On April 12, the Duke community will celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Grateful Dead concert at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Widely regarded as a top show that year, the band delivered smoking renditions of “Jack Straw,” “Bertha,” “Good Lovin’,” and “Eyes of the World,” as you can hear for yourself in the video above.
To commemorate this historic show, join us for a special panel discussion, selections from the remastered video recording, live music, and refreshments on Wednesday, April 12, at 6:00 p.m. in the Ruby Lounge of the Rubenstein Arts Center.
A panel of Dead experts will share their interpretations of the show, including Professor Eric Mlyn; show volunteer and former Duke University Union coordinator Peter Coyle; and John Brackett, author of the forthcoming book Live Dead: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings and the Ideology of Liveness, coming out next fall from Duke University Press. The book will be the first in a new Duke University Press series, Studies in the Grateful Dead, in the fall of 2023.
Bridget Booher, Director of Duke WIN, will moderate the panel. Footage featuring selected songs from the concert will be screened. After the program, local Dead cover band The Loose Lucies will perform for an hour. Refreshments will be served.
Professor Mlyn teaches a first-year seminar about the Grateful Dead. His students researched the band’s performances at Duke from 1971 to 1982 and curated an exhibit in Perkins Library. According to Mlyn, “4/12/78 was a raucous and animated performance and has been widely recognized by Deadheads as one of the best shows that year. The band was preparing for a trip to Egypt and it was the last full year of shows for keyboardist Keith Godchaux and his wife Donna whose unforgettable vocals punctuated shows during that era.”
“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 theThompson 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 Historiesprovided 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 toOxford 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!
A new exhibit on the second floor of Bostock Library, next to the East Asian Magazine Reading Room, explores the truly global popularity of graphic novels.
Since ancient times, human beings all over the globe have been bringing text and images together to tell stories. The term “graphic novel” connotes a full-length graphic narrative that uses sophisticated artwork to address serious literary themes for mature audiences. Starting in the 1980s, it gained popularity as an alternative to comics in Britain and America. However, this distinction between “lowbrow” comics and “highbrow” graphic novels is not relevant to Europe, Latin America, and Asia, which have long histories of narrative art that appeals to a wide range of audiences in many genres.
In this selection of graphic novels and cartoons from Duke’s collection, you will see retellings of classics and tales of adventure that have gained massive popularity in Japan and China. You will see stories of revolution and bold political movements from Russia, India, South Africa, and Colombia. You will see tales of atrocities, survival, and redemption in Germany and Israel. You will see humor, both lighthearted and political, in Turkey, Portugal and Spain, and everyday life in Korea and Côte d’Ivoire. This variety demonstrates the power of graphic narratives to reflect and lend new visual interpretations to all aspects of the human experience. We welcome you to explore one of the world’s most popular modes of storytelling in the Duke collection.
The exhibit was curated by Katie Odhner, a graduate student in the UNC School of Information and Library Science who is interning this summer with our International and Area Studies department.
“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.
Dr. Marion Quirici is a Lecturing Fellow in the Thompson Writing Program and a faculty advisor for the Duke Disability Alliance. This semester she is teaching Writing 101: Neurodiversity, Narrative, Activism. Her students are working on projects that fight stigma by educating the public about the social contexts of mental and psychiatric disabilities. Kim Duckett, Head of Research and Instructional Services, has been Marion’s course librarian for three semesters.. She recently asked Marion a few questions about how the library has supported her teaching and research in the area of disability studies.
What are your primary goals for your students working on their neurodiversity activism projects?
Student Sydny Long with her graphic novel, “The Lonely Brain.”
The goal is to train students to communicate an impactful message to a broad audience beyond the classroom. Their message should challenge mainstream assumptions and stereotypes about mental disabilities, and generate deeper understanding of the social contexts that make mental differences meaningful. The assignment is flexible in terms of format and medium. Students have a lot of freedom in figuring out what they want to say, how they want to say it, and whom they want to address. Some of their projects may involve more traditional forms of academic writing (articles, blogs, or op-eds), but students can also communicate their message through visual art, film, creative writing, posters, websites, social media campaigns, and dialogic forms of activism such as canvassing and teach-ins. What every project has to do is take the knowledge and skills cultivated in my course and transfer them into real-world situations. Through this assignment, I want students to come to terms with their own power and learn to use their research and writing skills to enact change.
What unique challenges does this assignment present?
Because my courses are situated in the field of disability studies, there are two main challenges that we reckon with as a group when designing these projects. The first is upholding the mantra of the disability rights movement: “nothing about us without us.” In the “disability rights are human rights” conversation, we must center disabled perspectives. While some of my students identify as disabled and incorporate their own experiences into their activism,
Student Laura Benzing with her visual art piece, “Language of Autism.”
the majority identify as nondisabled and neurotypical. It is therefore essential that students rigorously consider the lived experiences of psychiatric consumers, survivors, and ex-patients in order to challenge their own assumptions. In advocacy work and activism, it is important not to place an onus of recovery on the individual. Instead, I ask students to research the social structures and cultural conditions that contribute to the challenges individuals face. To be good allies, students have to resist thinking of “us” and “them” — it’s just “us.”
The second challenge is accessibility. The activism project must be accessible not only to a general audience that is unfamiliar with the neurodiversity paradigm, but also to people with all kinds of disabilities. Students learned to use accessibility software to caption their videos, and create audio descriptions of the visual components of their projects. Some thought about ways to incorporate tactile elements into their artwork, while others created accessible maps and navigational aids to help guide participants to their events. I organized the projects into a website here: tinyurl.com/disabilityart.
How has the library supported your teaching?
The Thompson Writing Program follows a “writing in the disciplines” model, which means that every faculty member designs writing courses within a specific discipline in which they have advanced training and expertise. We each have an assigned course librarian with specialized knowledge of our discipline–you, in my case–who visit our classes once or twice a semester to train students in their research methods. This semester you visited twice: once to discuss non-traditional forms of research for the activism projects, for which students were expected to find first-person perspectives on topics relating to mental health, and a second time to train students to use the library databases to compile and analyze a variety of critical sources for their research papers.
Student work from Dr. Quirici’s class last year featured on the Campus Club wall in Perkins Library.
Duke’s librarians have collaborated on a number of resources that are useful for the teaching of writing, which they organized into a “Library 101 Toolkit.” The toolkit contains worksheets that help students choose a topic, consider their audience by identifying stakeholders, and evaluate their sources. My favorite handout is called “Classifying Sources: The BAAM Method.” It outlines four different ways a student might engage with a source in their writing: Background, Artifact, Argument, and Method. I find that having students organize their sources into these categories during the research process helps them structure their papers, and situate their own ideas alongside the work of others.
A really unique way that the library has supported my teaching has been their willingness to provide opportunities for my students to exhibit their work. Last year, the students who created visual art for their activism projects had their work featured on the Campus Club Wall in Perkins Library for a month, thanks to the help of Meg Brown. This year, librarians in Lilly helped one of my students organize a shelf display of recommended reading for Disability Pride Week and contribute a post to the Libraries’ blog.
How about your research?
The Duke Libraries have an online database called “Disability and the Modern World” that I have found useful for browsing for the kinds of resources I would not have known to search for, including periodicals, film and television sources, and archival materials. Resources are organized by subject, discipline, geographical
Students Jay Patel and Nick Saba with their children’s book, “New Friends.”
location, and people, which always makes for a really generative browsing experience. I was so excited to discover an Australian chat show called “No Limits,” which covers a range of topics on disability representation in the media, and features one of my favorite disability activists, Stella Young.
The Rubenstein Library also has an extensive History of Medicine Collection that has been useful to my research. When I was writing a lecture on Psychiatric Degeneration Theory for the Neurohumanities Research Group this past February, I was able to consult a first edition of Bénédict Morel’s 1857 treatise on the so-called “physical, intellectual, and moral degeneration of the human race,” and study the development of a harmful theory that would later be used to justify eugenics and racial cleansing.
What are three things you think that undergraduates should know about using information and the library?
First, to generate as many questions as possible about your topic before you start searching. It’s important at the beginning of the research process to consider your topic from all angles, and to keep an open mind about what you might argue until you’ve learned what other scholars have already written. The more questions students ask about their topic at the beginning of the process, the more options they will have for taking a unique approach on the subject.
Second, not to be overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. Disability is a topic people initially perceive as marginal, but this is a misconception, and there is scholarship connecting disability to almost anything you can think of. Students can feel daunted by this. But once they take the time to comb through what’s out there by engaging in distant reading, they find more sophisticated ways to articulate what exactly interests them. It can be really exciting to watch them discover the originality of their own ideas.
Third, to be comfortable asking for help. Research should never be done in total isolation. Having a conversation with a librarian, classmate, or professor can help you not only articulate your project to yourself, but also to get feedback on how well others are understanding your ideas. They might raise questions, introduce perspectives you had not considered, and help you define your topic. Think of the librarians as extra professors outside the classroom. They have many years of experience organizing research and gaining access to information, and students should take advantage of all that expertise!
The Duke University Libraries are pleased to announce the winners of our 2017 Andrew T. Nadell Prize for Book Collecting.
Since 1947, the Friends of the Duke University Libraries have presented the contest in alternate years to promote reading for enjoyment and the development of students’ personal libraries. The contest is open to all regularly enrolled undergraduate and graduate students at Duke University. The winners for 2017 are:
Undergraduate Division:
First Prize: Jessica Lee, “Hamilton to Homer: A Mythoholic’s Journey to Becoming a Classicist”
Second Prize: Caroline del Real, “The Unfathomable Journey: A Factual and Fictional View of Life Under the Sea”
Graduate Division:
First Prize (tie): Colin O’Leary, “The ‘Library of Forking Paths’: Jorge Luis Borges, His Literary Antecedents and His Descendants”
First Prize (tie): Jason Todd, “Century of Upheaval: War and Revolution in China and Around the World”
Second Prize: Brent Caldwell, “Politics by Example: My Political Mentors, America’s 20th Century Greats”
Judge Ruth Ross speaks with Caroline del Real, who received second prize in the undergraduate division.
Since 1947, the Duke University Libraries have presented the Prize for Book Collecting in alternating years to promote the development of students’ personal libraries.
Members of the public are invited to a showing at which undergraduate and graduate student competitors will have selections from their personal collections on display and will answer any questions about the works they collect.
The contest is named for Dr. Andrew T. Nadell M’74, who began collecting rare books when he was a student at Duke. The contest is open to all students regularly enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate/professional degree program at Duke. Winners of our contest will be eligible to enter the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest, where they will compete for a $2,500 prize and an invitation to the awards ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
Guest post by Ashley Rose Young, Ph.D. candidate in History at Duke and the Business History Graduate Intern at the Hartman Center.
My life has always revolved around the sale and distribution of food. My food-centric lifestyle is not all that surprising, as my family owns and operates gourmet food stores in Pittsburgh. By the time I was three years old, I was working behind the counter, standing on a plastic milk carton so that customers could see me while I earned my family “business degree.” After years of practice (and a growth spurt or two) I could easily reach over the counter to hand my family’s homemade kielbasas to customers. My grandfather made those sausages. He established the family business, too, by starting as an itinerant vendor at a roadside food stand in the 1940s. Over time, he worked his way towards opening a series of grocery stores with the support of my grandmother, mother, aunts, and uncles. Together, my family created a business committed to supporting small-scale local farmers and artisans while preserving the culinary heritage of Pittsburgh.
A profile of McGinnis Sisters Special Food Stores featuring a photo of the author (age 6) with her grandparents, mother, and aunts.
Inspired by my own experiences and those of my family, my dissertation research focuses on urban food economies in the United States. Specifically, I study street food and market vendors in New Orleans and the global influences on the city’s Creole cuisine. As a major Atlantic port city, New Orleans was connected to communities and food cultures throughout the Atlantic Rim, adopting ingredients like okra from West Africa and cooking techniques like starting soups with a French-style roux. Tracing those influences, I have visited archives and conducted fieldwork in countries like France, Italy, and Morocco, all of which influenced the development Creole cuisine. At the National Library in France, I studied the parallels and dissimilarities between artistic renderings of street food vendors in Paris and those in New Orleans. While the images were different in the ways they revealed cultural bias, in both places it was common for artists to pair images of food vendors with sheet music that captured their cries of “Piping hot rice fritters!” and “Beautiful cakes!”
A nostalgic rendering of an elderly cake vendor in nineteenth century France. “Un Type Perdu,” 1849, collection MD43, Les collections d’estampes Richelieu Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
A sketch of a sausage vendor in nineteenth century France. “Marchande de lard et de saucisses,” 1863, collection MD43, Les collections d’estampes Richelieu Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Fascinated by the prevalence of street cries in New Orleans’ historic soundscape, I sought connections to modern day street food cultures. In order to do so, I conducted fieldwork in Palermo, Sicily—a city known for its musical food vendors. Although most people do not associate New Orleans with Italian food culture, in the late nineteenth century, the city had one of the largest Sicilian immigrant populations in the world. In fact, at that time, New Orleanians colloquially referred to the French Quarter as “Little Palermo.” The sonorous voices of Sicilian food vendors rang throughout the city. Folklorists captured their calls on the page in compendiums like Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folktales of Louisiana (1945). In that volume, an Italian vendor is described as singing while he hawks his wares: “Cantal—ope—ah! Fresh and fine, just off a de vine, only a dime!”
A drawing and sheet music depicting a rice fritter vendor in twentieth century New Orleans. “The Calas Girl,” Cooking in the Old Créole Days: La Cuisine Créole à l’Usage des Petits Menages (New York, R. H. Russell, 1903).
Modern-day Palermo’s urban food scene shares similarities with New Orleans’ historic one. Like the Big Easy, Palermo’s streets are crowded with food vendors who entreat passersby with humorous and delightful calls. One of their more popular grab-n-go foods in the city is sfincione, or street pizza. Sfincione is simple and economical—a tasty combination of spongy crust, tomato sauce, olive oil, and a healthy sprinkling of dried parsley. Commenting on those humble origins with a bit of humor, one of the traditional Palermitano street cries is: “Scarsu d’ogghio e chinu i prubulazzo!” Or, in English, “Lack of oil and plenty of dust!” Another more enticing cry is, “Uara u sfuinnavi uara! Chistu è sfinciuni ra bella viaro!”—“I’ve just taken it out of the oven! This is a very beautiful sfincione!” The street cries of Palermo work in similar ways to those of historic New Orleans, attracting the attention of potential customers with a witty, entertaining performance. For food vendors past and present, charm is a major component of their business strategy. I had witnessed the power of charisma so long ago, perched on my milk carton while my mother wrapped parcels of sausage and joked with customers.
Sfincione vendor, Palermo, Sicily, 2014. Photo by Ashley Rose Young.
Entranced by that charm and my newfound academic approach to food, a dissertation (or one might say obsession) was brought to life. Even when traveling without a research agenda, I was constantly analyzing the local food cultures around me to connect what I observed in New Orleans with what I witnessed abroad. There were a few surprises along the way. While in Peru for an academic conference, for example, I learned about a maize beer called chicha de jora that resembled a fermented corn beverage popularized by Choctaw Indians in colonial New Orleans. Although I had originally focused my dissertation research on New Orleans’ connections to Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean, the discovery of chicha de jora encouraged me to study Latin American influences on Creole cuisine as well.
Municipal Market, Cusco, Peru, 2014. Photo by Ashley Rose Young.
Photography was a means of crystalizing these connections while also honoring the distinctiveness of community food cultures. Over the years, as I wandered through countless markets, I sought to capture the vibrancy of locally grown produce, the entrepreneurial spirit of food vendors, and the enduring presence of local food cultures in an age of homogenized industrial food.
I now have the opportunity to share these dynamic cultures in an exhibit I’ve curated for Perkins Library: To Market, to Market! Urban Street Food Culture Around the Globe. Through this exhibit, you can compare the texture and shape of ruby red radishes in Paris with their kaleidoscopic counterparts in Durham. Or you can draw parallels between curbside displays of fish in Essaouira, Morocco with those for sale at the Vietnamese Farmers’ Market in New Orleans East. The exhibit, which consists of twenty-four photographs, is loosely organized, encouraging you to create your own narrative of the interconnectivity of urban food around the world.
The exhibit is installed on the Student Wall on the first floor of Perkins Library, opposite the Thompson Writing Studio. It runs through March 31, 2017.
World AIDS Day Event to take place in Rubenstein on November 30, 3-6 pm
The papers of Maria de Bruyn, a medical anthropologist, are a recent acquisition by the History of Medicine Collections and will be the focus of this event and several others this fall. The Duke University History of Medicine Collections is a rich resource for teaching Duke medical students about the centuries of medical experimentation that inform the modern practice of medicine.
On November 30, the Franklin Humanities Institute Health Humanities Lab will host a special World AIDS Day event featuring a keynote address by de Bruyn and a lecture by poet and writer Kelley Swain.
In addition, students in professor Kearsley Stewart’s Duke Global Health Institute’s fall seminar on HIV/AIDS will discuss their three-week workshop with Swain and present an exhibit of their work based on materials from the Maria de Bruyn collection.
A reception is to follow the presentations. The event is free and open to the public and will take place on November 30, 3:00 – 6:00 pm, in Rubenstein Room 153. Contact Kearsley Stewart for more information, k.stewart@duke.edu.
Getting ready for Halloween? So is Lilly Library! Come check out our collection of spooky DVDs and graphic novels, on exhibit through the end of October.
The H Word: Horror in the LibrariesFuture Imperfect: Dystopian and Post-Holocaust Cinema
Last Thursday, we played host to Edgefest, an arts extravaganza that took advantage of the Libraries’ newest space, The Edge, by filling the walls with art. There was an amazing turnout, with hundreds of students flocking to sample the smorgasbord of tasty treats (everything from mocktails to cupcakes and mushroom sliders) and staying to add their own piece of whiteboard art.
Just a few of the amazing creations we saw at Edgefest.
The walls of the Edge were covered from top to bottom with art–both doodles and masterpieces alike. Duke’s unofficial artists had no shortage of creativity; from Van Gogh’s Starry Night to a full color map of Durham, Pacman to Pokémon; we saw all kinds of creations.
The Poetry Fox types up a new poem for his latest patron.
The Poetry Fox (a local Durham writer who writes on the spot poetry based on a single word) cranked out poems all evening for many eager poetry enthusiasts. Student performers, including Inside Joke, #busstopguy, and DUI, entertained artists throughout the evening.
Since 1947, the Friends of the Duke University Libraries have presented the contest in alternate years to promote reading for enjoyment and the development of students’ personal libraries. The contest is open to all undergraduate and graduate/professional students who are regularly enrolled at Duke University. The winners for the 2015 contest are:
Undergraduate Division:
First prize: Claudia Dantoin, “A British Homecoming: Growing Up Alongside Austen, Dickens, and Dahl”
Second prize: Katie Fernelius, “Women’s Fiction of the Past One Hundred Years: Re-Reading the World in My Own Image”
Graduate Division:
First prize (tie): Anne Steptoe, “Look Homeward: A Girl’s Journey Homeward through 20th Century Southern Literature” (pictured above)
First prize (tie): Andrew Patty, “Masculinity, Race, and Southern University: An Exploration of the Role of Fraternities in College Life” (pictured below)
Second prize: Yuqian Shi, “Across the Great Wall, I Can Reach Every Corner of the World”
Andrew Patty and judge Ruth Ross with his prize-winning collection
Since 1947, the Friends of the Duke University Libraries have presented the Book Collectors Contest in alternating years to promote the development of students’ personal libraries.
Join us for a showing at which student competitors will have selections from their collections on display. Students will be on hand to answer questions about their individual collections. The showing is free and open to the public.
In a new exhibit on the Perkins Library Student Wall, Duke students, faculty, and staff all explain what “Writing is like…”
Guest post by Jennie Saia, Thompson Writing Program Coordinator. Jennie worked with Writing Studio Director Vicki Russell and Writing Studio Acting Director Jim Berkey to curate the “Writing Is Like…” exhibit. The exhibit will be on display on the Perkins Library Student Wall through mid-November.
Every October, the Thompson Writing Program (TWP) celebrates how vital writing is to life and work at Duke.
The TWP joins university writing programs around the country in honoring October’s National Day on Writing. Last year, Writing 101 faculty and Writing Studio tutors asked Duke community members to complete the sentence, “Writing is like…”
Across campus, Duke students, faculty, and staff invented similes that expressed their thoughts on both academic and personal composition. Their comparisons get at the heart of what it feels like to actually sit down and write.
If you want to explore their answers, sixteen of the most creative replies are on display on the first floor of Duke’s Perkins Library. The showcased statements—sometimes profound, often humorous, occasionally sad—represent how the Duke community as a whole views writing. Join the conversation by adding your own simile to the open journal at the start of the exhibit.
You can also become part of next year’s exhibit by joining the 2014 National Day on Writing celebration. On Monday, October 20, look for writing activities in Perkins Library on West Campus and around the East Campus Quad. Stop by throughout the day to grab some candy, meet other writers, and answer the question, “What is the future of writing?”
Guest post by Maria Carla Cella, Graduate Liberal Studies Program. She curated the exhibit of prints currently on display on the Perkins Library Student Wall about the Beehive Design Collective.
Detail from “Mesoamerica Resiste,” a poster by the Beehive Design Collective on display in Perkins Library on the Student Wall.
In our multimedia world, we are constantly seeking a good way to tell our story. From cave paintings to blog posts, generation after generation of storytellers try to find the most emotive way to record history and pass it on. As a student of Latin America and the Caribbean, I have delved into many mediums in my efforts to understand the complex relationship between the global south and north. Despite the availability of information on the internet, innumerable academic journals, countless books and documentaries on the topic, it is difficult to find a comprehensive examination of what globalization really entails. Transmitting the information in a way that resonates with the widespread population is an even harder task.
Enter the Beehive Design Collective. Founded in 2000, this non-profit, all-volunteer, activist arts collective creates collaborative, anti-copyright images for use as educational and organizing tools. With its mission of “cross-pollinating the grassroots,” the cooperative uses intricate graphic illustration in the form of giant pen and ink posters that communicate stories of resistance to corporate globalization, free trade, militarism, resource extraction, and biotechnology. The Bees spread their art across the Americas, wielding it as an educational tool and aiming to help communities conceptualize alternatives to a globalized economic model based on exploitation. Funding the printing costs with donations, the Bees distribute 50 percent of each print run (full run averaging 20,000-30,000 prints) to communities in the global south free of charge, giving away prints to frontline communities, educators, and organizers actively working on the issues featured in the posters.
The Beehive Collective’s use of imagery and symbolic art ties the local to the global, providing microscopic detail on the interconnected nature of global issues and compiling the images into, literally, a bigger picture that is both overwhelming and hypnotizing. Using a word-to-image approach, the Bees are translators of complex global stories, which they learn and share through conversations with affected communities. The first time I unfurled and laid eyes on their massive poster, Mesoamerica Resiste, I knew I had found a gem that begged to be shared, and that its message would flourish and proliferate in the minds of the Duke community. If you want to dive into the Beehive’s art and see the epic story for yourself, stop by Duke University’s Perkins Library, where four of the Beehive Design Collective’s epic works are on display. You can also learn more about the Beehive Design Collective at their website: beehivecollective.org.
A new exhibit in Perkins Library highlights the major points of struggle and triumph in Duke’s LGBTQ history over the past 50 years. The exhibit begins with the earliest records of LGBTQ activity on campus—the dark days of arrest and expulsions—and culminates with the thriving and active queer community seen at Duke today. This transition was neither quick nor linear. LGBTQ individuals on Duke’s campus faced major setbacks in every one of the last five decades.
The exhibit also functions as a timeline, marching the observer decade-by-decade in order to view every artifact within the greater context of Duke’s queer struggle. On display are arrest records for “homosexuality” in the 1960s, early 1970s-era queer publications, the official “dechartering” of the gay and lesbian alliance in the 1980s, the establishment of the LGB center during the 1990s, same-sex unions permitted in Duke Chapel at the start of the new millennium, and finally a reflection of the current vibrancy of Duke’s LGBTQ community.
The exhibit was curated by Duke alumnus Denzell Faison (T’14), with special thanks to co-advisors Dr. Janie Long, former director of Duke’s Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity, and Professor Raymond Gavins, Duke Department of History. Thanks also to the Duke University Archives, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity, Blue Devils United, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture for their institutional support and contributed resources.
Commemorative Exhibit Opening Event and Remarks: Please Join Us!
Date: Thursday, September 25 Time: 4:30 – 6:30 p.m. (Program begins at 5:15 p.m.) Location: von der Heyden Pavilion, Perkins Library Remarks by: Exhibit curator Denzell Faison (T’14), former director of the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity Dr. Janie Long, and Duke University President Richard H. Brodhead.
Duke: 175 Years of Blue Devilish Images Student Photography Contest
We are pleased to announce the winners of this spring’s Student Photography Contest sponsored by Lilly Library and the Duke University Archives. Congratulations and many thanks to all the student contestants; we are pleased and overwhelmed by all the great photos. If you can’t make it into Lilly Library to view the winning photos on display, all the entries may be viewed on the Duke Libraries Photo Contest Flickr page.
Students reinterpreted iconic photos from four categories presented by University Archives, and the independent panel of judges selected the following winners:
Academics: First Prize – Donovan Loh, Field Trip to Lake Waccamaw
Runner-Up- Susannah Roberson, A Glimpse to the Past
Athletics: First Prize-Misty Sha, Jumping the Sunset
Runner-Up- Erica Martin, A Star on the Rise
Campus Scenes: First Prize – Misty Sha, Man in the Snow
Runner-Up- Shameka Rolla, Capturing the Moment
Social Life: First Prize – Catherine Sun, Jarvis Smoothie Night
Runner-Up- Jennifer Margono, Round Table Antics
All the students who contributed their contemporary perspective of past Duke scenes illustrate that campus life and student life remain constant over the years. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we do.
Currently on exhibit at Lilly Library: The winning photos are on display in Lilly’s lobby through May, and will be installed in Lilly Room 05 during summer 2014.
Duke: 175 Years of Blue Devilish Images – Student Photography Contest
Duke students are invited to celebrate the 175th anniversary of Duke University’s origins and win cash prizes at the same time! Explore and emulate the rich images of Duke’s past found in photos from University Archives and then reinterpret them with your own contemporary vision. Categories include Academics, Athletics, Campus Scenes and Social Life.
Sponsored by Lilly Library and Duke University Archives
What you need to know:
Who may enter – Currently enrolled Duke Students
When – Contest ends Thursday, March 27th at midnight.
Prizes – Winning photographs in each category will receive $200. First runners-up receive $50.
All contestants are invited to the Awards Ceremony on April 8, 2014 in the Thomas Room in Lilly Library. Winners will be announced and their photographs will be displayed in Lilly Library this spring.
Sponsored by Lilly Library and Duke University Archives.
News, Events, and Exhibits from Duke University Libraries
My life has always revolved around the sale and distribution of food. My food-centric lifestyle is not all that surprising, as my family owns and operates gourmet food stores in Pittsburgh. By the time I was three years old, I was working behind the counter, standing on a plastic milk carton so that customers could see me while I earned my family “business degree.” After years of practice (and a growth spurt or two) I could easily reach over the counter to hand my family’s homemade kielbasas to customers. My grandfather made those sausages. He established the family business, too, by starting as an itinerant vendor at a roadside food stand in the 1940s. Over time, he worked his way towards opening a series of grocery stores with the support of my grandmother, mother, aunts, and uncles. Together, my family created a business committed to supporting small-scale local farmers and artisans while preserving the culinary heritage of Pittsburgh.
On exhibit August 14 – December 14, 2014
