by correspondence and then in person, with Charlie, a ruggedly handsome philosopher and scholar based in Los Angeles. Sparks fly as they exchange ideas about Camus and masculine desire, and their intellectual connection promises more–but there are obstacles to this burgeoning relationship. While Tessa’s husband Milton enjoys Charlie’s company on his visits to the East Coast, Charlie’s wife Wah is a different case, and she proves to be both adversary and conundrum to Tessa. Wah’s traditional femininity and subservience to her husband strike Tessa as weaknesses, and she scoffs at the sacrifices Wah makes as adoptive mother to a Burmese girl, Htet, once homeless on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. But Wah has a kind of power too, especially over Charlie, and the conflict between the two women leads to a martini-fueled declaration by Tessa that Wah is “an insult to womankind.” As Tessa is forced to deal with the consequences of her outburst and considers how much she is limited by her own perceptions, she wonders if Wah is really as weak as she has seemed, or if she might have a different kind of strength altogether. For more details, check out this NYT review and this review in the Boston Globe.

ONLINE: Big Books Edition: “The God of Small Things”

It’s almost summer, and that means it’s time for the Low Maintenance Book Club Big Books Edition! This year, we’ll be reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997.

The last meeting of three is scheduled for Wednesday, July 26th from noon-1pm over Zoom. At this meeting, we’ll discuss chapters 15-21.

The second of three meetings was scheduled for Wednesday, June 28th. At this meeting, we discussed chapters 8-14.

The first meeting was scheduled on Wednesday, May 25th.  At this meeting, we discussed chapters 1-7.

Print, ebook and audiobook formats can be found at Duke University Libraries and most public libraries.

Although the readings are longer, the low maintenance attitude is the same. Join as you like, discuss as much as you want–or just hang out and enjoy the company. Everyone is welcome. Just RSVP so we know how many to expect, and we’ll send out a Zoom link the morning of the meeting.

If you have any questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu).

Conducting Research After You Graduate

After you graduate, you will lose some of your access to resources at Duke University Libraries. You can still conduct research, but it may require you to do more digging. Here are some tips to help you!

Options at Duke Libraries

Local Academic Libraries

If you are relocating to a community with a nearby university or college, you can often use some of their library resources. Check their website for exact details of services and policies. Here are common things to look for:

  • Do they have a Friends of the Library program?
  • Can you use some of their online databases if you visit their library?
  • Do they have a rare books and manuscripts collection?

Local Public Libraries

Though they will have less of an academic focus than our libraries, you may be pleasantly surprised by what your public library can provide!

  • Get a free library card at your local library. Sometimes for a small fee you can also get library cards to access resources at the libraries in surrounding towns. 
  • Find out what kinds of online databases they have. They may have access to newspapers, data sets, journal and magazine articles, streaming films, etc.
  • Find out how their interlibrary loan program works. 

Digital Collections

Many libraries and museums have digitized some of their collections. Examples:

Online Repositories

There are legitimate online scholarly repositories that may share scholarly articles (often preprints). Examples:

DUL Creative Writing Awards

Are you an undergraduate who enjoys creative writing?  You could win an award for your talents!

The Rudolph William Rosati Creative Writing Award

The Rosati Creative Writing Prize is awarded each spring in recognition of an outstanding work of creative writing.  All Duke first year or sophomore students are eligible to submit work for consideration.  Projects may be any genre and take any form (audio/video, digital media, etc.), but must include a substantial creative writing component.

Deadline: June 15th, 2023

Prize: $1500

For more details: https://library.duke.edu/research/awards/rosati

The William Styron Creative Writing Award

 The Styron Creative Writing Prize is awarded each spring in recognition of an outstanding work of creative writing. All Duke juniors and seniors (graduating spring 2023) are eligible to submit work for consideration. Projects may be any genre and take any form (audio/video, digital media, etc.), but must include a substantial creative writing component.

Deadline: June 15th, 2023

Prize: $1500

For more details: https://library.duke.edu/research/awards/styron

Eligibility for both awards:

  • You must be a Duke undergraduate student
  • You may submit multiple, different projects in a given year but each project should be submitted individually with an accompanying application cover sheet
  • Submitted projects must have been written during the current academic year
  • Projects are judged based on quality and originality of writing
  • At this time submissions must be written in English
  • No minimum or maximum length required

Contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Librarian for Literature, at arianne.hartsell.gundy@duke.edu, if you have questions.

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads “All Systems Red”

Need some escapism this time of the semester? Join Low Maintenance Book Club in sci-fi paradise with All Systems Red,  the first novella in Martha Wells’ beloved Murderbot Diaries series (it’s not as morbid as it sounds!). We’ll discuss the work in its entirety at our next meeting on Tuesday April 25th at noon.

As always, you’re welcome to attend regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read. Copies of the book are available through Duke University Libraries and your local public library.

The meeting will be held over Zoom, so make sure to RSVP to receive an invitation link the morning of the 25th. We hope to see you there!

If you have any questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu).

Solarities 1: Asiya Wadud and Roberto Tejada

There’s a poetry reading happening on campus this Thursday, and if you are interested in reading some of the poets ahead of time, the library can help!  Here are some details about the two poets and links to their works in our library.

Asiya Wadud is the author of several poetry collections, most recently No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body and Mandible Wishbone Solvent (forthcoming in 2024). Her recent work appears in e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine, Triple Canopy, POETRY, Yale Review and elsewhere. Asiya’s work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Finnish Cultural Institute of New York, Rosendal Theater Norway, and Kunstenfestivaldesarts among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School and Columbia University.

Other works include Syncope, Crosslight for youngbird, and A filament in gold leaf.

Roberto Tejada is an award-winning poet and author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009); a Latinx poetics of the Americas, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019), and catalog essays in Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011) and Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (The Menil Collection; Yale, 2021), among others. His poetry appears in the collections Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006), and Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015), selected poems in Spanish translation. Tejada’s writing spans method, discipline, and form to address the political imagination and impurity of time in shared image environments; configurations of art, life, and language inclined to the future. Committed to poetics and open sites of cultural inquiry—regional, transnational, and diasporic—his research and creative interests involve the language arts and image worlds of Latin America, especially Mexico, Brazil, the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, and other sites of U.S. Latinx cultural production. Awarded The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Poetry (2021), Tejada is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston where he teaches Creative Writing and Art History.

 

Solarities 1: Asiya Wadud and Roberto Tejada

 Hosted by Tessa Bolsover and Michael Cavuto, Duke English

Thursday 3.30, 7:30PM

Nelson Music Room, East Bldg., 2nd Floor

Duke University, East Campus

Solarities is a new contemporary poetry reading series bringing established and emerging visiting writers to Duke. The series seeks to emphasis experimental literary writing as a unique mode of thought that engages and expands scholarly fields of inquiry.

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads selections from “Disability Visibility”

In honor of National Disability Awareness Month, the Low Maintenance Book Club is reading selections from Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Centuryedited by Alice Wong, founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project. Our discussion will take place over Zoom on Wednesday, March 22 at noon.

The readings include:

  • Introduction by Alice Wong
  • “When You are Waiting to be Healed” by June Eric-Udorie
  • “Canfei to Canji: The Freedom of Being Loud” by Sandy Ho
  • “How a Blind Astronomer Found a Way to Hear the Stars” by Wanda Diaz-Merced
  • “The Beauty of Spaces Created for and by Disabled People” by s.e. smith

Attendees are also encouraged to read other essays in the book (they’re all bite-sized, we promise!) and bring a favorite to discuss with the group. As always, though, anyone is welcome regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read.

Copies of the book and audiobook are available through Duke University Libraries and your local public library.  Please RSVP to receive a Zoom link the morning of the event.

If you have any questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu)

ProQuest One Literature

Proquest One Literature brings together one of the most comprehensive collection of primary texts, ebooks, reference sources, full-text journals, dissertations, video and more, for access to historical and contemporary content by and about celebrated and lesser-known authors from around the world. The international literature focus is especially useful!

After you search, the results are helpfully divided in to categories such as criticism, primary texts, reference works, dissertations, book reviews, etc. You can also limit results by aspects like peer reviewed, publication date, subject, and language.

Another nice search feature of this resource is that you can find both literary criticism and primary texts for poetry, drama, and prose. If you specifically search the primary texts, you can search by author nationality, author ethnicity, literary movement or period, or gender.

I also really enjoyed the Poets on Screen collection that is part of this database, where you can watch clips of poems being read aloud, sometimes by the poet.

Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day

If you need to do research about a literary text, author, literary movement, or genre, this is a great resource to begin your search!

The Work of Charles Simic

Pulitzer-Winning Poet and U.S. Laureate Charles Simic died this week. If you want to learn more about his significance to the world of poetry, you can read this Washington Post obituary or watch this short PBS News Hour video. The Poetry Foundation website also has an accessible biography and a place to start with some of his poems.

If you want to dive in deeper to his work, we have you covered. Here’s just a selection of what we have:

Scribbled in the Dark

The Lunatic

A Wedding in Hell

Hotel Insomnia

The Voice at 3:00 a.m.: Selected Late & New Poems

Selected Poems, 1963-1983

Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems

The Monster Loves his Labyrinth: Notebooks

The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry

Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry edited by Bruce Weigl

Charles Simic and the Poetics of Uncertainty by Donovan McAbee

Let me leave you with “Tattoed City” from Poetry Vol. 163, No. 1 (Oct., 1993), p. 8 

 

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads “Mr. Malcolm’s List”

Suffering from romance withdrawal while waiting for the third season of Bridgerton? Low Maintenance Book Club is here for you.  We’ll be reading and discussing Suzanne Allain’s Mr. Malcolm’s List at our next meeting on Thursday, February, 9th at noon. As always, you’re welcome regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read. Copies of the book are available through Duke University Libraries and your local public library.

The meeting will be held over Zoom, so make sure to RSVP to receive an invitation link the morning of the 9th. We hope to see you there!

If you have any questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu)

Collection Spotlight: New Year, New You

The theme for this month’s Collection Spotlight is “New Year, New You.” We’re featuring books to help you with any resolutions or goals you might have made this month, ranging from managing stress, developing better habits, learning more about DEI issues, improving study skills, and more. You can find these titles in our Collection Spotlight display near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins. Also, make sure to share an affirmation or word of encouragement for others in our Duke Community!

Here is a selection of some of the titles you will find:

Stolen Focus : Why You Can’t Pay Attention–And How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari.

Simply Sustainable: Moving Toward Plastic-Free, Low-Waste Living by Lily Cameron.

She’s on the Money: Take Charge of Your Financial Future by Victoria Devine

Being Present: Commanding Attention at Work (and at Home) by Managing your Social Presence by Jeanine W. Turner.

Write More, Publish More, Stress Less!: Five Key Principles for a Creative and Sustainable Scholarly Practice by Dannelle D. Stevens.

Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes that Stick by Wendy Wood.

You may also find relevant titles in our Overdrive collection, including e-books and audio in business, self improvement, and psychology.

Happy Birthday, Jane!

Chawton House

Today is Jane Austen’s birthday! As always I like to celebrate with a blog post highlighting interesting things to read and new books that have been published about her. If you are seeing this post early enough, you can sign up for a virtual birthday event at the New York Public Library that takes place at 2:00pm EST today: What is it About Jane? Celebrating Jane Austen’s Birthday 

Here are some new books that we own:

The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen edited by Cheryl A. Wilson and Maria H. Frawley

Jane Austen: A Companion by Laura Dabundo

Lady Susan ; The Watsons ; and, Sanditon : Unfinished Fictions and Other Writings by Jane Austen ; edited with an introduction and notes by Kathryn Sutherland.

LIFE Summer Research Grant Reflections: Digital Naturalism: Entomology VR Inspired by Maria Sybilla Merian

This is the third blog post in a series written by the 2022 recipients of the Duke University Libraries Summer Research Fellowship for LIFE Students. You can find the other posts here and here.  Noelle Garrick is currently a sophomore.

“Art and nature shall always be wrestling until they eventually conquer one another so that the victory is the same stroke and line: that which is conquered, conquers at the same time.” – Merian

I love bugs. I remember my mother highlighting glistening beetles and fuzzy moths in the glow of our porchlight, imbuing me with an appreciation for the behaviors and strangeness of insects. It is estimated that there are millions of species of insects that we will never encounter, many quietly slipping into extinction unstudied. With the global population, I have watched their numbers dwindle as the years pass. The public perception has remained one of distaste, blind to these creatures’ beneficial function and beautiful adaptation.

When I approached my mentor, Kristen Tapson, with a desire to create experimental artistic commentary on this phenomenon in partnership with the archive, she guided me in developing a project plan that centered themes both bold and unappreciated- women in
science, insects, dynamic illustration, meditative virtual reality (VR). On the one hand, I was determined to use my skills as a computational media student to capture the experience of insects, leveraging game design frameworks to craft an application that would honor both the robust source material and its real life counterparts. It was a labor in service to awareness and conservation. At the same time, the goal of the project was not a product, but a process. The archives contain a wealth of information in volumes that I found intimidating. Even as a student, it lay nested in esoteric depths of academia that deterred me. I was curious if working from these academic texts and images, developing a pipeline for recontextualizing them as 3D models for use in VR environments, would increase accessibility and engagement.

What followed this past summer were hours of discussion dissecting the compelling aspects and challenges of bringing archival materials to VR under the supervision of Lee Sorenson, Librarian for Visual Studies and Dance . Through weekly meetings, we refined research questions and narrowed down materials. Slowly, the archive lost its daunting aura. Overlapping histories and collections that were difficult to decipher gained feasibility through Lee’s expertise. I familiarized myself with ideal source libraries and search terms and took measures to ensure I incorporated them justly.

Our research centered on Maria Sybilla Merian, one of the first female naturalists who produced extensive volumes of entomological illustration in the 1600s. Merian’s life was one of
boldness and transformation just like her artistic subjects. The dominating scientific attitudes of the time period, in theological perfectionism and inattentiveness to uncovering the secrets of iinsects’ lives, characterized them as indivisible entities. Merian’s process was one of the first to challenge this characterization, providing accurate and intimate depictions of the rich metamorphosis of insects and their associated environments. Her detailed documentation helped lay a strong foundation for modern entomological studies. She would nurture various species from their pupal form to adulthood, sketching the stages in between. Our research focused on the images and descriptions from Merian’s first book Raupen (loosely translated to caterpillar), published in 1679. Merian illustrated this book in her early 20s and 30s while living in her home in Nuremberg. We felt this, as one of her earliest works, captured the dynamic and exploratory qualities of her processes and musings. Merian’s respect and nurturance for her subjects translated into rich stylistic detail that I wanted to capture in my translations of her work to 3D models.

In terms of modeling approach, my process improved over the course of the summer as I learned new techniques to remedy past mistakes. Essentially, I had to sculpt representations of the key figures in a given illustration in the modeling program Blender, and then carefully map the fine details of each illustration into its corresponding model representation. Initially, I attempted to model excessive details from square bases that sharpened the softer qualities Merian tried to capture in her moths and caterpillars. It wasn’t a gentle approach but it produced valuable output on what not to do. Eventually, cylindrical-based objects provided a reproducible and accurate result that flowed better with the linework. One key limitation of VR experiences is the level of detail it can render in the environment. This revised method of modeling from cylinders supported significant detail in a computationally efficient way.

Armed with an arsenal of virtual bugs, I began development in the game engine Unity to bring them to life. One can think of the animation process as having similarities with the movement of the human body, which is not positionally fixed and rigid but rather a system of components receiving signals from the brain. Similarly, building out a virtual body that is life-like and compelling requires conceptualizing the subject as a sum of its necessary components. I needed separate pieces to represent the body of the insect and two opposing planes for the wings. The wing planes need to be given coded instructions to rotate around the hull of the body in an erratic pattern to simulate fluttering. The central body needed to subtly totter on its axis with the force of this fluttering. The entire entity needed to be responsive to other components in the scene, chasing after light sources and flowers.

Merian greatly inspired my own process. She was patient and open to transformation. She was motivated by passion for her subject matter. These are values I wanted to embody in my technical production. They are takeaways I assert as valuable to future VR development. In evolving the tech, it is important not to look at the product as one of spontaneous emergence. It is merely a larva, a transitional body that we should analyze closely for nuance so that we might understand how the next chapter comes about. Similarly, the experiences created in the VR medium should be transformational and varied. It’s important that we use it for advocacy and experimentation that go beyond pure entertainment. The desire for immersion and rich sensory experiences continues to expand, with terms like “Metaverse” drawing ominous conceptions to a fully virtual environment that parallels our own world. It’s important that this virtual revolution does not channel all of its creative power onto a narrow set of interests, subjects, and experiences. Ethical questions arise about how to ensure that we take this technology as an opportunity to self-reflect and build awareness through meaningful and enriching creations and experiences. This project contributes to these conversations in terms of subject matter, intention, implication, and effect. Creating this experience, which centers undervalued species and a less known artist, is a contribution to the body of work setting an example for experimental and ethical VR immersion. It has an intentional goal of not just entertainment but awareness. In terms of its implications, the process itself takes meaningful strides towards reproducibility, which ensures that more people can pull meaningful and niche subjects into the esoteric immersive space and be empowered to tell stories.

Calling attention to the quote at the beginning of this article, there is an inherent contradiction to my work. On the one hand, the artist and subjects I am working with are highly natural. They existed in a time and space vastly different from my own. The experience I wanted to create was a case for the fascination and vitality of insects, for the patience incited by nature. All the same, the artistic medium I choose is highly technical and arguably the opposite of natural experience. It is a manufactured illusion for the senses that could not possibly compare to the real thing. I believe Merian’s view implies that this contradiction, this “wrestling,” is a necessary part of the process that benefits both competitors. Art and nature need each other and can be mutually liberated through their inevitable clash. All the same, it’s important to acknowledge the function of my work. It is not meant to exist as its own reality. It is merely a tool for introspection and advocacy, ideally redirecting the audience towards further learning and experiences.

Moving into next semester, I plan to continue polishing this project. I want to add more content, more interaction and functionality. The understandings gathered from this process are valuable for future work inspired by the archive. I hope to instill future projects with historical and cultural depth. One of the limitations of the current process for developing the images into functional 3D assets is that it still requires modeling skill to be properly functional. In the future, we will explore procedural modeling programs that streamline the image-to-asset development process for a more general audience.

Comparative Media:

 

LIFE Summer Research Grant Reflections: Filipina Care Labor Migrations

This is the second blog post in a series written by the 2022 recipients of the Duke University Libraries Summer Research Fellowship for LIFE Students. You can find the first post in the series here. Tessa Delgo is a senior majoring in Global Cultural Studies.

Growing up in the American South, finding community with other Filipino Americans often felt difficult, especially compared to my relatives living in Filipino enclaves on the West Coast. Thus, when I chose to attend a Southeastern university like Duke, it was no surprise when I found little Filipino presence on campus, both in academics and in campus life (though it should be noted, there has been progress in this area even just in my short time on campus, such as the development of a Filipino student group and the approval of the Asian American Diaspora Studies minor).

However, I was surprised by the encouragement from faculty across seemingly-unrelated departments like History, Literature, and Spanish of my independent pursuits of Filipino/Filipino American Studies projects. My first academic foray into Filipino/Filipino American Studies was a summer history project completed after my freshman year, looking at mestiza (meaning “mixed,” traditionally someone of Spanish and Filipino heritage but now generally used to refer to any Filipina with a light skin tone) history through the autobiography of a Filipina American guerrilla leader in World War II. That project led me to Catherine Ceniza Choy’s book on Filipina nursing migrations called Empire of Care, which exposed me to feminist Filipino American studies and wound up being the basis of the research I pursued through the LIFE Summer Research Grant.

This summer, I conducted research on migrant Filipina nurses and other migrant Filipina female care laborers that became the foundation of my senior thesis in the Literature/Global Cultural Studies department, asking why the migrant Filipina nurse has not received the same level of scholarship in critical theory as other migrant Filipina care laborers. The history of Filipinas migrating to the United States to fill nursing shortages goes as far back as the Philippine-American war (1899-1902), when the United States set up nursing schools in the Philippines as an imperial ‘civilizing’ project, meaning that the migrant Filipina nurse is the oldest ‘figure’ of a migrant Filipina migrating to perform care labor in the Global North. However, studies of migrant Filipina care laborers tend to focus on domestic and sex workers rather than nurses, which, going into the summer, attributed to narratives that surround nurses granting the field an aura of professionalism and even heroism, especially compared to narratives around domestic and sex work.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the reality that, while Filipino nurses might be called heroes in the United States, they are hardly treated as such. Despite making up only 4% of registered nurses in the United States, Filipina/os made up nearly a third of all COVID-related deaths in the field. Going into the summer, my hope was to investigate the gap between the narratives and the actual lived experiences of Filipino nurses who have migrated to the United States over the past century or so. By investigating historical documents such as nursing education manuals and nurse recruitment advertisements and comparing them to first-person accounts from Philippines-trained nurses who migrated to the United States, such as those collected by Catherine Ceniza Choy in Empire of Care, I aimed to get a sense of the narratives that were created to attract nurses to America and how those narratives led to their oversight in critical theory.

With the help of the Duke Libraries Staff and my thesis advisor, I developed a ‘syllabus’ for the summer that included reading seminal works of Filipino critical theory, reading through American nursing histories and education manuals to understand their framings of the nursing profession and how these narratives align with American cultural ideas of the Philippines and Filipino culture, and delving into the Rubenstein Library’s archival collection of student nurse recruitment ads from the 1950s. Diving into this work introduced me to new fields of study and got me thinking about resources that I had not previously been exposed to through my classes. Looking into nursing education manuals made me think critically about my own education and the ways that hegemonic narratives seep their way into ostensibly “objective” things like professional training. Especially in such a care-centered profession as nursing, training in “ethics” is just as important as the technical, scientific skills — but how do you teach people to care? And what — or who — do you teach them to care about?

This, proving much more difficult than teaching someone to administer shots or change bedsheets, seems to be how Filipinas got so heavily recruited into the profession — seen as naturally docile and nurturing, they were seen as ideal hires that would also work for deeply unethical wages. But the “docile and nurturing” narrative, though admittedly a belief that many Filipinos hold and pride ourselves on even to this day, is itself tied to American colonialism. When Americans initially established nursing schools in the Philippines, there were worries that the native people were too ‘uncivilized’ for the profession. That is, until the advantages of having an American-trained candidate pool of potential laborers for a profession the United States struggled to fill became apparent and initiatives to recruit Filipinas to the Western world began.

From the Student Nurse Recruitment Ads archive in the Rubenstein

Doing this research further spurred my passion for Filipino American studies and put me in a much better position to begin my thesis work. I was exposed to so many of the Libraries’ resources — and how to use them — that I would not have been otherwise, which was a boon to me when the semester started and I did not have as much time to dedicate to my research. I also learned how to work with mentors, how to better organize and articulate my thoughts and questions around my research, and how to seek support when I needed it. I was also further enlightened to the ways that people go about researching topics at institutions that do not necessarily have an established department that aligns with their work. The work I was able to do this summer finally proved to me that my interests in Filipino/Filipino American studies are not “out of place” at Duke. That realization has been such a comfort and something I’ve returned to many times when working on my thesis throughout the Fall semester has sometimes felt defeating. I am immeasurably grateful to the Duke Libraries staff for believing in me and my project, and I hope to continue carving out a space for Filipino studies at Duke.

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads “A Room of One’s Own”

 

For the final Low Maintenance Book Club of 2022, we’ll be reading and discussing the entirety of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own on Thursday, December 8thAs always, you’re welcome regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read. Copies of the book are available through your local public library and Duke University libraries in both print and ebook format.

The meeting will be taking place over Zoom, so make sure to RSVP to get an invitation link the morning of the 8th.  We hope to see you there!

If you have any questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu)

 

Extended Deadline: Apply for Spring Archival Expeditions by 11/14

EXTENDED DEADLINE: Spring 2023 Archival and Digital Expeditions

Are you interested in developing your skills in designing learning experiences for students? Interested in engaging students with digital and physical primary source materials? Consider participating in Archival and Digital Expeditions!

Archival and Digital Expeditions is a unique opportunity for graduate students to work with a faculty member to design a learning module involving archival materials. The collections can be physical materials in Duke’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, or any variety of digital collections available at Duke or elsewhere. There are numerous possibilities.

Eligibility: Any Duke PhD student who has completed one academic year at Duke.

Stipend: $1,500 for designing the module. An additional $500 is available to students who teach their module in a subsequent semester.

Expected time commitment: 70-75 hours over the course of the semester to be spent consulting with their sponsor, library staff and other experts and researching, developing and testing the module.

Timeframe: Spring 2023

To learn more and apply: https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/instruction/archival-expeditions

Applications are due November 14th, 2022.

For more information contact Brooke Guthrie (brooke.guthrie@duke.edu) or Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (arianne.hartsell.gundy@duke.edu)

LIFE Summer Fellowship reflections: Queer Muslim Environmentalisms

 This is the first blog post in a series written by the 2022 recipients of the Duke University Libraries Summer Research Fellowship for LIFE Students. Maya Ghanem is a senior majoring in International Comparative Studies. 

Maya standing next to the there are gardens at the margins exhibition at the Nasher.

This summer, I pursued a project on queer Muslim environmentalisms in the United States, which I hope to develop into an honors thesis with the International Comparative Studies program at Duke. My main questions for this project are as follows: (1) How do Muslim and queer environmentalisms connect? (2) How can the intersection of queer and Muslim perspectives shift Anglo-Western dominated environmental discourse? (3) How is this reflected in the lives and expressions of queer Muslims within the United States? I developed an interest in this topic after realizing that my identities as queer and Muslim greatly strengthened my commitment to the environment.  My queerness and Muslimness motivate my search for an understanding of nature and the environment beyond Anglo-Western accounts, which are often dominated by capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and human exceptionalism. The Anglo-Western consideration of nature as objective and stagnant, at the mercy of human domination, is present in mainstream environmentalist movements and supports “the very relations of power that produce environmental problems” (Whitworth, 2018, 74–75). To unlearn these power relations, I look to new paradigms to restructure the way I think about the environment. Although I have much more to explore, I find that putting queerness and Muslimness in dialogue could open new possibilities for understanding the environment. 

To address my questions, I first situated queer Muslim politics within my thesis by analyzing the interactions between white settler colonization, homocolonialism, and Islamic fundamentalism. I then applied the analysis to envision the potential of queer Muslims in environmental discourse. This formed the first chapter of my thesis. Additionally, I searched for connections in leading literature on Muslim environmentalisms and queer environmentalisms, keeping in mind that “queer” and “Muslim” encompass robust, pluralistic frameworks. The foray I take into these connections will constitute the second chapter of my thesis. Finally, I focused on the perspectives of leading queer Muslim figures in the United States, which will become the third thesis chapter. This summer, I explored environmental motifs in Saba Taj’s there are gardens at the margins, a mixed media visual art exhibition highlighting queer Muslims. After observing the exhibition, displayed online and at the Duke University Nasher Museum, I wrote reflective poetry about the pieces. 

My research process so far has brought me healing; I finally could put language to my experiences as a queer Muslim. Before I could talk about environmentalism specifically, I had to reckon with the perceived contradiction in my identity. How can I be both queer and Muslim, especially if Muslims are seen as heterosexist and regressive in contrast to the more queer-affirming, progressive West? In my work this summer, I demonstrated how this dichotomy developed due to the rise of homonationalism in the West, and by extension homocolonialism, coupling with the development of Islamic fundamentalism to ideologically oppose one another. In the Oriental Islam-West dichotomy, queer Muslims are treated as objects, perceived by others but grossly underrepresented as voices. For this thesis, I intend to take the focus off queer Muslims as objects and instead center their perspectives on an important topic, such as environmentalism. Through an intersectional queer Muslim perspective, my intention is to find a comprehensive environmentalism, one that accounts for homocolonialism, Orientalism, and heteropatriarchy but is not defined solely by relationships with systemic oppression.

Although there is nearly no literature on queer Muslim environmentalisms specifically, an abundance of literature on queer environmentalisms and Muslim environmentalisms exists separately. Despite the reality that scholarship in queer and Muslim environmentalisms has also been impacted by homocolonialism and Orientalism (as with nearly every aspect of society), these rich perspectives share commonalities and points of solidarity. Prominent literature in queer and Muslim environmentalisms challenge anthropocentrism, embody humorous and satirical tones, find comfort in contradiction, disrupt conceptions of time as linear, create relationships with the environment beyond a problem to be solved, and see humans and nature as intrinsically linked. These similarities all in some way resist white settler-colonial, heteronormative enviornmental discourse.

While drawing connections between queer environmentalisms and Muslim environmentalisms separately could hint at the potential of queer Muslim environmentalisms, interacting with the lives and expressions of queer Muslims themselves provides the best insight into their relationship with the environment. As demonstrative of Kimberle Crenshaw’s writings on intersectionality, queer Muslim environmentalisms as an intersectional perspective is not merely the summation or overlap of queer environmentalisms and Muslim enviornmentalisms. Rather, it is a unique perspective truly understood by the people who experience both of these identities. 

To capture genuine expressions of queer Muslim environmentalisms, I analyzed and wrote poetry on Saba Taj’s there are gardens at the margins, a mixed-media exhibit highlighting queer Muslims in the American South. In an interview with The Georgia Review, Saba Taj talks discusses her intentional concealment of the people she paints, protecting them and asserting that they do not have to prove themselves to outsiders. The subjects make eye contact with the viewers, positioning them as the perceiving rather than the perceived. Saba Taj emphasizes an Islamic concept called barzakh, which is mentioned three times in the Qur’an and represents “an activity or an active entity that differentiates between two things and (paradoxically) through that very act of differentiation provides for their unity” (Bashier, 2004, p. 7). Barzakh is both a connection and a limit among other limits, “called for to provide for the unity of the posited duality. This process can go on indefinitely until we arrive at a concept of the Limit that meets the two limited things, between which it differentiates, with two faces that are one” (Bashier, 2004, p. 7). In the Qur’an, barzakh refers to the in-betweeness of the afterlife and material world or the love among Allah and Allah’s creations. Common symbols of barzakh include the meeting between fresh and salt waters, the garden as a meeting between humans and Nature, and the ability of the third eye to see connections of limits. Saba Taj employed this concept as a symbol for how queer Muslims blur gender boundaries through their very existence. In my reflective poetry, I marveled at the contradiction within barzakh, feeling humbled by the infinities of nature interconnected with me and beyond my comprehension. Drawing on motifs of bees, gardens, and mirages in the paintings, I noticed how Taj’s application of barzakh nuances our understanding of our relationship with Allah and with non-human creation.

Reflecting on barzakh, I remembered a Ted Talk I watched by Amrou Al-Kahdi, a Muslim drag queen navigating their queer and Islamic intersections. In reckoning with the supposed impossibility of their queer Muslim identity, Al-Kahdi found beauty in the contradiction of quantum physics; the duality of light as simultaneous particles and waves helped them revel in their paradoxical existence as an intentional part of Allah’s creation. I not only found immense healing in Amrou Al-Kahdi’s talk, but also began to see the particle-wave nature of light as an example of barzakh. While it may seem incompatible for light to exist as two forms simultaneously, its duality can allow for both distinction and connection. I can embrace the messy contradiction of the world, finding peace and beauty in my inability to compartmentalize reality to my restrictive human logic. Queer Muslims may live paradoxically, but maybe that is not a bad thing. Maybe that contradiction is a reflection of the beauty in Islam, requiring more than pure logic to comprehend.

In the next school year, I plan to complete my thesis by revising my first chapter on the politics of queer Muslims, writing a chapter on the connections between queer and Muslim environmentalisms, and interviewing more queer Muslims about their relationships with the environment. I am grateful to the Deans Summer Research Fellowship for their support in this project.

 

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads “Night of the Living Rez”

Get spooky with the Low Maintenance Book Club! At our October 27th meeting, we’ll discuss selections from the award-winning short story collection Night of the Living Rez: “Burn,” “In a Jar,” “The Blessing Tobacco,” and “Night of the Living Rez.” As always, you’re welcome regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read!

Copies of the book are available through your local public library, on our Overdrive, and soon through our print copies. This meeting will be taking place over Zoom, so make sure to RSVP to get a invitation link the morning of the 27th!

Date: Thursday, October 27, 2022

Time:12:00pm – 1:00pm

If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

Collection Spotlight: Banned Books in 2022

This post was written by Ciara Healy, Librarian for Psychology & Neuroscience, Mathematics, and Physics.

Banned or challenged books are alive and well across the country. Recently there have been PTA and livestreamed school board meetings devoted to banned books, with parents and students alike defending or protesting Critical Race Theory in schools. Two places to learn more about this ongoing issue is Unite Against Book Bans and EveryLibrary Institute.

The American Library Association (ALA) offers lists of books as part of their annual Banned and Challenged Books week kicking off September 18th through the 24th of September. The list of the top ten most banned and challenged books of 2021 can be found on their website. Thanks ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom!

Th 2021 list linked above has a mix of books covering challenges to books about race and a surprising number of LGBTQIQ+ titles and the reasons for their being challenged or banned in schools and libraries.

If you are interested in learning more, there are several upcoming opportunities. First, Duke Alumni has programs beginning on September 27th through December 14th at the Karsh Alumni and Visitors center and through Zoom. To register, use this link for the events: https://tinyurl.com/48wbv2p5.

Also, check out the Collection Spotlight featuring Banned and Challenged books, which can be found in Perkins Library on exhibit near the book drop at the Perkins Service Desk.

Low Maintenance Book Club Reads The Memory Librarian

The Low Maintenance Book Club is starting off the semester with a bang—our first in-person meeting since 2020 and a superstar reading selection (if we do say so ourselves)! Join the Low Maintenance Book Club on Wednesday, September 21st at 5:30pm for a discussion of selections from Janelle Monáe’s The Memory Librarian: the introduction, “The Memory Librarian” and “Timebox.” We’ll be meeting outdoors at the tables near the breezeway between Perkins & Bostock. In case of inclement weather, we’ll send a rain location to participants who have RSVP’d.

Copies of the book can be found at Duke University Libraries (audiobook, ebook and print) and most public libraries.

Low Maintenance Book Club reads selections from The Memory Librarian

Wednesday, September 21st, 5:30-7:00pm

Tables near Perkins-Bostock breezeway

Light snacks will be served, so please RSVP if you plan to attend. We hope to see you there!

What to Read this Month: August 2022

Looking for something new to read?  Check out our New and Noteworthy, Current Literature, and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy! Here are a selection of books you will find in these collections!


Carolina Built by Kianna Alexander. Josephine N. Leary is determined to build a life of her own, and a future for her family. When she moves to Edenton, North Carolina from the plantation where she was born, she is free, newly married, and ready to follow her dreams. As the demands of life pull Josephine’s attention- deepening her marriage, mothering her daughters, supporting her grandmother- she struggles to balance her real estate aspirations with the realities of keeping life going every day. She teaches herself to be a business woman, to manage her finances, and to make smart investments in the local real estate market. But with each passing year, it grows more difficult to focus on building her legacy from the ground up. Moving and inspiring, Josephine Leary’s untold story speaks to the part of us that dares to dream bigger, tear down whatever stands in our way, and build something better for the loved ones we leave behind. If you’d like to learn more about Josephine N. Leary’s life, we have some of her papers in the Rubenstein Library.


Sticker by Henry Hoke. Stickers adorn our first memories, dot our notebooks and our walls, are stuck annoyingly on fruit, and accompany us into adulthood to announce our beliefs from car bumpers. They hold surprising power in their ability to define and provoke, and hold a strange steadfast presence in our age of fading physical media. Henry Hoke employs a constellation of stickers to explore queer boyhood, parental disability, and ancestral violence. A memoir in 20 stickers, Sticker is set against the backdrop of the encroaching neo-fascist presence in Hoke’s hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, which results in the fatal terrorist attack of August 12th and its national aftermath. We have other books in the Object Lessons series, if you are interested in exploring the cultural context of everyday objects.


In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of our World, Riley Black walks readers through what happened in the days, the years, the centuries, and the million years after the impact, tracking the sweeping disruptions that overtook this one spot, and imagining what might have been happening elsewhere on the globe. Life’s losses were sharp and deeply-felt, but the hope carried by the beings that survived sets the stage for the world as we know it now. Picture yourself in the Cretaceous period. It’s a sunny afternoon in the Hell Creek of ancient Montana 66 million years ago. A Triceratops horridus ambles along the edge of the forest. In a matter of hours, everything here will be wiped away. Lush verdure will be replaced with fire. Tyrannosaurus rex will be toppled from their throne, along with every other species of non-avian dinosaur no matter their size, diet, or disposition. They just don’t know it yet. Check out this New Scientist book review to learn more.


Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde. In the bustling streets and cloistered homes of Lagos, a cast of vivid characters–some haunted, some defiant–navigate danger, demons, and love in a quest to lead true lives. As in Nigeria, vagabonds are those whose existence is literally outlawed: the queer, the poor, the displaced, the footloose and rogue spirits. They are those who inhabit transient spaces, who make their paths and move invisibly, who embrace apparitions, old vengeances and alternative realities. Eloghosa Osunde’s brave, fiercely inventive novel traces a wild array of characters for whom life itself is a form of resistance: a driver for a debauched politician with the power to command life and death; a legendary fashion designer who gives birth to a grown daughter; a lesbian couple whose tender relationship sheds unexpected light on their experience with underground sex work; a wife and mother who attends a secret spiritual gathering that shifts her world. As their lives intertwine–in bustling markets and underground clubs, churches and hotel rooms–vagabonds are seized and challenged by spirits who command the city’s dark energy. Whether running from danger, meeting with secret lovers, finding their identities, or vanquishing their shadowselves, Osunde’s characters confront and support one another, before converging for the once-in-a-lifetime gathering that gives the book its unexpectedly joyous conclusion. To learn more, you can read an NYT review and a Guardian review.


Pandora: A Novel in Three Parts by Susan Stokes-Chapman. A pure pleasure of a novel set in Georgian London, where the discovery of a mysterious ancient Greek vase sets in motion conspiracies, revelations and romance. Dora Blake is an aspiring jewellery artist who lives with her uncle in what used to be her parents’ famed shop of antiquities. When a mysterious Greek vase is delivered, Dora is intrigued by her uncle’s suspicious behaviour and enlists the help of Edward Lawrence, a young antiquarian scholar. Edward sees the ancient vase as key to unlocking his academic future. Dora sees it as a chance to restore the shop to its former glory, and to escape her nefarious uncle. But what Edward discovers about the vase has Dora questioning everything she has believed about her life, her family, and the world as she knows it. As Dora uncovers the truth she starts to realize that some mysteries are buried, and some doors are locked, for a reason. Here’s a review from the Guardian.  You might also enjoy this YouTube video where the author discusses the Greek mythology that inspired this book.

What to Read this Month: July 2022

Looking for something new to read?  Check out our New and Noteworthy, Current Literature, and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy!


Activities of Daily Living by Lisa Hsiao Chen. How do we take stock of a life–by what means, and by what measure? This is the question that preoccupies Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant in her late thirties. In the off-hours from her day job, Alice struggles to create a project about the enigmatic downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his monumental, yearlong 1980s performance pieces. Meanwhile, she becomes the caretaker for her aging stepfather, a Vietnam vet whose dream of making traditional Chinese furniture dissolved in alcoholism and dementia. As Alice roots deeper into Hsieh’s radical use of time–in one piece, the artist confined himself to a cell for a year; in the next, he punched a time clock every hour, on the hour, for a year–and his mysterious disappearance from the art world, her project starts metabolizing events from her own life. Moving between present-day and 1980s New York City, with detours to Silicon Valley and the Venice Biennale, this vivid debut announces Lisa Hsiao Chen as an audacious new talent. To learn more, check out this San Francisco Chronicle review and this NYT review.


Noisy Autumn: Sculpture and Works on Paper by Christy Rupp. Christy Rupp emerged as an American artist and activist in Manhattan in the late 1970s, using commodified materials to construct three-dimensional, sculptural works imbued with a dynamic sense of life. Noisy Autumn contains her recent sculptures and works on paper anticipating the dawn of late capitalism, and the Anthropocene. Rupp is primarily concerned with humans’ perceptions of nature: where do the borders of the “natural” emerge? The work aims to deconstruct harsh divisions that separate humans from our environment, while addressing the intersection of geopolitics, culture, and economics, as they impact the vulnerabilities of ecosystems. Her sculptures and works on paper alike leave readers pondering human engagement with the natural world amid rampant consumption–and how they may take action. Check out her website to learn more about Christy Rupp.


Don’t Cry for Me by Daniel Black. As Jacob lies dying, he begins to write a letter to his only son, Isaac. They have not met or spoken in many years, and there are things that Isaac must know. Stories about his ancestral legacy in rural Arkansas that extend back to slavery. Secrets from Jacob’s tumultuous relationship with Isaac’s mother and the shame he carries from the dissolution of their family. Tragedies that informed Jacob’s role as a father and his reaction to Isaac’s being gay. But most of all, Jacob must share with Isaac the unspoken truths that reside in his heart. He must give voice to the trauma that Isaac has inherited. And he must create a space for the two to find peace. With piercing insight and profound empathy, acclaimed author Daniel Black illuminates the lived experiences of Black fathers and queer sons, offering an authentic and ultimately hopeful portrait of reckoning and reconciliation.  There’s an interesting review in Southern Review of Books. You might also be interested in this video from the Georgia Center for the Book that shows a conversation between Daniel Black and Julian Winters.


Unprotected: A Memoir by Billy Porter. “This is not a coming-out story. It’s not a down-low story either. I never could have passed for straight, even if I’d wanted to, and so I never had the dubious luxury of living a lie.” From the incomparable Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award winner, a powerful and revealing autobiography about race, sexuality, art, and healing It’s easy to be yourself when who and what you are is in vogue. But growing up Black and gay in America has never been easy. Before Billy Porter was slaying red carpets and giving an iconic Emmy-winning performance in the celebrated TV show Pose; before he was the groundbreaking Tony and Grammy Award–winning star of Broadway’s Kinky Boots; and before he was an acclaimed recording artist, actor, playwright, director, and all-around legend, Porter was a young boy in Pittsburgh who was seen as different, who didn’t fit in. At five years old, Porter was sent to therapy to “fix” his effeminacy. He was endlessly bullied at school, sexually abused by his stepfather, and criticized at his church. Porter came of age in a world where simply being himself was a constant struggle. Billy Porter’s Unprotected is the life story of a singular artist and survivor in his own words. This audiobook is also narrated by Billy Porter himself!


The Invisible Kingdom : Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke.  Drawing on her own medical experience as well as fifteen years of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, O’Rourke’s incisive new work speaks to an urgent subject: the epidemic scale of autoimmune disease in America (even greater with the advent of ‘Long Covid’) and where we go from here. O’Rourke reveals crucial, subtle complexities about the American struggle with chronic illness and autoimmune conditions, and offers new reasons for hope, as well as a new framework for thinking about infectious disease and autoimmune response going forward. You can read reviews in Slate and the Los Angeles Times.

Ada Limón Named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States

Ada Limon standing in a gardenAda Limòn was recently appointed the United States poet laureate. If you want to learn more about her and her work, NYT Books did a nice profile in May right before her most recent book was published. You might also find this brief bio helpful.

If you want to read some of her work, we have most of her books:

The Hurting Kind

The Carrying

Bright Dead Things

Sharks in the Rivers

We also have access to a short segment on PBS News Hour called #IMHO. A poet’s take on looking to language for ‘radical hope’:

On a local note, Durham has recently appointed its first poet laureate, DJ Rogers.

ONLINE: Big Books Edition: One Hundred Years of Solitude

 

It’s almost summer, and that means it’s time for the Low Maintenance Book Club’s Big Books Edition! This year, we’ll be reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez over three months.

The third and final meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, July 20th from noon-1pm over Zoom. For this meeting, we’ll discuss the chapter beginning with the sentence “The war was over in May.” through the end of the novel.

The second meeting will take place on Wednesday, June 22 from noon-1pm over Zoom. For this meeting, we discussed pages 133-315 in the Harper Collins edition.

The first meeting took place on Wednesday, May 25th from noon-1pm over Zoom We read pages 1-31 in the Harper Collections edition.

Although you may read any edition, we recommend the Gregory Rabassa translation. Hard copies and audiobooks may be found at Duke University Libraries and most public libraries. Currently, there are no ebook editions available.

Please RSVP to receive a Zoom link the morning of the meeting. We hope to see you there!

What to Read this Month: June 2022

Looking for something new to read?  Check out our New and Noteworthy, Current Literature, and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy!


The First, the Few, the Only: How Women of Color Can Redefine Power in Corporate America by Deepa Purushothaman. A deeply personal call to action for women of color to find power from within and to join together in community, advocating for a new corporate environment where we all belong—and are accepted—on our own terms. Women of color comprise one of the fastest-growing segments in the corporate workforce, yet often we are underrepresented—among the first, few, or only ones in a department or company. For too long, corporate structures, social zeitgeist, and cultural conditioning have left us feeling exhausted and downtrodden, believing that in order to “fit in” and be successful, we must hide or change who we are.  Deepa Purushothaman  met with hundreds of other women of color across industries and cultural backgrounds, eager to hear about their unique and shared experiences. In doing so, she has come to understand our collective setbacks—and the path forward in achieving our goals. To learn more, watch this interview or read this article outlining five key insights.


Taste: My Life through Food by Stanley Tucci. From award-winning actor and food obsessive Stanley Tucci comes an intimate and charming memoir of life in and out of the kitchen. Stanley Tucci grew up in an Italian American family that spent every night around the kitchen table. Taste is a reflection on the intersection of food and life, filled with anecdotes about his growing up in Westchester, New York; preparing for and shooting the foodie films Big Night and Julie & Julia ; falling in love over dinner; and teaming up with his wife to create meals for a multitude of children. Each morsel of this gastronomic journey through good times and bad, five-star meals and burned dishes, is as heartfelt and delicious as the last. You can read reviews here and here.


The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird by Jack E. Davis. The bald eagle is regal but fearless, a bird you’re not inclined to argue with. For centuries, Americans have celebrated it as “majestic” and “noble,” yet savaged the living bird behind their national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies. Taking us from before the nation’s founding through inconceivable resurgences of this enduring all-American species, Jack E. Davis contrasts the age when native peoples lived beside it peacefully with that when others, whether through hunting bounties or DDT pesticides, twice pushed Haliaeetus leucocephalus to the brink of extinction. This book is a cultural and natural history that demonstrates how this bird’s wondrous journey may provide inspiration today, as we grapple with environmental peril on a larger scale. You can learn more through this review and and this review.


The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections: A Novel by Eva Jurczyk. A stunning debut following a librarian whose quiet life is turned upside down when a priceless manuscript goes missing. Soon she has to ask: what holds more secrets in the library–the ancient books shelved in the stacks, or the people who preserve them? Liesl Weiss long ago learned to be content working behind the scenes in the distinguished rare books department of a large university, managing details and working behind the scenes to make the head of the department look good. But when her boss has a stroke and she’s left to run things, she discovers that the library’s most prized manuscript is missing. Liesl tries to sound the alarm and inform the police about the missing priceless book, but is told repeatedly to keep quiet, to keep the doors open and the donors happy. What Liesl discovers about the dusty manuscripts she has worked among for so long–and about the people who care for and revere them–shakes the very foundation on which she has built her life. If you want to visit a real-life rare books and special collections, make sure to check out our Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.


Joan is Okay: A Novel by Weike Wangoan. Joan is a thirtysomething ICU doctor at a busy New York City hospital. The daughter of Chinese parents who came to the United States to secure the American dream for their children, Joan is intensely devoted to her work, happily solitary, successful. She does look up sometimes and wonder where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white coat makes her feel needed, or with her family, who try to shape her life by their own cultural and social expectations. Once Joan and her brother, Fang, were established in their careers, her parents moved back to China, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in their homeland. But when Joan’s father suddenly dies and her mother returns to America to reconnect with her children, a series of events sends Joan spiraling out of her comfort zone just as her hospital, her city, and the world are forced to reckon with a health crisis more devastating than anyone could have imagined.  You can read an interview here and a review here.

Conducting Research After You Graduate

After you graduate, you will lose some of your access to resources at Duke University Libraries. You can still conduct research, but it may require you to do more digging. Here are some tips to help you!

Options at Duke Libraries

Local Academic Libraries

If you are relocating to a community with a nearby university or college, you can often use some of their library resources. Check their website for exact details of services and policies. Here are common things to look for:

  • Do they have a Friends of the Library program?
  • Can you use some of their online databases if you visit their library?
  • Do they have a rare books and manuscripts collection?

Local Public Libraries

Though they will have less of an academic focus than our libraries, you may be pleasantly surprised by what your public library can provide!

  • Get a free library card at your local library. Sometimes for a small fee you can also get library cards to access resources at the libraries in surrounding towns. 
  • Find out what kinds of online databases they have. They may have access to newspapers, data sets, journal and magazine articles, streaming films, etc.
  • Find out how their interlibrary loan program works. 

Digital Collections

Many libraries and museums have digitized some of their collections. Examples:

Online Repositories

There are legitimate online scholarly repositories that may share scholarly articles (often preprints). Examples:

The Rudolph William Rosati Creative Writing Award

Jumbled letters (photo by Laineys Repetoire – CC-BY)

What is the Rudolph William Rosati Creative Writing Award?

The Rosati Creative Writing Prize is awarded each spring in recognition of an outstanding work of creative writing. All Duke undergraduate students are eligible to submit work for consideration. Projects may be any genre and take any form (audio/video, digital media, etc.), but must include a substantial creative writing component.  The Rosati Prize was established in 1978 by Walter McGowan Upchurch in honor of Rudolph William Rosati “to encourage, advance and reward creative writing among students at the University and particularly among undergraduate students.”

Prize: $1500

Is my paper eligible?

  • You must be a Duke undergraduate student
  • You may submit multiple, different projects in a given year but each project should be submitted individually with an accompanying application cover sheet
  • Submitted projects must have been written during the current academic year
  • At this time submissions must be written in English
  • No minimum or maximum length required

How do I apply?

To be eligible for the Rudolph William Rosati Creative Writing Award, email the following to Arianne Hartsell-Gundy by June 15, 2022:

  • application cover sheet (see form)
  • The creative work (send written projects as either a Word document or pdf.  If it’s a multimedia project, please send URL of the project or email Arianne Hartsell-Gundy for alternative means of delivery)
  • A faculty signature of support (see form)
  • The faculty member should e-mail the signature of support in a separate file to Arianne Hartsell-Gundy

How is a winner chosen?

  • The selection committee, consisting of two Libraries staff members and two faculty members, judges the papers
  • Projects are judged based on quality and originality of writing
  • The committee reserves the right to split the award among more than one author, or to award no prize

For More Information

Contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Librarian for Literature and Theater Studies (arianne.hartsell.gundy@duke.edu), for more information.

Collection Spotlight: Asian American Studies

Contributed by Matthew Hayes, Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies Librarian

Asian American history is part and parcel of American history. Asian American experiences emerge within an American context and in relation to the many other cultural, institutional, and political aspects that comprise contemporary life in the United States. And yet, beginning with the initial moments of immigration to the United States by people from Asia, large swathes of white Americans have deemed these histories and experiences as somehow un-American. Several historical moments have laid bare this tendency to distinguish Asian Americans as separate from or, in some cases, a threat to non-Asian Americans: the Exclusion Act of 1882 that barred citizenship, as well as the future entry, of Chinese immigrants; the incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans during WWII; the post-9/11 prejudice and profiling of Arab and Muslim Americans; and sweeping incidents of anti-Asian hate, especially of East Asian Americans, following the emergence of the global COVID-19 health crisis. This is to say nothing of the countless examples of racism, prejudice, and exclusion that punctuate history between these more visible and widespread examples.

“An act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to the Chinese, May 6, 1882”; Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress, 1789-1996; General Records of the United States Government; Record Group 11; National Archives

San Francisco, California (1942). Japanese Americans appear for registration prior to evacuation. Posted instructions for “all persons of Japanese ancestry” appear on the wall behind. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

This collection spotlight offers a glimpse into the spectrum of Asian American experiences in the contemporary United States. There are four interrelated genres of writing represented here and all of them are meant to amplify one another. The first is historical writing, which captures not only the movements and moments that comprise Asian American social, political, and economic histories in several regions of the United States, but also traces the emergence of Asian American Studies as a crucial academic discipline that helps us to better understand American history. The second is social science, which provides several key theoretical frameworks for thinking through intersectional, postcolonial, and racial aspects of experience and meaning-making within Asian American communities. These titles ought to serve as theoretical tools for exploring how cultural relationships, bodies of knowledge, and identities form the basis of Asian American subjectivity, and how this subjectivity is continually undermined by policies and systems that seek to delimit the experience of these (and other) ethnic communities within the United States. The third genre is memoirs and personal writing, which captures that very subjectivity. As a complement to the first two genres, both of which provide a largely impersonal or abstract view of Asian American communities and their experience across time, memoirs allow experiences within those communities to emerge first-hand. The reader is therefore allowed a personal glimpse into how some of these historical and theoretical mechanisms operated within lives and experiences of Asian American authors. Finally, literary titles by Asian American authors offers a few examples of how the experiences and perspectives of Asian American writers translate to fiction, which often tackles the very social and historical motifs brought to light in the other genres included here.

Cover image for Moustafa Bayoumi’s How Does it Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (2008)

Cover image for Paula Yoo’s From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement (2021)

This collection spotlight comes on the heels of a very exciting development within Duke’s Asian American and Diaspora Studies (AADS) Program, which has very recently announced a new minor degree option for undergraduate students. After decades of student activism pushing for a curriculum that reflects America’s broad range of diverse backgrounds and histories, students are now able to engage in a full course of study as part of their long-term education. Through the introduction of this new minor degree, the value of Asian American Studies has finally been formally recognized at Duke.

Cultivating a cultural literacy—especially of the domestic cultures with which we interact nearly every day—is crucial for the development of future American generations. This collection spotlight is a great place to start for anyone interested in learning about Asian American communities and the important role they’ve played in the course of American history.

You can find these titles in our Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins starting on April 11th.

Also, consider joining us on April 11th at noon in Perkins 217 to explore our Asian American Collection.

 

ONLINE: Meet Threa Almontaser, Rosati Visiting Writer

ONLINE: Meet Threa Almontaser, Rosati Visiting Writer

Please join us as the 2021-22 Rosati Fellow and award-winning poet Threa Almontaser reads from her recent work. Maha Houssami, Interim Arabic Program Director & Lecturer in the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department, will host a Q&A following the reading.

Duke University Libraries is pleased to welcome Ms. Almontaser to Duke and Durham as the recipient of the 2021-22 Rosati Fellowship. Ms. Almontaser holds an MFA and TESOL certification from NC State University and is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her first full-length book of poetry, The Wild Fox of Yemen, was published by Graywolf Press in 2021 and has received widespread national recognition, including the Maya Angelou Book Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and the Walt Whitman Prize from the American Academy of Poets, as well as being longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and the PEN/Voelcker Award for a Poetry Collection.

Tuesday, March 29, 2022 from 12:00pm – 1:00pm

Please register here to attend.

Zoom details to participate will be sent to all registrants prior to the event. This event will NOT be recorded.

Co-sponsored by Duke’s Forum for Scholars and Publics, the Duke Islamic Studies Center, and the Duke University Middle East Studies Center.

Collection Spotlight: Women’s History

Image from the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection in the Sallie Bingham Center.

 

Happy International Women’s Day! Today seems like a great day to mention that our Collection Spotlight this month features books related to women’s lives, history, and culture. You can find these titles in our Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins.  Here is a selection of the titles you can find in this spotlight:

Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for their Rights by Mikki Kendall

Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells by Michelle Duster and Hannah Giorgis

Gertrude Weil: Jewish Progressive in the New South by Leonard Rogoff

Modern HERstory: Stories of Women and Nonbinary People Rewriting History by Blair Imani

Latina Voices = Voces de Mujeres Latinas by Ana Fernández

Beloved Women: The Political Lives of LaDonna Harris and Wilma Mankiller by Sarah Eppler Janda

First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies by Kate Andersen Brower

My Wars are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson by Alfred Habegger

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads selections from “Dubliners” by James Joyce

To continue the St. Patrick’s Day mood, the Low Maintenance Book Club will be discussing selected stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners during our March meeting: “The Sisters,” “Araby,” and “The Dead.” Join us on Tuesday, March 29th at noon over ZoomPlease RSVP to receive a Zoom link the morning of the meeting. As always, you’re welcome regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read.

You can find copies of Dubliners at Duke University Libraries and your local public library.  We hope to see you there!

Though the exhibit is no longer up, you might also be interested in reading about our recent ReJoyce exhibit that was on display last month to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of Ulysses.

“Shaping Your Professional Identity Online” RCR Graduate Student Workshop

Shaping Your Professional Identity Online

The digital world allows us to connect in ever increasing ways.  As an early career scholar these connections can provide you with both opportunities and challenges.  This workshop is designed to help you consider the best ways to navigate how you want to present yourself online.  We will discuss topics such as what to share and how to share, the ethical issues involved, and how to maintain the right balance of privacy.  We will also examine some steps you can take, such as creating a profile on Google Scholar, creating a Google alert for your name, creating an ORCID ID, interacting professionally on Twitter, and creating an online portfolio.  You will receive RCR credit for attending.

This event will be offered virtually. Information about how to participate via Zoom will be sent to all registrants via email before the event. A Duke NetID is required.

Date: Thursday March 24th

Time: 3:00pm – 5:00pm

Location: We will send a Zoom link to those who register.

Registration link:https://duke.libcal.com/event/8880716

If you have questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu)

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads “A Psalm for the Wild-Built”

Never read solarpunk? Neither have we! Join the Low Maintenance Book Club for a discussion of  Becky Chambers’ novella, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, the first in her Monk & Robot duology. We’ll meet on Thursday, February 24th at noon over Zoom. As always, you’re welcome to join regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read.

Low Maintenance Book Club reads A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Thursday, February 24th, noon-1pm
Zoom (link to be sent the morning of the meeting)

You can find copies at Duke University Libraries (ebook, audiobook, print) and through your local public library.

Please RSVP to receive a Zoom link the morning of the meeting. We hope to see you there!

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads “Cyrano de Bergerac”

Want help with your resolution to read more in 2022? Join the Low Maintenance Book Club for our discussion of Cyrano de Bergerac: A Play in Five Acts, a classic play that inspired the new movie Cyrano, starring Peter Dinklage. We’ll meet on Wednesday, January 26th at noon over Zoom. As always, you’re welcome to join regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read.

Low Maintenance Book Club reads Cyrano de Bergerac: A Play in Five Acts
Wednesday, January 26th, noon-1pm
Zoom (link to be sent the morning of the meeting)

We do not have a recommend translation or edition, but you may find this one to be especially readable: https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE009632684.

Please RSVP to receive a Zoom link the morning of the meeting. We hope to see you there!

Happy Birthday, Jane Austen!

Every year I write a blog post to celebrate Jane Austen’s birthday where I highlight books and resources related to her writing and her life. One of my highlights this year was attending Jane Austen & Co.‘s Race and Regency series. You can see the recordings of these talks at their website. In honor of those great programs, I’m going to share some resources related to the speakers and the topics they covered.

 

 

Sanditon by Jane Austen

 

Britain’s Black Past edited by Gretchen H. Gerzina

 

 

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano written by himself with related documents

 

 

Slavery and the British Country House edited by Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann

 

 

 

 

Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip

 

 

Belle directed by Amma Asante

 

Pride by Ibi Zoboi

 

The Woman of Colour: A Tale edited by Lyndon J. Dominique (on order)

 

Finally Devoney Looser’s recent article about the Austen family’s complex ties to slavery is well worth the read.

LIFE Summer Fellowship Reflections: Black, White, and Brown? Complicating the Racial Dichotomy through an Analysis of Latinx Racialization

This is the final blog post in a series written by the 2021 recipients of the Duke University Libraries Summer Research Fellowship for LIFE Students. Gabriela Fonseca is a senior majoring in History and Cultural Anthropology with a focus on race and ethnicity and a minor in Inequality Studies. You can find the other posts here, here, and here.

Throughout my time at Duke, I have grounded myself in the study of race and racism. But class after class, I found myself being the voice at the back of the room asking about Latinx populations. Constantly pushing back against the idea that the story of race and racism is strictly Black-White, when it came time to finally decide what I would write my thesis on (something I knew would happen before I even decided to come to Duke), I figured since I have been doing this work for three years, I might as well make it official in my last year here. And so came my summer research project that I used to step into this mystical world that would become my history thesis.

When I began this project, I wanted to do so much, I still do. I have to stop and recenter myself every time I open a book or enter the Reading Room at the Rubenstein or begin a new chapter in my thesis. I didn’t quite know exactly what I wanted to research, but I knew I wanted to somehow dive into the black-white racial dichotomy we exist in as a nation and how, or if, Latinx individuals are affected by it. But essentially, I knew three things. I knew I was going to talk about North Carolina, that I was going to historicize the present (and if not the present, something really close to it), and that I was going to write about the Latinx experience. As a Latina from North Carolina, I wanted to talk about something that was a bit more personal because I knew it would lend me a unique perspective as I attempted to historicize the Latinx experience more broadly. I also just really love modern history; I think it is very important to think about where we are and how we got here and to acknowledge that history is happening now, and it is not just something to learn or read about 50 years later. Through the months now that I have spent on this project, I have continued to focus it as much as I can so I can tell as clear a story as possible. It is way harder than I thought it would be, but with two out of three chapters at least partially written, I have forced myself into focusing on a specific topic.

In a class I took my sophomore year, “The America Borderlands” with Professor Diane Nelson (who I will shamelessly plug any chance I get), I learned about a program that allowed American growers the opportunity to utilize foreign labor on their farms, the H-2A guest worker program. It was the first time I had ever heard of it, the closest thing I knew was about the Bracero Program in the mid 20th century because a great-grandparent of mine participated in it. The knowledge that the United States was granting work visas to the same people who were villainized for taking the jobs of American workers, was incomprehensible. It didn’t make sense, sometimes it still doesn’t. I thought there was no way that the H-2A program still existed. And yet, it is still very much alive today and North Carolina, and more specifically the North Carolina Grower’s Association, is one of its largest beneficiaries. So, while all of these thoughts were rolling around in my mind, I continued to search for my topic. H-2A fascinates me, it has sense I learned about it, but it felt like something was missing from the narrative.

In 2006, Mecklenburg County (my western neighbor) became home to a pilot program for a new ICE initiative: 287(g), essentially deputizing local law enforcement officers as partial immigration officials. Of course, at the time I was blissfully unaware that any of this was happening. It wasn’t really until 2018 that I even learned about 287(g) as a program, the rhetoric and fear that I was aware of was ICE-centric. Warnings of ICE raids and sightings filled my social media and text chains for days at a time. But I didn’t really know anything; the fear I held was for friends and their families, at times it was even for my father who I still fear will be targeted because of what he looks like. The popular discourse always centered around being undocumented, that you’d be fine so long as you had the proper papers. I never really had to worry about myself. And then, within my first month of being an official Duke student, there were ICE sightings near campus that had gotten so much attention that multiple people reached out to me to see if I was okay. Of course, I was okay, why wouldn’t I be? And I think that was the first time I ever really questioned what it meant to be Latinx, especially in North Carolina. Not until I was reminded that my last name kind of stands out, it’s a little different. And that I had no way to identify myself aside from my DukeCard because I didn’t have a drivers license, a passport, or my social security card. And that is when it finally clicked, that having the proper papers means very little when the goal is to find the illegals.

When I finally sat down to think about what all I had learned and experienced things began to make sense. Systems of racism and labor are much more complex than we often like to think, and I think ultimately my goal is to present a new way of thinking about these systems. I want to complicate the narrative of racism by including a Latinx perspective. We are living in an incredibly diverse nation, and yet our conversations are heavily bound. Why? What is this doing? In a black-white state, what is the role of Latinx people? What does it mean for Latinx individuals to exist in a state that both imports their labor and polices their bodies? This is what I am after. By bringing together H-2A and 287(g), I hope to complicate the black-white dichotomy we have created by telling the story of Latinx racialization in North Carolina. It is an arduous process but one that I am deeply excited to continue as I enter my third and final chapter.

As I expected when I entered this project, the research never seems to end. From reading and rereading related books -like Hannah Gill’s The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina or Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects– to spending hours in the reading room digging through different collections -like the Joan Preiss Papers or boxes from the Southern Poverty Law Center- new discoveries are waiting on every page. I can go from feeling hopeful as I review the activism of Joan Preiss in the pursuit of the rights for farm workers to suddenly feeling extremely vulnerable as I peruse newsletters from organizations the SPLC stamped as “klan watch.” At every turn, good or bad, I learn more about the Latinx experience in North Carolina. And with every new piece of information, my belief in this project grows. At times I doubt my own ability to be successful in this endeavor, but there is so much to be learned, explored, and shared. If I can create something that teaches myself and others even just a part of what it means to be Latinx in North Carolina, all the long hours and sleepless nights will be worth it.

If I can, I would like to offer some advice to anyone thinking about doing research of this kind: do it! This is a roller coaster ride of emotions, but it is also a time to learn more about yourself and something you are passionate about. But always keep in mind that you do not have to go on this journey alone. Whether it be through the aid of a faculty mentor or a librarian, using the resources available to you will only make your project stronger and that much more meaningful. I know I couldn’t have done this work and wouldn’t be able to continue if it wasn’t from the support I have received, and still receive, from my mentors and the various librarians I have had the privilege of working with.

 

 

 

The Paper Station

Looking to de-stress and get research and writing help?

Join us at The Paper Station on Thursday, December 2nd from 7-9 pm near the Perkins service desk on the 1st floor of Perkins Library!

At The Paper Station, you can:

  • Meet with Thompson Writing Studio consultants for 20-minute lightning consultations and get handouts with writing tips.
  • Create your own zine or bookmark.
  • Find scholarly sources for your papers and projects with support from our librarians.
  • Learn Google Scholar tips and tricks like how to avoid paywalls.
  • Get help navigating citation manuals and using citation management tools.

This event is co-sponsored by Duke University Libraries and the Thompson Writing Studio.

LIFE Summer Fellowship Reflections: Crossing the Cultural Divide: Healthcare Access for African Migrants in Northern and Southern Italy

This is the third blog post in a series written by the 2021 recipients of the Duke University Libraries Summer Research Fellowship for LIFE Students. Isaiah Mason is a senior majoring in International Comparative Studies, with a concentration in Europe. You can find the other posts here and here.

Within the past ten years, the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean Sea has become a hot button issue and site of humanitarian efforts. Connected with the events of the Arab spring, there has been significantly increased movement of migrants and refugees into Europe. In the relatively short time since its unification in 1861, Italy has transformed from a country of emigration to one of immigration, partially due to its status as a primary port of entry into Europe. Due to this, Italy becomes a place where a lot of African migrants come for varying amounts of time seeking aid. This is in addition to other migrants flows from Africa that became a subject of political focus in the early 1990s concerning the legal status of foreigners within Italy. Additionally, Italy’s colonial history within the Horn of Africa might serve to complicate African migrant access to resources and community formation, impacting the ways that they navigate life within a new country.

Another consideration that I had was the impact of location within Italy as affecting the situation of migrants. There is a strong culture within Italy of identifying with the region where one is born which compounds with distinctions between the Northern and Southern economies. As the North has a more significant history with industrialization than do many regions of the South, the presence of certain labor and manufacturing jobs creates push for Northern migration flows. In considering the displacement of migrant communities within Italy following arrival, I thought that migratory pressures might have an influence on understanding African migrant life, integration, and access to Italian society.

My project investigates the sociocultural access to Italy for African migrants, specifically the degree of healthcare access within Northern and Southern Italy to understand the presence of structural barriers and facilitators that impact the quality of care. After considering how access to healthcare could look different across Italy due to economic differences between rural and urban regions, I decided to try to include migrants from regions across Northern and Southern Italy to be able to compare their relative experiences with both aspects of building and maintaining community as well as experiences with the healthcare system. To accomplish this, I organized an ethnographic approach to interview migrants and reflect on their personal accounts within family units. Since there was a university travel ban in place, I had to shift my methodology to accommodate remote research so that I would complete the interviews over Zoom.

This project synthesizes my interests in public health with my studies of Italian language and culture throughout my time at Duke. Additionally, I chose Italy as a site of study because of the interplay between regionalism and the public healthcare system. In Italy, there is a national health service, known as the Servizio Sanitario Nazionale (SSN), that is administered on a regional basis. Italy is also divided into 20 different regions, which creates health systems with various levels of development. The SSN is also a relatively new development, having only been created in 1978. Considering the vulnerability of minorities within a public discourse would also allow me to critique the effectiveness of national policies to serve all the constituents within Italy and possibly identity areas for recourse to improve health services. Beyond the interest in healthcare, I wanted to understand Italy from the context of functioning as a space within several types of borders. Moving from the context of the nation, I was interested in determining whether region mattered in the sense of how African migrants can establish community, both in terms of family unification and preserving cultural ties with their country of origin.

Through the Duke University Libraries LIFE Undergraduate Research Grant, I set out to understand the extent of medical literature in Italy that would allow me to investigate the intersection of policy and identity for African migrants. This led first to understanding the significance of space on the degree of treatment disparities and the interesting fact that each region governs a separate healthcare system and that migrant health investigations at the national level would require comparisons of the data available in government documents and journal articles. In this process, I discovered the dominant narrative was Italian citizens that offered their analysis of the cause for various disparities concentrated in the healthcare sector.

Diving into this topic led me to new bodies of knowledge and consideration of different kinds of resources that I have not engaged with through my classes. Looking specifically into Italian government documents led me to investigate the role of language in governing access in reference to Italian citizens. Thus, the Italian government implicated legal status across time as an important consideration, meaning that the importance of holding papers becomes a strictly migrant experience that is related to phenotype. Italian comes to mean white, while the question of identity for anyone that does not fit that scope becomes a question of legitimacy.

While I reflect on some of the pitfalls of my research, namely the difficulty that I had in establishing contact with African migrants in Italy due to COVID, I think about the ways that this presented new opportunities to re-center my research on the relationship between the African migrant and Italy through labor. This research experience has caused me to go outside my comfort zone and explore different methods to appropriately write within the discourse. I would encourage anyone that has a similar interest to not count themselves out of conducting research because it is new. Before engaging with this project, I had always considered that research not directly linked to a class was not something that I saw myself doing, but this project helped me grow and seek out resources at Duke to receive guidance. As I move forward with this project throughout the following year for my honors thesis, I am excited to see what else I will be able to discover and the journey that it will take me on.

I would like to thank the Duke Libraries for the support in starting to work through key aspects of my project and providing funding to allow me to do my research during the summer. I am grateful to my faculty mentor, Professor Roberto Dainotto, and Duke Librarians Hannah Rozear and Arianne Hartsell-Gundy for the continuous support and helping me generate alternatives, without which this project would not be possible. I look forward to continuing my research on the place and agency of African migrants within Italy and building upon this work.

 

 

LIFE Summer Fellowship Reflections: “Finding Home Through Migration: Narratives of Queer Refugees”

This is the second blog post in a series written by the 2021 recipients of the Duke University Libraries Summer Research Fellowship for LIFE Students. David Marin Quiros is a senior majoring in International Comparative studies with a concentration on Africa. You can find the first post here.

South Africa has a unique history in the development of human rights, which is very clear in their constitution, which grants freedoms and protections of various identities, regardless of citizenship. Because of this, South Africa becomes the place where many African queer migrants and asylum seekers come to seek refuge. However, the rise of queer-phobic and xenophobic violence has questioned the power of laws to translate to lived experiences, leading many to have to navigate the refugee process surrounded by prejudice. Their dual identity makes it difficult to find community with queer South Africans or their cisgender/heterosexual fellow refugees and families. Due to the history of colonialism in South Africa, many of the barriers they face are physically constructed into urban cities, affecting access to resources, work opportunities, and how communities are formed, which forces them to navigate through life in ways where they must think about the presentation of their identities in any given space.

My projects takes a look at social-spatial justice in South Africa, and specifically I am looking at queer refugees in South Africa living in Cape Town, looking at their movement, their relationship to the spaces they inhabit while taking into consideration the social coding of these spaces. There is an element of ethnography, as I want to listen to these individuals to understand how they would describe their lived experiences, but also how they make sense of their spaces as home, and what home means to them. I’m also including a human rights discourse to see how this discussion fits in the global migrant and queer narratives, and how queer and migrant geographies as a global phenomenon has very local and personal consequences.

I was drawn to this topic for two reasons. The first is academically, as I am intrigued by how a country with such a progressive government can struggle to apply policy into lived experiences. It challenges how we understand human rights as a system of treaties and agreements by demonstrating how localized institutions can be greater than global ones. The experience of queer refugees in Cape Town reminds us that we should have a deeper understanding of individuals and their intersectionalities when trying to improve their conditions. The second reason I am excited about this research is that I see myself in this project. Like the population I am researching, I am also a queer migrant, and I am interested in how these identities change when looked at local contexts, and how globalization impacts regional understandings of queer and migrant.

Throughout this project, I loved getting to learn about this specific intersection in a different context from the one I lived through. Also, getting to speak with the participants in my study illuminated me towards the diversity found even within various intersections. This work tries its best to be guided by the conversations I had with the participants, and take into account what they view as important elements of their lives. The conversations with queer refugees provide the critical entry point from which to begin to consider and to guide this work through the relationship of queer theory to the movement of bodies across and within different nation spaces, and to the central theme of finding and experiencing of home. This is why the idea of home is such a central focus in this work– many of these individuals, while they may have defined it differently, expressed making a home one of their most important dreams. Many of these participants expressed their appreciation for having their stories being shared to a wider audience, which makes me incredibly excited to have the opportunity to share their experiential knowledge.

Diving into this topic lead me to new bodies of knowledge I hadn’t had the chance to engage with in my classes. What was most fascinating for me was in thinking of time and space as nonlinear and implicated with one another. In beginning to understand the lives of queer refugees, I discovered the important role of the past in enabling and limiting spatial access in the present, and how this impacts how these individuals will come to understand their own identities. Additionally, I was able to think of space more than a container in which things take place, but rather as being actively produced by the actions that take place in it. In the context of this project, these new ideas allowed me to better make sense of urban space in South Africa, and how the political structures of the past and present affect queer people of color.

This project will still take some time before it will be finished, but continuing to engage in this topic in the spring semester has me incredibly excited. This experience has pushed me outside of my intellectual comfort zones, and has challenged the way I understand my engagement with human rights, both academically and in activism. I am very proud of the work I have done so far, as it has forced me to become a much more proficient writer and to further develop my emotional intelligence. I know there is much more I can learn from this project, and I look forward to being able to share the final product with my peers.

I am thankful to have had the support of Duke Libraries, both in funding my research and for allowing me to use their various different resources. I am also grateful to my faculty mentor, professor Samuel Fury Childs Daly, and Duke Librarians Heather Martin and Arianne Hartsell-Gundy. This project would not have been possible without their continued support and guidance. I look forward to continuing my research and building upon the foundational work in understanding queer and refugee movement globally.

LIFE Summer Fellowship reflections: From 23% to 4% of the population, Pakistani religious minorities continue to suffer

This is the first blog post in a series written by the 2021 recipients of the Duke University Libraries Summer Research Fellowship for LIFE Students. Priyah Parkash is a senior majoring in Economics and Statistical Science. 

I grew up as a Hindu attending a Catholic school in the Muslim-majority country of Pakistan, where minorities form only about four percent of the population. Although I was privileged to grow up in diverse subcultures that have conditioned the nuanced layers of my identity and facilitated a multicultural outlook, the reality for minorities as a whole in Pakistan is rather grim.

Religion in Pakistan is the source of political legitimacy and the basis for the state’s identity; throughout Pakistan’s short history, it has demonstrated itself to be an explosive force when it is used to shape culture, social institutions and the state itself, embroiling the nation in Hindu-Muslim riots, inter-sectarian violence, forced conversions and other religiously-related conflicts. Religion is not a popular subject for discussion without tension and there is a repeated pattern of our national leaders dismissing the contributions of religious minorities to our nation and treating them as second-class citizens. However, Hindus of Pakistan did not migrate from present-day India but were the original rulers and inhabitants of the land surrounding the river Indus that constitutes Pakistan today and have actively contributed to the region’s culture and development throughout history. However, this history is intentionally ignored as Pakistan’s Constitution, political and economic institutions systematically disadvantage religious minorities. For example, the Pakistani Constitution explicitly prevents non-Muslims from running for the office of the President and the Prime Minister of Pakistan .

Although religious minorities in Pakistan have suffered discrimination since the inception of Pakistan, the human rights abuses suffered by minorities over the last four decades have reached an all-time high as the state has increasingly moved to the right with the institutionalization of Islamization in the quest for legitimacy and national cohesiveness. This has further led to the development of state apparatus that further disadvantages non-Muslim citizens by exposing them to legal prosecution and extrajudicial persecution in the form of blasphemy laws, forced conversions, target killings, and desecration of temples, etc.

Through the Duke University Libraries LIFE Undergraduate Research Grant, I set out to delve deeper into the history of religious minorities of Pakistan and see if their experiences and status could be demarcated into different phases that parallel the trends in their emigration numbers using a variety of library resources such as government documents, books, journal articles, and newspaper records. In this process, I also hoped to shed light on the contributions of Pakistani minorities to the country’s economic, strategic, and cultural development.

This deep dive helped me recognize that Pakistan’s history pertaining to religious minorities can be divided into three distinct phases. The first phase lasting from 1947 to 1972 was characterized by protection of the freedom and rights of religious minorities, when religious minorities formed approximately 23% of the Pakistani population; the second phase saw a contraction of this protection as a result of the new formal constitution; the third and the current phase began with the institutionalization of Islamization under the martial law regime of Zia-ul-Haq and saw the ascension of radical religious forces that sought to reorder public and private life in line with a fundamentalist conception of an Islamic state, causing the minority emigration rates to skyrocket.

This summer research project also drew my attention to the status of non-Muslim Pakistani women as “double minorities”. For my next project, I wish to elevate minority women and give them a voice by collecting and sharing their stories of silent suffering, rebellion, perseverance and revolution.

My personal research experiences, both this summer and in the past, have not only pushed me out of my comfort zone but also enhanced my emotional intelligence and equipped me with the skills of weaving my way through complex rationale, mediating between conflicting viewpoints, and seeking commonalities, which will prove valuable, regardless of what I decide to pursue next.

If you are someone who has a subject area that they are interested in, regardless of how bizarre or controversial it might be, I encourage you to take a leap of faith and pursue your research interests. Use the Duke network and resources around you, voice your ideas, seek feedback, and get comfortable with the idea of being a leaf in the wind—you may not always be able to answer what you set out to explore, but you might end up in a whole new world of exciting (research) possibilities and perhaps discover a new area that you didn’t originally think you would be interested in.

I am deeply grateful to Duke Libraries for funding my research and allowing me to use their resources this summer. I would also like to recognize my faculty mentor Dr. Ellen McLarney and Duke librarians Carson Holloway and Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, without whose mentorship and support this project would not have been possible. I intend to continue to further the cause of religious minorities in Pakistan and around the world through research and applied projects and look forward to the upcoming discoveries and milestones.

 

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

Take a seat at the round table for a discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a delightfully creepy Arthurian tale (and the inspiration for the new movie The Green Knight, starring Dev Patel). We’ll meet on Wednesday, October 27th at noon over Zoom, and the link will be mailed out the morning of the meeting. Register here to join us. As always, you’re welcome to join regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read.

Although you may choose to read any edition (including some freely available online), we especially recommend the Burton Raffel and J.R.R. Tolkien translations.

2021 Banned Books Week

This post was written by Sydney Adams, current practicum student in the Research and Instructional Services department at Duke and second year graduate student in the School of Information and Library Science at UN Chapel-Hill.

This week (September 26th-October 2nd, 2021) is Banned Books Week, which is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. The theme for Banned Books Week this year is “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.” While censorship creates barriers between us, sharing stories allows us to forge connections with one another.

This year, we have compiled a collection of commonly banned and challenged books for Mystery Date with a Banned Book. Below is a list of books that were either banned or challenged during 2020, but instead of telling you the book titles, we’ve provided a summary of each book and the reason(s) why it was banned or challenged. If any of these books sound interesting to you, click on the “Mystery Book” link to check out that book from Duke University Libraries.

  • Mystery Book 1: In this novel, two teens—one Black, one white—grapple with the repercussions of a single violent act that leaves their school, their community, and, ultimately, the country bitterly divided by racial tension.
    • Reasons: Banned and challenged for profanity, drug use, and alcoholism and because it was thought to promote antipolice views, contain divisive topics, and be “too much of a sensitive matter right now.”
  • Mystery Book 2: Japanese animation is more popular than ever following the 2002 Academy Award given to Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. It confirmed that anime is more than just children’s cartoons, often portraying important social and cultural themes. This book will be the authoritative source on anime for an exploding market of viewers who want to know more.
    • Reasons: Challenged because it includes pornographic content in a chapter that explores the subject of bodies in hentai, a sub-genre of anime.
  • Mystery Book 3: This is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove—a Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
    • Reasons: Banned and challenged because it was considered sexually explicit and depicts child sexual abuse.
  • Mystery Book 4: Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about.
    • Reasons: Challenged in North Carolina for being “anti-Christian” and on the grounds that the school’s use of the novel violates constitutional safeguards against government endorsement of religion.
  • Mystery Book 5: This autobiography charts the author’s journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.
    • Reason: Challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content.
  • Mystery Book 6: The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons their love, their sacrifices, and their lies.
    • Reasons: This critically acclaimed, multigenerational novel was challenged and banned because it includes sexual violence and was thought to “lead to terrorism” and “promote Islam.”
  • Mystery Book 7: Through a gripping, fast-paced, and energizing narrative, this book shines a light on the many insidious forms of racist ideas—and on ways readers can identify and stamp out racist thoughts in their daily lives.
    • Reasons: Banned and challenged because of the author’s public statements and because of claims that the book contains “selective storytelling incidents” and does not encompass racism against all people.

Summaries courtesy of Syndetic Solutions, Inc. Reasons for ban or challenge courtesy of the American Library Association and the Office for Intellectual Freedom.

Online: Low Maintenance Book Club reads “Persepolis”

To get in the back-to-school spirit, we’ll be reading and discussing Persepolis, a newer addition to many middle and high school reading lists. Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel describes her experience growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. As always, you’re welcome to join regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read the book!

Low Maintenance Book Club reads Persepolis
Tuesday, September 28th, noon-1pm
Zoom (link to be sent the morning of meeting)

Copies of the book can be found at Duke University Libraries and at all local public libraries. Please RSVP to receive a Zoom link the morning of the meeting.

If you have questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu

RCR Library Programs for New Graduate Students – Fall 2021

The Duke University Libraries is offering a number of RCR programs for new graduate students. These workshops are designed as a complement to the required RCR orientations for new graduate and professional school students. The library will offer a number of additional RCR programs through the academic year.

Workshop Description

This interactive online workshop will introduce you to a variety of library resources to support your research practices. We’ll cover copyright and fair use, citation practices and avoiding plagiarism, research data management, using rare materials and manuscripts, and issues in scholarly publishing from an author’s perspective. You’ll meet library experts relevant to your discipline and leave the session informed on how to dig deeper and get individualized help when these topics arise in your graduate student career. This workshop has been approved for two hours of RCR credit.

You must register for the workshop. Click the appropriate link to register:

If you have questions, please contact Haley Walton, Librarian for Education and Open Scholarship, at haley.walton@duke.edu

What to Read this Month: July 2021

Looking for something new to read?   Check out our New and Noteworthy, Overdrive, and Current Literature collections for some good reads to enjoy!


Chatter: The Voice in our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross. Tell a stranger that you talk to yourself, and you’re likely to get written off as eccentric. But the truth is that we all have a voice in our head. When we talk to ourselves, we often hope to tap into our inner coach but find our inner critic instead. When we’re facing a tough task, our inner coach can buoy us up: Focus–you can do this. But, just as often, our inner critic sinks us entirely: I’m going to fail. They’ll all laugh at me. What’s the use? Ethan Kross explores the silent conversations we have with ourselves. Interweaving groundbreaking behavioral and brain research from his own lab with real-world case studies–from a pitcher who forgets how to pitch, to a Harvard undergrad negotiating her double life as a spy–Kross explains how these conversations shape our lives, work, and relationships. You can read reviews here, here, and here.


The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix, author of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. Lynette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she’s been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece. But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up. Read a review here, and an interview here.


How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones. In the tradition of Zadie Smith and Marlon James, a brilliant Caribbean writer delivers a powerful story about four people each desperate to escape their legacy of violence in a so-called “paradise.” In Baxter’s Beach, Barbados, Lala’s grandmother Wilma tells the story of the one-armed sister. It’s a cautionary tale, about what happens to girls who disobey their mothers and go into the Baxter’s Tunnels. When she’s grown, Lala lives on the beach with her husband, Adan, a petty criminal with endless charisma whose thwarted burglary of one of the beach mansions sets off a chain of events with terrible consequences. The book is an intimate and visceral portrayal of interconnected lives, across race and class, in a rapidly changing resort town, told by an astonishing new author of literary fiction. You can read reviews here and here.


I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum. From The New Yorker ‘s fiercely original, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic, a provocative collection of new and previously published essays arguing that we are what we watch. In this collection, including two never-before-published essays, Nussbaum writes about her passion for television, beginning with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show that set her on a fresh intellectual path. She explores the rise of the female screw-up, how fans warp the shows they love, the messy power of sexual violence on TV, and the year that jokes helped elect a reality-television president. More than a collection of reviews, the book makes a case for toppling the status anxiety that has long haunted the “idiot box,” even as it transformed. Through it all, Nussbaum recounts her fervent search, over fifteen years, for a new kind of criticism, one that resists the false hierarchy that elevates one kind of culture (violent, dramatic, gritty) over another (joyful, funny, stylized). It’s a book that celebrates television as television, even as each year warps the definition of just what that might mean.


The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights by Dorothy Wickenden. In the 1850s, Harriet Tubman, strategically brilliant and uncannily prescient, rescued some seventy enslaved people from Maryland’s Eastern Shore and shepherded them north along the underground railroad. One of her regular stops was Auburn, New York, where she entrusted passengers to Martha Coffin Wright, a Quaker mother of seven, and Frances A. Seward, the wife of William H. Seward, who served over the years as governor, senator, and secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln.  Through richly detailed letters from the time and exhaustive research, Wickenden traces the second American revolution these women fought to bring about, the toll it took on their families, and its lasting effects on the country. Riveting and profoundly relevant to our own time, The Agitators brings a vibrant, original voice to this transformative period in our history. You can read review here, and the US National Archives has a video (starts at about the 10 minute mark) of a virtual book discussion with the author.

LMBC Big Books Edition: Middlemarch (final discussion)

Duke University Library’s Low Maintenance Book Club (Big Books Edition) goes provincial this summer with George Eliot’s Middlemarch, discussed over three monthly meetings.

  • The third will take place on Zoom, Tuesday, August 10, noon-1pm EST and cover book seven through the end of the novel.
  • The second took place on Zoom, Tuesday, July 13, noon-1pm EST and covered book four through book six. A link to the Zoom meeting will be sent out the morning of the 13th.
  • The first meeting took place on Tuesday, June 15, noon-1pm EST and covered the prelude through book three.

Frequently named as one of the greatest British novels, Eliot’s work explores issues of class and gender through the residents of the fictional town of Middlemarch. Does it live up to its reputation? Is it still relevant in the present age? Let’s discuss!

Print and online versions of Middlemarch can be found through Duke University Libraries and most public libraries. Project Gutenberg also provides multiple ebook formats for free.

Although the readings are longer, the low maintenance attitude is the same. Join as you like, discuss as much as you want–or just hang out and enjoy the company. Everyone is welcome. Just RSVP so we know how many to expect, and we’ll send out a Zoom link the morning of the meeting.

What to Listen to this Month: June 2021

Normally we highlight books from our New and Noteworthy, and Current Literature collections for this monthly post, but this month we will be showcasing audiobooks from our Overdrive. Protip: make sure to also check out Durham County Public Library’s Overdrive collection!


Just as I Am: A Memoir written and narrated by Cicely Tyson. “Just As I Am is my truth. It is me, plain and unvarnished, with the glitter and garland set aside. Here, I am indeed Cicely, the actress who has been blessed to grace the stage and screen for six decades. Yet I am also the church girl who once rarely spoke a word. I am the teenager who sought solace in the verses of the old hymn for which this book is named. I am a daughter and mother, a sister, and a friend. I am an observer of human nature and the dreamer of audacious dreams. I am a woman who has hurt as immeasurably as I have loved, a child of God divinely guided by His hand. And here in my ninth decade, I am a woman who, at long last, has something meaningful to say.” –Cicely Tyson


The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel. With The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with her Booker Prize-winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage. This book is read by Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in the Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and includes a bonus conversation between Ben Miles and Hilary Mantel.


Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe. You’re told that if you “do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Whether it’s working for “exposure” and “experience,” or enduring poor treatment in the name of “being part of the family,” all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love. Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this “labor of love” myth — the idea that certain work is not really work, and therefore should be done out of passion instead of pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries — from the unpaid intern, to the overworked teacher, to the nonprofit worker and even the professional athlete — Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work. You can read reviews here and here.


The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo. Quick-witted, ambitious Ji Lin is stuck as an apprentice dressmaker, moonlighting as a dancehall girl to help pay off her mother’s Mahjong debts. But when one of her dance partners accidentally leaves behind a gruesome souvenir, Ji Lin may finally get the adventure she has been longing for. Eleven-year-old houseboy Ren is also on a mission, racing to fulfill his former master’s dying wish: that Ren find the man’s finger, lost years ago in an accident, and bury it with his body. Ren has 49 days to do so, or his master’s soul will wander the earth forever. As the days tick relentlessly by, a series of unexplained deaths wracks the district, along with whispers of men who turn into tigers. Ji Lin and Ren’s increasingly dangerous paths crisscross through lush plantations, hospital storage rooms, and ghostly dreamscapes. Narrated by the author. You can read a review here, and check out this NPR interview.


The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here by Hope Jahren. Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions—from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles—that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before. She explains the current and projected consequences of global warming—from superstorms to rising sea levels—and the actions that we all can take to fight back. At once an explainer on the mechanisms of global change and a lively, personal narrative given to us in Jahren’s inimitable voice, it is an essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it. You can read reviews here and here.

National Poetry Month 2021

This year is the 25th National Poetry Month. The Academy of American Poets has 30 ways to celebrate on their website.

This year I want to honor Lawrence Ferlinghetti who died this year at the age of 101. You can read a nice bio and overview of his work at the Poetry Foundation. We of course also have many of his works in our library:

Little Boy

Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems

How to Paint Sunlight: Lyric Poems & Others (1997-2000)

These are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993

Starting from San Francisco

He was also the founder of City Lights, a bookstore and a publisher in San Francisco. This 2013 blog post “A Literary Meeting Place: The History Behind City Lights Bookstore” is a good place to start to understand the legacy of City Lights. Here is a selection of titles that they have published:

City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology

City Lights Anthology

Every Day We Get More Illegal by Juan Felipe Herrera

Funeral Diva by Pamela Sneed

Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman

Heaven is All Goodbyes by Tongo Eisen-Martin

And Then We Became by Devorah Major

Save Twilight selected poems of Julio Cortázar ; translated by Stephen Kessler

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads “A Year in Provence”

Missing spring break? Take a literary trip with this month’s Low Maintenance Book Club reading, Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence. This classic memoir chronicles the author and his wife’s first year after moving to France’s Provence region. As always, you’re welcome to join regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read the book!

Copies of the book can be found at Duke University Libraries (hard copy), Durham County Library (hard copy and audiobook), Wake County Public Libraries (hard copy), Orange County Public Library (hard copy) and Chapel Hill Public Library (eBook) and as an eBook through Open Library (you’ll just need to set up a free account to borrow).

Please RSVP to receive a Zoom link the morning of the meeting.

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads “The Duke & I”

Join the Low Maintenance Book Club for a very special Valentine’s-themed meeting on Tuesday, February 16th at noon. We’re delving into romance with The Duke and I by Julia Quinn, the basis for the hit Netflix series Bridgerton.  As always, you’re welcome to join regardless of how much (or whether) you’ve read the book!

Copies of the book are available through Duke University Libraries (ebook), Durham County Library (book and audio CD | downloadable audiobook | ebook), and Wake County Public Libraries (book and downloadable audiobook | ebook).

Please RSVP to receive a Zoom link on the morning of the meeting.

Happy Birthday to Jane Austen!


Every year I like to write a blog post to celebrate Jane Austen’s birthday.  This year I’m going to celebrate with titles related to Emma since this new version of Emma (watch online through our library) was the last movie I saw in movie theaters this year.

If you want to see other film versions of Emma, we have several you can watch through the library, including this 2010 Masterpiece Theatre version, this 2004 BBC  version,  the 1996 version with Gwyneth Paltrow, and what some people (me) would argue is the greatest adaptation of them all, Clueless.

If you want to read the book, we of course have you covered with multiple versions, including this one on Overdrive.

For a special treat, check out Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s first edition. Put this on your list to check out for a future in person visit, or check it out on Internet Archive.

And let me end with some of the fun Jane Austen related things that came out of this year.

https://twitter.com/LibraryLydia/status/1244723932722343942?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1244723932722343942%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.marieclaire.com%2Fculture%2Fa32699248%2Fdating-during-covid19-jane-austen-novel%2F)
I saw many memes comparing our experience of staying home, taking long walks, and social distancing to Jane Austen’s world, many of them outlined in this May Marie Claire article and this recent New Yorker humor column. I found a lot of enjoyment from this twitter account called Pride and Plague. I was also fortunate to be able to attend many online Jane Austen related talks this year, hearing scholars and enthusiasts I probably normally wouldn’t have been able to see live. I especially enjoyed the Jane Austen & Co. virtual series, sponsored by our UNC neighbors.  You can find videos of the recorded events on their website. I also attended the Virtual Jane Austen Mini Fest hosted by the Glendale Public Library.

Your End-of-Semester Toolkit

This blog post was co-written by Brittany Wofford, Librarian for the Nicholas School of the Environment, and Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Librarian for Literature and Theater Studies.

Exam time? Bring it on! Here are some resources to help you power through the end of semester and beyond.

To Help You Study

Take a Break

Take Care of Yourself

The Library @Home

The library is always here for you!  Maybe you already know that you can access many of our online resources from home or that you can check out books to take home with you.  We also have movies and music that you can stream and some e-books that you can download to your devices. Check out this recent blog post for some specific title recommendations! Here are some of the resources we have to do this!

Streaming Video includes:

Kanopy: Watch thousands of award-winning documentaries and feature films including titles from the Criterion Collection.

SWANK Digital Campus: Feature films from major Hollywood studios.

See the full list: bit.ly/dukevideos.

Overdrive Books:

Go to duke.overdrive.com to access downloadable eBooks and audiobooks that can be enjoyed on all major computers and devices, including iPhones®, iPads®, Nooks®, Android™ phones and tablets, and Kindles®.

Streaming Music includes:

Contemporary World Music: Listen to music from around the world, including reggae, Bollywood, fado, American folk music, and more.

Jazz Music Library:  Access a wide range of recordings from jazz classics to contemporary jazz.

Medici.tv: Browse an online collection of classical music, operas and ballets.

Metropolitan Opera on Demand:  For opera fans, a large selection of opera videos from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

Naxos Music Library:  Huge selection of classical music recordings—over 1,925,000 tracks!

Smithsonian Global Sound: Find and listen to streaming folk and related music

See the full list: library.duke.edu/music/resources/listening-online

 

Congratulations on finishing Fall 2020!

 

Long Night Against Procrastination at Home

What: Writing, subject tutoring, a virtual study room, and stress relief!
Where: On Zoom
When: November 10th and 17th in the morning and the evening (hours below)

Like most things, the Long Night Against Procrastination is going virtual this year! We’re still here to provide writing support, tutoring, research support, and fun stress-relieving activities, all virtual and adjusted to fit your busy schedule and multiple time zones, whether you’re studying on campus or remotely.

Newly added for those who miss studying in the Libraries: A Virtual Study Room! This quiet Zoom room will provide shots of your favorite library spaces and the chance to study alongside your peers as you prepare for final tests and papers.

Read on for what will be available on each date. Log in with your netID to this Duke Box folder for more details and Zoom links for the activities you are interested in attending! Feel free to come and go as you like!

November 10th 8:00am-10am EST

  • Morning Meditation with DuWell
  • Virtual Study Room
  • Writing Studio Consultants
  • Research Help with Duke Librarians
  • ECON 101 Tutors
  • Support from ARC Learning Consultants

November 10th 8:00pm-10:00pm EST

  • Yoga with DuWell
  • Virtual Study Room
  • Sleigh of Hand with DuWell
  • Research Help with Duke Librarians
  • PHY 152 Tutors
  • MATH 111L Tutors

November 17th 8:00am-10:00am EST

  • Morning Meditation with DuWell
  • Virtual Study Room
  • Research Help with Duke Librarians
  • CHEM 201 Tutors
  • Support from ARC Learning Consultants

November 17th 8:00pm-10:00pm EST

  • Self-Care Zine Workshop
  • Virtual Study Room
  • Research Help with Duke Libraries
  • Writing Studio Consultants
  • CHEM 201 Tutors
  • CHEM 101 Tutors

We know not everyone will be able to join us for the Long Night(s) Against Procrastination, but we want to remind everyone to take care of themselves during this time.  Here are additional resources to help you study safely and smartly (and a reminder to take time for a little fun along the way):

Resources to Help You Study

Take a Break

Take Care of Yourself

If you have any questions, feel free to email Brittany Wofford (bfw7@duke.edu) or Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu).

Sponsored by Duke University Libraries, the TWP Writing Studio, the Academic Resource Center and the Duke Student Wellness Center.

Reading and Voting

This is the last week for early voting! Did you know that Duke has an early voting location? It’s at the Karsh Alumni Center. You can learn more about your voting options at Duke Votes. If you want to learn more about what will be on your ballot, a good tool to use is vote411.org. To get you excited about voting, I wanted to share some titles about the history of voting and voting rights!

Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman.

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones.

Why Vote?: Essential Questions about the Future of Elections in America by Daniel M. Shea.

The Women’s Suffrage Movement edited with an introduction by Sally Roesch Wagner ; foreword by Gloria Steinem.

Voting in Indian Country: The View from the Trenches by Jean Reith Schroedel.

Fragile Democracy: The Struggle over Race and Voting Rights in North Carolina by James L. Leloudis and Robert R. Korstad.

Citizenship beyond Nationality: Immigrants’ Right to Vote across the World by Luicy Pedroza.

Selma’s Bloody Sunday: Protest, Voting Rights, and the Struggle for Racial Equality by Robert A. Pratt.

Institutions and the Right to Vote in America by Martha E. Kropf.

Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression in the United States by Gilda R. Daniels.

Ballot Blocked: The Political Erosion of the Voting Rights Act by Jesse H. Rhodes.

Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote by Susan Ware.

Oh and if you’re looking for something fun to do, there’s the recent The Voting Booth by Brandy Colbert. In fact Book Riot had a whole list this year of YA books about elections.

Open Educational Resources for Making Duke Courses Accessible, Flexible, & Affordable

As part of Open Access Week 2020, Duke University Libraries will be offering a workshop on Open Educational Resources (OER). Read on to learn more about what OER is and for details about this upcoming workshop.

What is OER Anyway?

OERs include worksheets, textbooks, videos, syllabi and lesson plans, and assignments or exams created by other instructors and shared openly for others to modify and reuse in their own teaching. OERs are accessible online without paywalls to anyone and are designed and licensed to be adapted, remixed, and reused in your own classroom.

Learn More on October 19th

In this time of reassessing how we teach for a combination of remote/online and in-person instruction, we have an opportunity to make our courses more accessible, flexible, and affordable for our students. The key to this: Open Educational Resources (OER).

This 1-hour workshop serves as an introduction to OER and an exploration of how to locate, evaluate, and use OER to enrich our teaching and learning.

Led by Haley Walton, Librarian for Education and Open Scholarship and Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Librarian for Literature and Theater Studies at Duke University Libraries.

Date: Monday, October 19, 2020

Time:1:00pm – 2:00pm EST

Register at this link.

ONLINE: A Very Spooky Low Maintenance Book Club

Get in the halloween spirit with the Low Maintenance Book Club! For our next meeting on October 21st at noon EST, we’ll discuss selections from the short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories by Mariana Enriquez. Named a Best Book of the Year by: Boston GlobePASTE Magazine, Words Without BordersGrub StreetRemezccla, and Entropy Magazine, these disquieting stories draw regular comparisons to Shirley Jackson.

We’ll discuss the following stories during the meeting:

  • “Things We Lost in the Fire”
  • “Adela’s House”
  • “The Inn”

This book is available online and in print from Duke University Libraries and print and audio at Durham County Library.

Please RSVP to receive a Zoom link to the meeting the morning of the event. If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

2020 Banned Books Week

This week (September 27th-October 3rd, 2020) is Banned Books Week, which is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. This year I am going to focus on books by and about African-Americans that have been challenged or banned because they are often more likely to experience a challenge.

As explained in an American Library Association webpage about diversity and banned/challenged books: “While ‘diversity’ is seldom given as a reason for a challenge, it may in fact be an underlying and unspoken factor: the work is about people and issues others would prefer not to consider. Often, content addresses concerns of groups who have suffered historic and ongoing discrimination. For instance, a book that often recurs in previous years’ top ten challenges is Toni Morrison’s Beloved. While it has sex in it, and that’s often the complaint, many other books also have sex, and are not challenged. Is the underlying motivation for the challenge racism? Sometimes, it surely is. In other cases, of course, a complaint genuinely may be about precisely what the challenger says it is.”

Here are some examples of titles that we have in our collection that have faced challenges over the years (books are drawn from Banned Books Written by African Americans and Top 10 Banned Books that Changed the Face of Black History).

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. Baldwin’s blunt prose rubbed people in New York and Virginia the wrong way, it appears. “Go Tell It on the Mountain” was banned in both states for being “rife with profanity and explicit sex” and including “recurring themes of rape, masturbation, violence and degrading treatment of women.”

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. After a parent’s public complaint at a school board meeting, the superintendent of Katy (TX) Independent School District removed the multiple award-winning book from all the school libraries in the district. Teachers and librarians argued against the censorship, which produced overwhelming media uproar. A Katy ISD student circulated a petition gathering over 3,700 signatures to urge reinstatement of the book. The Superintendent held firm in his claim that the book was pervasively vulgar and he was legally right to censor the book. Three months later the critically acclaimed novel about a black teen dealing with the aftermath of witnessing a police shooting that killed her unarmed friend was returned to the district’s high school libraries, available to students only with parental consent.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Challenged as a summer reading assignment in the Knoxville (TN) high school system because a parent claimed the nonfiction book “has too much graphic information.” Henrietta Lacks was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells – taken without her knowledge in 1951 – became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more.

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Banned in North Carolina prisons in February 2017 because it was considered “likely to provoke confrontation between racial groups.” The book was later removed from the list of prohibited books after the American Civil Liberties Union sent NC Department of Public Safety officials a public letter in 2018.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Though Time Magazine included the novel on its list of 100 best English-language novels published since 1923, not every English-language reader agrees. In 1997, parents in Brentsville, Virginia attempted to ban the novel from the Advanced English curriculum for “sexual explicitness.” Thankfully, the ban was overturned.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Winner of the National Book Award and ranked nineteenth on Modern Library’s list of 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has nonetheless been challenged for its lack of “literary value.” In 2013, NCAC sent a letter to Randolph County Public Schools in North Carolina after they banned the book because of a complaint that it “is not so innocent; instead, this book is filthier, too much for teenagers.” Ten days after the original ban, the board held a special meeting to reconsider their actions and voted 6-1 to return the book. One member of the board expressed his shift after considering his son’s military career: “He was fighting for these rights. I’m casting a vote to take them away. Is it right of me? No.” Such reflections would even give the Invisible Man reason to step into the light of day.

What to Read this Month: August 2020

Normally we highlight books from our New and Noteworthy, and Current Literature collections for this monthly post, but this month we will be showcasing books from our Overdrive. Please read this recent blog post to learn more about Overdrive, and also make sure to check out Durham County Public Library’s Overdrive collection!

Since we are we are currently commemorating the centenary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, I thought I would highlight books about the suffrage movement and women’s rights and history. If you’re looking for some films and television shows, USA Today recently had a nice list of titles. If you would like to read more about North Carolina’s involvement in the suffrage movement, check out She Changed the World: North Carolina Women Breaking Barriers


Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for Their Rights by Mikki Kendall is a fun and fascinating graphic novel-style primer that covers the key figures and events that have advanced women’s rights from antiquity to the modern era. In addition, this compelling book illuminates the stories of notable women throughout history—from queens and freedom fighters to warriors and spies—and the progressive movements led by women that have shaped history, including abolition, suffrage, labor, civil rights, LGBTQ liberation, reproductive rights, and more.


The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss. The nail-biting climax of one of the greatest political battles in American history: the ratification of the constitutional amendment that granted women the right to vote. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade. The opposing forces include politicians with careers at stake, liquor companies, railroad magnates, and a lot of racists who don’t want black women voting. Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, The Woman’s Hour is the gripping story of how America’s women won their own freedom, and the opening campaign in the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.


The Women’s Suffrage Movement by Sally Roesch Wagner. An intersectional anthology of works by the known and unknown women that shaped and established the suffrage movement, in time for the 2020 centennial of women’s right to vote, with a foreword by Gloria Steinem. Comprised of historical texts spanning two centuries, The Women’s Suffrage Movement is a comprehensive and singular volume that covers the major issues and figures involved in the movement, with a distinctive focus on diversity, incorporating race, class, and gender, and illuminating minority voices. In an effort to spotlight the many influential voices that were excluded from the movement, the writings of well-known suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are featured alongside accounts of Native American women who inspired suffragists like Matilda Joslyn Gage to join the movement, as well as African American suffragists such as Sarah Mapps Douglas and Harriet Purvis, who were often left out of the conversation because of their race.


Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote by Ellen Carol DuBois. Honoring the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, this exciting history explores the full scope of the movement to win the vote for women through portraits of its bold leaders and devoted activists. DuBois explains how suffragists built a determined coalition of moderate lobbyists and radical demonstrators in forging a strategy of winning voting rights in crucial states to set the stage for securing suffrage for all American women in the Constitution. She follows women’s efforts to use their voting rights to win political office, increase their voting strength, and pass laws banning child labor, ensuring maternal health, and securing greater equality for women.


Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote by Susan Ware is a tribute to the women who worked tirelessly across the nation, out of the spotlight, protesting, petitioning, and insisting on their right to full citizenship. Ware shows how race, class and religion divided the movement even as she celebrates unheralded African American, Mormon, and Jewish activists. The dramatic, often joyous experiences of these pioneering feminists resonate powerfully today, as a new generation of women demands to be heard.

ONLINE: Low Maintenance Book Club reads N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season

Duke University Libraries’ Low Maintenance Book Club is now online! To close out the summer, we’re reading and discussing The Fifth SeasonN.K. Jemisin’s Hugo award-winning dark fantasy/sci-fi novel. The first book in The Broken Earth Trilogy follows a mother searching for her daughter after an act of retaliation against an oppressive civilization sparks an apocalypse.

Readings and discussions will be split between two monthly meetings. The second session is scheduled for Wednesday, September 2nd at noon on Zoom and covers chapter 16 through the end of the novel.

Copies of The Fifth Season can be found at Duke University Libraries and at Durham County Library.

Although the readings are longer, the low maintenance attitude is the same. Join as you like, discuss as much as you want–or just hang out and enjoy the company. Everyone is welcome. Just RSVP so we know how many to expect, and we’ll send out a Zoom link the morning of the meeting.

If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

What to Listen to this Month: July 2020

Normally we highlight books from our New and Noteworthy, and Current Literature collections for this monthly post, but this month we will be showcasing audiobooks from our Overdrive. Please read this recent blog post to learn more about Overdrive, and also make sure to check out Durham County Public Library’s Overdrive collection!


The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life. Bahni Turpin, who has been included on AudioFile magazine’s list of Golden Voice Narrators, narrates.


The Princess Bride by William Goldman. Fairy tale collides with reality in this adventure about a beautiful maiden who must be rescued from her price. Everything William Goldman liked about S. Morgenstern’s original is here: good guys, bad guys, sword fighting, revenge, romance, and even “rodents of unusual size. “Join Buttercup the beautiful maiden, Westley the plucky farm boy, Inigo Montoya the embittered swordsman, Prince Humperdinck the scheming villain, and many other characters in this swashbuckling tale of good-natured silliness. This is a true keepsake for devoted fans and an absolute treasure for those lucky enough to discover it for the first time. Bonus: This audiobook is narrated by the film’s director, Rob Reiner!


No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg. In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day in order to protest the climate crisis. Her actions sparked a global movement, inspiring millions of students to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across the globe, from the United Nations to Capitol Hill and mass street protests, her book is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. The speeches are read by Greta Thunberg herself!


The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. On an alien world in the middle of an Ice Age, one man prepares for the biggest mission of his life. Alone and unarmed, Genly Ai has been sent from Earth to persuade the people of Gethen to join the Ekumen, a union of planets. But it’s a task fraught with danger. Ursula Le Guin’s award-winning masterpiece was one of the first feminist SF novels. This BBC Radio 4 production is the first ever broadcast dramatisation of this novel. It stars Lesley Sharp (Scott & Bailey), Toby Jones (Dad’s Army) and Louise Brealey (Sherlock).

 


Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling. In Why Not Me?, Kaling shares her ongoing journey to find contentment and excitement in her adult life, whether it’s falling in love at work, seeking new friendships in lonely places, attempting to be the first person in history to lose weight without any behavior modification whatsoever, or most important, believing that you have a place in Hollywood when you’re constantly reminded that no one looks like you. Mindy turns the anxieties, the glamour, and the celebrations of her second coming-of-age into a laugh-out-loud funny collection of essays that anyone who’s ever been at a turning point in their life or career can relate to. And those who’ve never been at a turning point can skip to the parts where she talks about meeting Bradley Cooper. Mindy narrates herself, which just increases the humor!

Online: Drop-In Library Orientations for Graduate Students

In August the Duke University Libraries will be hosting several 30 minute orientations on Zoom for graduate students. These sessions will include a short overview of library services and resources, introductions to library staff who can support you, and plenty of time for questions! Register now to save your spot!

August 10th from 11-11:30 am

August 10th from 3-3:30 pm

August 11th from 8-8:30 am

August 11th from 2-2:30 pm

August 11th from 6-6:30 pm

August 12th from 3-3:30 pm

If you have questions, please contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy (aah39@duke.edu).

Charles Dickens: 150th Anniversary of His Death

June 9th, 2020 marks the 150 anniversary of the death of Charles Dickens. Westminster Abbey is celebrating the occasion with a private wreath laying behind closed doors and the release of a new film of a sound and light installation which was projected onto the Abbey’s iconic West Towers over the weekend. The New York Times is looking back at their archives to examine how people reacted to the news. The Guardian newspaper is reading Our Mutual Friend in June for their reading group.

By a wonderful coincidence worthy of Dickens, our Low Maintenance Book Club has also been reading Dickens this summer.  We have been reading David Copperfield, and our last discussion will take place on June 23rd. It’s not too late to sign up if you would like to join us. We will send you a Zoom link after you have registered.

We are lucky that we have many books by and about Charles Dickens that can be accessed virtually, if you just can’t get enough. Here are a selection of some of the titles:

Charles Dickens in Context edited by Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux

Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing by Michael Slater

The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens by Sarah Winter

Select Short Fiction by Charles Dickens

The Unabridged Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

We also have some wonderful items in our Rubenstein Library, including a first edition of David Copperfield, which you can view online on Internet Archive.

 

 

What to Read this Month: June 2020

Normally we highlight books from our New and Noteworthy, and Current Literature collections for this monthly post, but this month we will be showcasing books from our Overdrive. Please read this recent blog post to learn more about Overdrive, and also make sure to check out Durham County Public Library’s Overdrive collection!

In light of recent news, this month’s books highlight the Black experience and Black excellence. If you are interested in further readings about structural racism and its effects, here are several recent lists to explore: The Anti-Racist Reading List10 Books About Race To Read Instead Of Asking A Person Of Color To Explain Things To You, and Readings on Racism, White Supremacy, and Police Violence in America.


When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele. From one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic audiobook memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Cullors’ story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful. In this meaningful, empowering account of survival, strength, and resilience, Patrisse Cullors and asha bandele seek to change the culture that declares innocent black life expendable.


Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, a two-time National Book Award winner and author of Sing, Unburied, Sing. She delivers a gritty but tender novel about family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. As the twelve days that make up the novel’s framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family—motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce—pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry.


Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America edited by Ibi Zoboi. Edited by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi, and featuring some of the most acclaimed bestselling Black authors writing for teens today—Black Enough is an essential collection of captivating stories about what it’s like to be young and Black in America. Contributors include Justina Ireland, Varian Johnson, Rita Williams-Garcia, Dhonielle Clayton, Kekla Magoon, Leah Henderson, Tochi Onyebuchi, Jason Reynolds, Nic Stone, Liara Tamani, Renée Watson, Tracey Baptiste, Coe Booth, Brandy Colbert, Jay Coles, and Lamar Giles.


Thick And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom. This “transgressive, provocative, and brilliant” (Roxane Gay) collection cements McMillan Cottom’s position as a public thinker capable of shedding new light on what the “personal essay” can do. She turns her chosen form into a showcase for her critical dexterity, investigating everything from Saturday Night Live, LinkedIn, and BBQ Becky to sexual violence, infant mortality, and Trump rallies. Collected in an indispensable volume that speaks to the everywoman and the erudite alike, these unforgettable essays never fail to be “painfully honest and gloriously affirming” and hold “a mirror to your soul and to that of America” (Dorothy Roberts).


Failing Up: How to Take Risks, Aim Higher, and Never Stop Learning by Leslie Odom, Jr. Leslie Odom. Jr. burst on the scene in 2015, originating the role of Aaron Burr in the Broadway musical phenomenon Hamilton. Since then, he has performed for sold-out audiences, sung for the Obamas at the White House, and won a Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical. But before he landed the role of a lifetime in one of the biggest musicals of all time, Odom put in years of hard work as a singer and an actor. These stories will inspire you, motivate you, and empower you for the greatness that lies ahead, whether you’re graduating from college, starting a new job, or just looking to live each day to the fullest.


How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones. Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir. Jones tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves.

What to Read this Month: May 2020

Normally we highlight books from our New and Noteworthy, and Current Literature collections for this monthly post, but this month we will be highlighting books from our Overdrive. Please read this recent blog post to learn more about Overdrive, and also make sure to check out Durham County Public Library’s Overdrive collection!


These Ghosts are Family by Maisy Card was an Entertainment Weekly, Millions, and LitHub Most-Anticipated Book of 2020 pick. This is the story of how a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations. Stanford Solomon has a shocking, thirty-year-old secret. And it’s about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley, a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. This novel explores the ways each character wrestles with their ghosts and struggles to forge independent identities outside of the family and their trauma. The result is an engrossing portrait of a family and individuals caught in the sweep of history, slavery, migration, and the more personal dramas of infidelity, lost love, and regret.


Whisteblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan Fowler. Susan Fowler was just twenty-five years old when her blog post describing the sexual harassment and retaliation she’d experienced at Uber riveted the nation. Her post would eventually lead to the ousting of Uber’s powerful CEO, but its ripples extended far beyond that, as her courageous choice to attach her name to the post inspired other women to speak publicly about their experiences. In the year that followed, an unprecedented number of women came forward, and Fowler was recognized by Time as one of the “Silence Breakers” who ignited the #MeToo movement. Now, she tells her full story for the first time: a story of extraordinary determination and resilience that reveals what it takes—and what it means—to be a whistleblower.


The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley. Julian Jessop, an eccentric, lonely artist and septuagenarian believes that most people aren’t really honest with each other. But what if they were? And so he writes—in a plain, green journal—the truth about his own life and leaves it in his local café. It’s run by the incredibly tidy and efficient Monica, who furtively adds her own entry and leaves the book in the wine bar across the street. Before long, the others who find the green notebook add the truths about their own deepest selves—and soon find each other In Real Life at Monica’s Café. It’s a story about being brave and putting your real self forward—and finding out that it’s not as scary as it seems. In fact, it looks a lot like happiness.


Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson. Moving forward and backward in time, Jacqueline Woodson’s taut and powerful new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of the new child. As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody’s coming of age ceremony in her grandparents’ Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody’s mother, for her own ceremony— a celebration that ultimately never took place.


Captain Marvel: Higher, Further, Faster, More by Kelly Sue DeConnick. Did you know you can read comics and graphic novels through Overdrive? We have a small but growing collection of these titles. Please note that some versions of the Kindle may not support reading graphic novels and comics. This volume collects Captain Marvel (2014) #1-6. One of Marvel’s most beloved Avengers launches into her own ongoing series! Carol Danvers has played many roles in her life; hero, pilot, Avenger, and now, deep-space adventurer! Join Captain Marvel as she attempts to return an alien girl to her home world, and defend the rights of aliens revolting against the Galactic Alliance. Guest-starring Guardians of the Galaxy!

National Poetry Month 2020

It’s currently National Poetry Month, and I feel like I need poetry now more than ever as a source of comfort. In fact Poets.org is running a #ShelterInPoems campaign right now. It’s quite lovely and worth checking out. In a similar vein, Professor Faulkner Fox is featuring a  Poem of the Day on the Hart Leadership Program page, and we in the libraries will be featuring lines from poems on Instagram this month.

If you are looking to read some poetry, I’m happy to say that we do have poetry you can read online in our collection. You can search our catalog for ebooks that we have. I have also had good luck finding poetry in literary magazines in Humanities International Complete. Plus I’ve recently been purchasing some poetry on Overdrive. Try out some of these titles:

Delphi Complete Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar

Delphi Complete Works of Emily Dickinson

Delphi Works of Robert Frost

Delphi Complete Works of W. B. Yeats

Delphi Complete Works of Walt Whitman

And let me leave you with two fun poetry related things. I was recently introduced to this tinyletter newsletter called Pome that sends a poem to your inbox everyday. Finally Sir Patrick Stewart has been posting #ASonnetADay on his Twitter. I personally can’t think of anything more lovely than that!

 

Overdrive and Libby are always open!

Maybe you’re finding yourself with more free time now that all of of your social events and entertainment/shows have been canceled. Maybe you just need a break from it all. Either way now might be a great time to pick up a good book, and we still have you covered with Overdrive.

Overdrive at Duke

We have ebooks and audiobooks on a variety of subjects and genres, including graphic novels, humor, and fantasy. You just need your netID. You can borrow titles for 21 days, and you can download to  all major computers and devices, including iPhones®, iPads®, Nooks®, Android™ phones and tablets, and Kindles®.

Overdrive at Your Public Library

It’s quite possible that the public library in your area has Overdrive, so take a look there too. Our friends at the Durham County Public Library has a wonderful collection that is worth checking out!

Libby

Duke Libraries is now available on the Libby app, which allows you to consolidate your checkouts across multiple libraries onto a single digital shelf. The app works with both smartphones and tablets. If you like to switch between reading on your phone and tablet, the app will sync your bookmarks and notes between devices so you won’t be left wondering where you last stopped reading. Libby also works with audiobooks!

Collection Spotlight: March Madness

March Madness, the NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament, is one of the most famous annual sporting events in the United States.

During the course of the month millions of Americans are glued to the screens, many fill out a bracket, there’s an increase in the number of sick days used, extended lunch breaks are taken, and even conference calls are rescheduled to allow for more tournament watching.

Duke has won 5 NCAA Championships, participated in 11 Championship Games (third all-time) and 16 Final Fours (fourth all-time), and has an NCAA-best .755 NCAA tournament winning percentage.

Duke’s continuous success in the tournament has raised the profile of the university, and one can spot Duke shirts all over the US and the world. This year both the men’s and the women’s basketball teams have high expectations and are poised to make their mark.

The Libraries have an extensive collection, covering March Madness, the Duke basketball teams (men and women), and the sport of basketball in general, a sample of which can be seen in the March Collection Spotlight, located near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins.

You can find interesting basketball facts and answers to the questions on everyone’s minds like:

…Who was the first basketball coach at Trinity?

…How many of the players on Trinity’s first team had ever played basketball?

…When Mike Krzyzewski, Coach K, was named the Duke men’s basketball coach?

the first African American player to integrate the Men’s Basketball program at Duke

…Who is the leading scorer in Duke history?

…What is the “Miracle Minute”?

…How many times have Duke and UNC met post-season?

This month’s spotlight was co-created by Tzvetan Benov (Evening Service Desk Assistant), Stephanie Ford (Evening Research Services Librarian), and Annette Tillery (Overnight Circulation Desk Assistant)!

Low Maintenance Book Club reads “Broad Band”

This spring, the Low Maintenance Book Club will be reading selections from Claire L. Evan’s Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet over three meetings. Spanning decades, this book profiles key figures who made advances in programming and technology that led to the online world of today.

Each meeting will feature stand-alone selections from this book, so attendance at each meeting is not necessary to following along.  At the upcoming meeting on March 4th, we’ll discuss Chapter 6: “The Longest Cave” (p. 83-94) and Chapter 10: “Hypertext” (p.153-174).

Multiple copies of this book are available at Duke University Libraries & Durham County Library.

Spring 2020 meeting schedule:

  • January 22, 5:30pm: Introduction (p. 1-5) and Chapter 2: “Amazing Grace” (p. 27-53)
  • March 4, 5:30pm : Chapter 6: “The Longest Cave” (p. 83-94) and Chapter 10: “Hypertext” (p.153-174).
  • April 7, 5:30pm: Chapter 13: “The Girl Gamers” (p. 222-236) and the Epilogue (p. 237-242).

Light snacks will be served.  We’ll be meeting in Bostock 127 (The Edge Workshop Room). Please RSVP here if you plan to join us at the March discussion!  If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

Happy Birthday, Jane!

Every year I like to celebrate Jane Austen’s birthday with a blog post!  Since 2020 will bring two new adaptations (Sanditon and Emma), I thought I would focus this year on film adaptations and these two works in order to get you ready!

Sanditon

Fragment of a Novel Written by Jane Austen, January-March 1817 : Now First Printed from the Manuscript.

Sanditon by Jane Austen.   An ebook version.

Sanditon by Jane Austen.  New edition currently on order.

The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster.  Chapter six covers Sanditon along with “Lady Susan” and “The Watsons.”

Jane Austen and the Fiction of her Time by Mary Waldron.  See chapter seven.

Unfinished Masterpieces from BBC Worldwide.   You can find the section about Sanditon in segment six.

Emma

Emma by Jane Austen.

Emma: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Reviews and Criticism edited by Stephen M. Parrish.

Emma.  2010 film.

Emma. 1999 film.

Clueless.  1995 film.

Jane Austen’s Emma: A Casebook edited by Fiona Stafford.

Cambridge Companion to Emma edited by Peter Sabor

Jane Austen’s Emma: Philosophical Perspectives by E.M. Dadlez

Adaptations

The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Works in Hollywood by Paula Byrne.

The Cinematic Jane Austen: Essays on the Filmic Sensibility of the Novels by David Monaghan, Ariane Hudelet, and John Wiltshire.

Jane Austen on Screen edited by Gina Macdonald and Andrew Macdonald.

Jane Austen on Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Adaptations by Sue Parrill.

Jane Austen in Hollywood edited by Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield.

Jane Austen and Performance by Marina Cano.

Collection Spotlight: Chocolate, Enough Said

This month’s Collection Spotlight is all about chocolate!  We have titles covering a diverse range of themes, including history, romance, food, feminism, and even some movies.  Here are some examples of what you can find:

Chocolate: A Global History

Chocolat: A Novel

Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History

Chocolate Wars: The 150-year Rivalry between the World’s Greatest Chocolate Makers

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

Do you suddenly find yourself craving chocolate?  Then take a look at the Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins!  We’ll even have chocolate out most of the time, so you can really satisfy that sweet tooth!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take the Library Home with You

handout

As you are preparing for your much needed break, I hope you remember that the library will still be here for you!  Maybe you already know that you can access many of our online resources from home or that you can check out books to take home with you.  We also have movies and music that you can stream and some e-books that you can download to your devices.  Here are some of the resources we have to do this!

Streaming Videos

Alexander Street Video Collection: Find and watch streaming video across multiple Alexander Street Press video collections on diverse topics that include newsreels, documentaries, field recordings, interviews and lectures.

Docuseek2 Collection: Find and watch streaming video of documentary and social issues films.

Films on Demand: Find and watch streaming video with academic, vocational, and life-skills content.

Kanopy: Watch thousands of award-winning documentaries and feature films including titles from the Criterion Collection.

SWANK Digital Campus: Feature films from major Hollywood studios.

Go to bit.ly/dukevideos to access these video collections.

Streaming Music

Contemporary World Music: Listen to music from around the world, including reggae, Bollywood, fado, American folk music, and more.

Jazz Music Library:  Access a wide range of recordings from jazz classics to contemporary jazz.

Medici.tv: Browse an online collection of classical music, operas and ballets.

Metropolitan Opera on Demand:  For opera fans, a large selection of opera videos from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

Naxos Music Library:  Huge selection of classical music recordings—over 1,925,000 tracks!

Smithsonian Global Sound: Find and listen to streaming folk and related music

All of these streaming music sources can be accessed at library.duke.edu/music/resources/listening-online

Overdrive Books

Go to duke.overdrive.com to access downloadable eBooks and audiobooks that can be enjoyed on all major computers and devices, including iPhones®, iPads®, Nooks®, Android™ phones and tablets, and Kindles®.

Low Maintenance Book Club Explores Nature

Our next book club will be on Wednesday November, 20th at 5:30 in Bostock 127 (The Edge Workshop Room) The Edge.

It’s that time when signs of the transitioning season are all around us, from the shortening days to changing leaves and shivers in the morning. As we move closer to winter, the Low Maintenance Book Club will be reading and discussing two short essays by Helen Macdonald on the cyclical movement of nature’s patterns: “The Human Flock” and “Sex, Death and Mushrooms.” Macdonald, author of the award-winning H is for Hawk, published these two essays as part of her regular “On Nature” column for The New York Times.

Both essays were published in The New York Times and are available on the NYT site:

They can also be found searching by essay title in The New York Times database collection.

Light snacks will be served. Please RSVP if you plan to attend. If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

Collection Spotlight: Native Americans: A Present-Tense People

We acknowledge that this space and greater university gathers on land that has long served as the site of meeting and exchange amongst a number of Indigenous peoples, historically the Shakori (sha-core-ee) and Catawba (kuh-taa-buh) people. 

It is also important to recognize the 8 tribes that currently reside in North Carolina, these include the Coharie (co-HAIR-ee), Lumbee, Meherrin (ma-HAIR-in), Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, Haliwa Saponi (HA-lih-WAH suh-PONY), Waccamaw Siouan (WOK-uh-ma Soo-uhn), Sappony, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee. We honor and respect the diverse Indigenous peoples connected to this territory on which we gather.

In honor of National Native American Heritage Month, Duke University Libraries is co-sponsoring with the Native American Student Alliance (NASA) a Collection Spotlight this month called “Native Americans: A Present-Tense People.”

We took part of the inspiration for this spotlight from this year’s Summer Reading book There There by Tommy Orange“We’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive.”  The fiction included in the spotlight are all by modern Native American authors, and the non-fiction books focus on modern history and culture.   Examples of some of the titles included are:

Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems by Joy Harjo

Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation by Malinda Maynor Lowery

Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot

Native Voices: indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversations edited by CMarie Fuhrman and Dean Rader

Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson

Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century by Douglas K. Miller

Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir by Deborah A. Miranda

Unsettling America: The Uses of Indianness in the 21st century by C. Richard King

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

“All the real Indians died off”: And 20 Other Myths about Native Americans by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Please check out the Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins!

You might also be interested in the current Nasher exhibit Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950’s to Now running until January 12th, 2020.  It is the first exhibition to chart the development of contemporary Indigenous art in the United States and Canada.  Check out the podcast “Native Voices: Darien Herndon” to learn more.  Darien Herndon is the current president of NASA.  There’s also a wonderful companion book by the curators Mindy N. Besaw, Candice Hopkins, and Manuela Well-Off-Man.

Finally please consider attending some of the upcoming events sponsored by NASA to celebrate Native American Heritage Month!

Low Maintenance Book Club Reads Kelly Link’s Pretty Monsters

Our next book club will be on Tuesday October 29th at 5:30 in Bostock 127 (The Edge Workshop Room) The Edge.

Get in the Halloween spirit with October’s meeting of Duke University Library’s Low Maintenance Book Club! We’ll be reading two spooky selections from award-winning author Kelly Link’s Pretty Monsters: “The Wrong Grave” and “Magic For Beginners.” Both titles are freely available online:

Hard copies of the book can also be found at Duke University Libraries and the Durham County Library. Halloween-themed snacks will be served.

Please RSVP if you plan to attend. If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

2019 Banned Books Week

This week (September 22nd-28th) is Banned Books Week, which is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Inspired by an article I read this year (More than half of banned books challenged for LGBTQ content), I want to highlight some LGBTQ related titles that have been challenged or banned to make us more aware of the need to include a variety of voices.  I hope that you will enjoy exploring these titles for yourself.

Angels in America by Tony Kushner.  Angels in America was challenged at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Massachusetts after protests from a community member who objected to its sexual, religious and racial content, and public attacks made by a local organization that called the play ‘pornography.’ However, after a major outcry from students and other community members, including a student who wrote an op-ed, it was decided that the book would still be taught in the Deerfield AP English class.

Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden.  It was published first in 1982 amidst controversy because of its positive portrayal of the story’s gay protagonists. There have been several attacks on the book because it centers on two 17 year old girls exploring their sexual orientation, though there are no explicit sexual encounters in the novel. The book was also reportedly banned in some Kansas City schools.  The book was at the center of a high-profile 1995 case in which US District Court Justice Thomas Van Bebber ruled that the novel must be returned to high school libraries where it had been removed because it was educationally suitable.

Coming Out in College: The Struggle for a Queer Identity by Robert A. Rhoads.  It was one of 55 books that parents in Fayetteville, Arkansas petitioned to have removed from school libraries. The parents formed Parents Protecting the Minds of Children and objected to the profane language and depictions of sexuality in the book. They also accused librarians and other opponents of their efforts of promoting a homosexual agenda. PPMC objects to this book because it promotes gay pride and a rejection of heterosexism.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel.  Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a graphic novel memoir of the author’s childhood, particularly focused on her relationship with her closeted gay father Bruce. As Alison grows older and realizes that she is a lesbian, she and Bruce are both forced to confront how his repression may have affected her own self-image and the way that she dealt with her sexuality. Time magazine named it the best book of 2006, describing it as “a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other.” The musical adaptation of Fun Home won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Musical. In 2018, two New Jersey parents requested that it be removed from the 12th grade honors curriculum because of its “sexually explicit nature.”

Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society and Law by Richard D. Mohr.  Gays/Justice was one of 55 books that parents in Fayetteville, Arkansas petitioned to have removed from school libraries. The parents formed Parents Protecting the Minds of Children and objected to the profane language and depictions of sexuality in the book. They also accused librarians and other opponents of their efforts of promoting a homosexual agenda. PPMC objects to this book because it endorses stronger civil rights for gay people and opposes organized religion.

Geography Club by Brent Hartinger.  It has recently become one of the most banned and challenged books in the United States. It was banned in the author’s hometown of Tacoma, Washington. More recently, the book has come under fire in West Bend, Wisconsin, where community members object to its presence in the local library because of its ‘immoral’ gay content. Click here for the Kids’ Right to Read Project interview with Brent Hartinger.

George by Alex Gino tells the story a child who is born male and known to all as George, but identifies as female and prefers the name Melissa. The book details how Melissa comes out to her best friend, and eventually to others, through the help of a school play. Five elementary schools in eastern Oregon withdrew from an annual statewide ‘Battle of the Books’ competition because of the inclusion of George in the reading list. The book carries an age recommendation of grades 3-7 and the schools’ principals argued it was not appropriate for their third-to-fifth grade students who would be participating in the competition.

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio.  In May 2005, the Oklahoma House of Representatives passed a resolution calling on public libraries to remove children’s books with references to gay characters or families. In response, gay and lesbian civil rights groups in Oklahoma donated copies of Lost Prophet: The Life of Bayard Rustin and Stonewall: The Riot that Sparked the Gay Revolution to local high schools. The donation was met with conservative outcry but the Oklahoma City school board voted to permit the donation.

New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein.  The New Joy of Gay Sex met various challenges including its being challenged at a Clifton, New Jersey library where the board voted to limit access to the book, keeping it hidden behind the circulation desk and requiring that patrons ask for it specifically by name. Additionally, a York Township woman in Medina County, Ohio quit her job as a librarian in protest over children being able to check out adult-oriented materials like The New Joy of Gay Sex. The library took no action maintaining that its policy was a parental responsibility to monitor which books children checked out.

Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse is a graphic novel about a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality in the Civil Rights era American south. Themes include homophobia, racism and gay identity. The novel was attacked by the Library Patrons of Texas, who objected to its inclusion in local libraries. They forced the reclassification of the book from Young Adult to Adult, but the book was not removed.

The National Coalition Against Censorship has even more titles on their website.

Collection Spotlight: Migration in a Divided World

In conjunction with the 2019 Provost Forum: Immigration in a Divided World, our current collection spotlight focuses on the complex issue of immigration, including books by many of the participants.  The titles are a mix of points of view and include public policy texts, political books, histories, memoirs, and novels.  Here are some highlights from the display:

The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America by Eric Kaufmann

Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen by Jose Antonio Vargas

The Death of Politics: How to Heal our Frayed Republic after Trump by Peter Wehner

Cast Away: Stories of Survival from Europe’s Refugee Crisis by Charlotte McDonald-Gibson

The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat

Debating Immigration edited by Carol M. Swain

Challenging the Borders of Justice in the Age of Migrations by Juan Carlos Velasco and MariaCaterina La Barbara

The Body Papers: A Memoir by Grace Talusan

Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution by Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick

Understanding Immigration: Issues and Challenges in an Era of Mass Population Movement by Marilyn Hoskin

The Other Americans by Laila Lalami

Please check out the Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins in preparation for the Forum taking place between October 16th-17th, 2019.

Low Maintenance Book Club Reads Fleabag!

Our next book club will be on Tuesday September 24th at 5:30 in Bostock 121 (Murthy Digital Studio) The Edge.

If you enjoyed the series, check out the play! Duke University Libraries’ Low Maintenance Book Club kicks off the fall semester reading Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridges’ play upon which the hit show was based.

From the play’s synopsis: “With family and friendships under strain and a guinea pig café struggling to keep afloat, Fleabag suddenly finds herself with nothing to lose.” We hope you’ll join us on this wild ride!

Light refreshments will be served, and we’ll have small prizes for attendees.  Copies of this book are available through the Duke Libraries.

Please RSVP if you plan to attend. If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

Announcing the 2019 Archival Expeditions Fellows

The Archival Expeditions introduces Duke graduate students to teaching with digital and physical primary sources. Each student partners with a Duke faculty sponsor to design an undergraduate course module that incorporates primary source material tailored to a specific class.  The Archival Expeditions Fellows spend 70-75 hours during a semester consulting with their faculty sponsor, library staff and other experts and researching, developing and testing the module.  A module can take a variety of shapes and be adjusted to fit different courses, disciplines, and goals of the faculty sponsor.  This year’s cohorts consists of three graduate students.

Kimberley DimitriadisKimberley Dimitriadis

Kimberley is a third year graduate student in the English department.  Her research interests include Victorian literature and culture, the history of science and mathematics, and novel theory.  She will be working with Dr. Charlotte Sussman on the course “Doctors’ Stories,” an undergraduate course that investigates fiction and theory written about doctors and the discipline of medicine from the eighteenth century to the present day. It explores stories doctors tell about themselves, and the stories that have been told about them.  She plans to use historical objects, manuscripts, and advertisements to help students understand how the fictions they’ve encountered in the classroom are supported by the physical instruments and documentation in circulation prior to or at the time of writing.


Jonathan HornrighausenJonathan Hornrighausen

Jonathan is a second year graduate student in Religious Studies.  His research interests include Scripture, art, and interreligious dialogue.  He will be working with Dr. Marc Brettler on the course “The Old Testament/Hebrew Bible,” an introduction to the Hebrew Bible from a non-confessional, historical-critical perspective.  His module aims to help students in the course understand the impact of the Hebrew language’s structure and writing system on how the Hebrew Bible has changed over time as a text and a material artifact.  One major aim will be for students to engage in transcription exercises based on the practices used by the Dead Sea scribes, the Masoretes, and contemporary Jewish scribes.


Joseph MulliganJoseph Mulligan

Joseph is a fourth year graduate student in Romance Studies.  His research engages with late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures of Hispanic America and explores the proliferation of allegory in modernist aesthetics. He will be working with Dr. José María Rodríguez García on the course “Introduction to Spanish Literature II,” a survey of major writers and movements of the Spanish literary tradition in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.  He will be drawing materials from digital archives, such as Biblioteca Digital Hispánica (Biblioteca Nacional de España), Biblioteca Digital de Castilla y León, and HathiTrust, as well as holdings from the Rubenstein, Perkins, and Lily Libraries at Duke.  Focusing on pedagogical missions, this module will highlight the challenges of modernization which the government of the Second Spanish Republic addressed in 1931 with the creation of the Board of Pedagogical Missions led by Manuel Bartolomé Cossío,

 

Applications will be available on our website in the spring for the fall 2020 cohort. Funding has been provided by the Provost’s Office and Duke’s Versatile Humanist NEH grant.

August 2019 Collection Spotlight: Microhistories

microhistory sign

This month’s Collection Spotlight is featuring microhistories.  In order to create what we hope is a far ranging and interesting selection of titles for people to browse, we decided to approach microhistory both from the academic and popular side of things.  We hope you will forgive us if in our enthusiasm we stray into some titles that might not meet the strict definition!

Here is a selection of some of the titles that we are showcasing:

A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

To Free a Family: The journey of Mary Walker by Sydney Nathans

Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay

Poverty and Piety in an English Village by Keith Wrightson and David Levine

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

If some of these titles spark your interest, consider getting involved with Duke’s own MicroWorlds Lab this year!  They even have a section called “What is Microhistory” if you want to explore further what this method of study means.

Please check out the Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins to find your next read!

microhistory book covers

Remembering Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison passed away yesterday at the age of 88. You can find a lot of really wonderful tributes and reflections online explaining just why she is a literary giant. Here are a few that you might find interesting:

Toni Morrison’s Song of America (written by Tracy K. Smith, former poet laureate)

How Toni Morrison Made Us See Black Women

The Generosity Of Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison Taught Me How to Think

Toni Morrison Taught Me How to Really Read

TONI MORRISON REMEMBERED AS A ‘WRITER FOR THIS AGE’: Recalling the Nobel laureate and the times her life touched Duke.

If you want to (re)read her work, we of course have you covered! Here are some highlights (including fiction, non-fiction, and works she edited):

The Bluest Eye

Home

Tar Baby

God Help the Child

Song of Solomon

Beloved

Beloved (ebook version)

The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

The Black Book

Burn this Book: PEN Writers Speak out on the Power of the Word

You might also be interested in reading interviews, such as Toni Morrison: Conversations and Conversations with Toni Morrison.

If you have a chance to go see the new documentary on her, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, you should definitely do so. I saw it at the Full Frame Documentary Festival this year, and I really enjoyed it. Eventually we’ll have a copy of the dvd in our library, but in the meantime you might enjoy these two films:

Beloved

“Sheer Good Fortune”: Celebrating Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison quote

The Art of Writing Letters: A Q&A with Joanna Murdoch

“Working with the Library” is an occasional series of stories highlighting collaborations between librarians and the people around campus whose teaching and research we support.

Joanna Murdoch is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department. She taught a Thompson Writing Program first-year writing seminar called “The Art of Writing Letters” in the spring of 2018. Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Head of the Humanities Section and Librarian for Literature and Theater Studies, served as the course librarian for this class. She had the pleasure of asking Joanna a couple of questions about how the library has supported her teaching and research.


What were your primary goals for your students in working with letter writing in this course?

Teaching for the Thompson Writing Program’s first-year writing seminar, I wanted to foreground the tangible longevity of academic writing. The claims we make and the words we use in essays, exhibits, or online forums can last a long time. Against the odds, a lot of written material survives! The assignments in my course ask students to think about their writing and research as taking part in conversations with long histories and long futures, too.

Letter writing, it turns out, is a good tool for cultivating the blend of voice, personhood, and responsibility that is crucial for compelling academic work but isn’t always explicitly handled in writing instruction. In almost any century, letters open with an address to a named person and close with the writer’s signoff. Between those extremities, letters and their composers do everything they can to try to reach their readers. For their part, the letter’s recipients face literal response-ability: they have to decide whether and how they are able to respond. Writing and reading in this view are intimate, implicating activities: words can’t convey ideas unless two human beings have already agreed to connect.

It’s easy to forget this interpersonal grounding when composing a college essay. But even the strictest cautions surrounding intellectual property and the respect and defense of human rights require us to acknowledge the voices of others. That’s why my students have been practicing discerning and responding to the historically situated human voice in other people’s writing over three major assignments—a close-reading analysis of a single letter, a research project on a letter exchange held at the Rubenstein or in Perkins’ collections or databases, and a letter to a public figure, exhibited on the Campus Club Wall for three weeks in April of 2018. 

How has the library supported your teaching?

In so many ways! Duke’s subscription to databases like North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories provided rich exploratory ground for my students in all stages of their writing projects. The library’s collections of World War I letters available in book form in the stacks gave students who stumbled across them the foundation they needed for their research on soldiers’ letters in the Rubenstein’s holdings. Then, in April, the Campus Club Wall in Perkins became a live part of our writing and learning space when students received permission to exhibit some visually enhanced selections from their letters to public figures.

But it was the library’s gifted specialists who really brought Perkins and Rubenstein to life for my class. Our designated Perkins librarian Arianne Hartsell-Gundy very graciously showed us how to use the library guide she had designed especially for our course, and she supported students with exercises for crafting a focused research question and building an annotated bibliography with reputable sources. I’ll always remember Perkins 118 as the place where Arianne showed us the lines from Alexander Hamilton’s letter-esque The Farmer Refuted (1775) that live on in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015).

A major highlight of the semester was when Rubenstein’s Elizabeth Dunn and Mandy Cooper introduced us to the historical letters and letter-writing guides they had hand-picked to match the students’ research interests. The hours these librarians spent selecting, transcribing, arranging, and expertly talking us through the materials were a huge gift to the class. Thank you, Perkins and Rubenstein!

How about your research?

For my research on medieval religious lyric poems, I lean heavily on Duke Libraries and their Borrow Direct and Interlibrary Loan relationships. My carrel is overflowing with Perkins, Divinity, and Lilly titles, plus others shipped in from Yale, the University of Chicago, or even our basketball competitor down the road. Thanks to the bases covered by Duke and these other library collections, this spring I was free to buy only the works I knew I would return to, rather than every single title on my comprehensive exams’ reading lists. The best part was when Perkins bought a collection of essays on Chaucer’s poetics at my request! I’d better go check it out, now that it’s on the shelves . . .

Another enormously helpful tool has been the library’s subscription to Oxford Bibliographies Online. Since I’m still in an early stage of dissertation research, I need all the overviews I can get of major contours in scholarly publishing. OBO is a great place to start.

What are three things you think that undergraduates should know about using information and the library?

I) You’re responsible for sniffing out the stories and scholarly drama behind the materials you see. If you do a lot of reading around for a project, you’ll start to see the same names and references to the same group of 10–30 major academic works. Then it’s like you’re pulling a necklace up out of the sand, revealing the links of a single, if complicated, structure. It’s one of the best feelings early on in graduate school, being not-at-the-mercy of the infinite-seeming database search results.

II) I said above that written material lasts longer than we think it will. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to actually use it once you’ve consigned it to your files. You may have terabytes of notes and essays on your computer or in the cloud, but you’ll never find any of it again unless you’ve tagged it all thoroughly or you like to spend your free time randomly clicking through old files. Some people love reference management software like RefWorks or Zotero. I can’t stand the way those services look, so I build massive searchable folders in an awesome writing program called Scrivener. Whatever you decide, leave yourself a lot of breadcrumbs. Don’t be like me and spend years searching for a half-remembered, haunting line that turned out to be from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem“: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”—I spent so long searching for the note I had made about it back before I learned to cite cite cite even passing references in journal-type notes. The best breadcrumb of all is a full bibliographic citation, including the date you found and read/listened to the material, plus a quick personal note on what you thought about it. The “find” function on your computer will do the rest.

III) If you need part-time work during a heavy course-load year, reshelving books for the library is a fantastic way to find a meditative groove while filling your muscle memory with clues about the way information is structured and accessed in a major university library—which boils down to the shape of academic discourse itself. That’s how it went for me, at least, in the basement stacks of the Yale music library. Maybe Duke will even let you listen to Hamilton or Leonard Cohen while you set some Perkins shelves to rights!

Happy Birthday, Walt Whitman!

Today is the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birthday!  We recently celebrated Whitman’s birthday with our Whitman Sampler event at the end of April, which featured President Emeritus Richard Brodhead reading from Whitman’s poetry and discussing his impact.

If you want to explore the life and work of Whitman, we have one of the best collections in the country in our Rubenstein Rare Books & Manuscript Library.  You can see original editions, the many drafts of his works that he created, correspondence, clippings, portraits, and scrapbooks in this collection.  We even have a lock of his hair!

If you want to read some of his work, of course we have many of his books that you can check out and read at home.  You might also enjoy reading a selection from the Academy of American Poets.  The New York Public Library has a great page outlining some good places to start reading.

If you’re looking for something different, check out the Manly Health and Training, written by Walt Whitman under the pseudonym Mose Velsor.  You can read about the discovery of this work here.

Finally I wrote a series of blog posts to highlight the “I Sing the Body Electric: Walt Whitman and the Body” exhibit that I had the great privilege of curating in 2017.  You can find blog posts about Whitman and Popular CultureWhitman and the Body, Whitman and the Civil War, and Reading Walt Whitman.

 

 

Low Maintenance Book Club Reads There There

For the summer meeting of the Low Maintenance Book Club, we’ll be discussing the 2019 Duke Summer Reads selection There There. It tells a powerful story of urban Native Americans confronting alcoholism, depression and unemployment amidst the historical backdrop of U.S. subjugation.

Copies of this book are available through the Duke Libraries (printonline and  e-audiobook) and from the Durham County Library (printlarge format printebook e-audiobook and audiobook on CD).

We’ll have light snacks (savory and sweet), and you’re welcome to bring your lunch. Please RSVP if you plan to attend.

**Please note a change in meeting location: Bostock 121, the Murthy Digital Studio

Date: Thursday June 27th, 2019

Time: noon-1:00 pm

Location: Bostock 121 (Murthy Digital Studio)

If you have any questions, you can contact Arianne Hartsell-Gundy at aah39@duke.edu.

April 2019 Collection Spotlight: Graphic Novels and Comics

This month’s Collection Spotlight shines a light on graphic novels and comics.  You will find a variety of graphic novels and comics from across our libraries on display.  Here are some examples:

Ms. Marvel, writer, G. Willow Wilson ; color artist, Ian Herring ; letterer, VC’s Joe Caramagna

 

 

 

I Kill Giants, [written by] Joe Kelly ; [art & design by] JM Ken Niimura

 

 

 

 

The Annotated Sandman,  by Neil Gaiman ; edited, with an introduction and notes by Leslie S. Klinger ; featuring characters created by Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg

 

 

Aya of Yop City, Marguerite Abouet & Clément Oubrerie

 

 

 

 

Wandering Son, [Shimura Takako ; translation, Matt Thorn]

 

 

 

 

French Milk, Lucy Knisley

 

 

 

 

If you are interested in finding out more details about finding graphic novels and comics in our collections, read on!

Comics and Graphic Novels in the Stacks

You can check out comics and graphic novels from our circulating collections.  We have comics and graphic novels scattered throughout our libraries, with most of them housed at Lilly Library on East campus.  You’ll find everything from The Walking Dead to Persepolis.

There are several ways to identify titles.  If you want to browse, relevant call number sections include PN6700-6790 and NC1300-1766.  You can do a title search in our library catalog for specific titles.  You can also use the subject headings Comic books, strips, etc. and graphic novels to discover more titles.

Manga

We have manga in the East Asian collection on the second floor of Bostock.  We hold about 600 titles in Japanese and 150 titles translated into English just in PN6790.J3 – PN6790.J34.  You can also find Korean manhwa in PN6790 K6 – PN6790.K64.  Popular titles held at Duke include One Piece, Dragon ballNarutoAstro Boy, as well as the complete works of Tezuka Osamu.

The Underground and Independent Comics Database

The Underground and Independent Comics database is the first-ever scholarly online collection for researchers and students of adult comic books and graphic novels. It features the comics themselves along with interviews, commentary, and criticism. Includes artists such as Jessica Abel, Jaime Hernandez, Jason, Harvey Pekar, Dave Sim, and many more. There are comics from around the world, including Canada, France, Italy, Spain, England, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Korea, Japan.

Overdrive

We have just recently begun purchasing some comics for Overdrive!  More titles to come!

Rare and Original Issues at the Rubenstein Library

The Rubenstein’s comic collection spans many decades, publishers, and styles: from Golden Age Batman to modern graphic novels, and everything in between.

Edwin and Terry Murray Comic Book Collection

With more than 67,000 comic books from the 1930s to the 2000s, this is our largest collection.  All of the comic book titles are in the process of being added to the library catalog, so you will be able to search the catalog for your favorite superhero!   The titles currently available can also be found in the catalog by searching for “Edwin and Terry Murray Collection (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library).”   You can try searching by genres, such as “Detective and mystery comics” and  “Underground comics,” as well.

Comic Book and Graphic Novel Collection

Contains thousands of additional comics and graphic novels with rich materials in international comics, especially Argentina and France, and comics created by women.  Find them in the Guide to the Comic Book and Graphic Novel Collection, 1938-2012.

 

In the meantime, check out the Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins to find your next read!