Duke Families Connect Over Stories with Author David Grann
Every October during Duke Family Weekend, we look for a parent of a Duke student who has an interesting job and invite them to share their experiences with other Duke moms and dads. This year we were fortunate to be joined by bestselling author and new Duke parent David Grann.
Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and author most recently of The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder (2023), named one of the best books of the year the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, TIME, Smithsonian, NPR, and others. He is also the author of Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (2017), which was also a New York Times bestseller and has been adapted into a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese. Grann’s other books include The Lost City of Z (2009), The White Darkness (2018), and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (2010). Grann and his wife, producer and investigative reporter Kyra Darnton, are the parents of Ella, a first-year student at Duke, who interviewed her dad at the event.
No stranger to libraries and archives, Grann shared insights and anecdotes from a long career of unearthing true-life episodes from history that turn out to be stranger than fiction.
Duke Grad Places 2nd in National Book Collectors Contest
Every other year, we hold the Andrew T. Nadell Book Collectors Contest to recognize and encourage student bibliophiles at Duke. This year’s graduate-level winner was Peter de Guzman, a graduate student in Interdisciplinary Data Science, for his collection on Filipino American identity.
As the first-place winner, de Guzman was eligible to enter the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest in Washington, D.C.—the “Final Four” of book collecting competitions—where he won second place!
De Guzman’s collection was inspired by a quote from Filipino writer Nick Joaquin: “The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.” The Duke student has explored this question through his collection, with many discoveries since his collecting began in 2018. De Guzman and his fiancée hope to continue building their collection and eventually donate it to a public library to promote youth education and Filipino American Studies.
At Duke, the biennial book collectors contest is named for Dr. Andrew T. Nadell M’74, who began collecting rare books when he was a student here.
Zooming In on Duke Engineers
This September we hosted our third annual library open house especially for students, faculty, and staff from the Pratt School of Engineering. The event offered attendees a chance to interact with some fascinating and unusual items from the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library—like a 1665 first edition of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (below), famous for its detailed illustrations of observations made through a microscope, including the first use of the word “cell” to describe minute structures invisible to naked eye. Over a hundred students and faculty members attended to get a sampling of the wide variety of collections we hold on the history of science and engineering, including many they might not expect.
Bookish Tradition Celebrates Faculty Success
Each year, Duke honors faculty members who have achieved tenure or promotion during the previous academic year with a special tradition. In recognition of their achievement, each faculty member is invited to select a book from the Libraries’ collection to be book-plated in their name, and to write a brief reflection their personal connection to the chosen work. The books and their accompanying statements are then displayed for guests to explore at a special celebration in the Rubenstein Library’s Gothic Reading Room, hosted by President Vincent Price and Provost Alec Gallimore.
At this year’s November 5 event, sixty-one Duke faculty members were recognized for their scholarly and creative achievements. The diversity of books they picked—from groundbreaking scientific texts and explorations of teaching and healthcare to timeless works of literature—offers a glimpse into the intellectual richness and spirit of curiosity that define Duke’s academic community. Following the event, a collection spotlight on the main floor of Perkins Library continued the celebration, highlighting some of the selected titles and the listing the honorees by name. Congratulations to all!
Spotlight on the “Space Race” for Library Collections
Below, Duke faculty members chat with Earl Alston, manager of the Duke Library Service Center, during a recent tour of the facility by the Library Council. The Library Council advises Duke’s University Librarian on library policy and serves as a communication link between the Libraries and the faculty. Members are appointed by the Provost.
Tucked away in an industrial park a few miles south of downtown Durham, the Library Service Center holds more than six million books, documents, and boxes of archival materials. About half of them belong to Duke. But the facility also manages millions of volumes on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
During the tour, Library Council members got to see for themselves how the LSC is running out of space. Built in 2001, it has been added onto twice and is now at 98 percent capacity. As usage keeps going up, it will need to be expanded again in the years ahead.
Made for This Campaign Invests in Duke Libraries
In early 2025, Duke University launched the most significant fundraising and engagement campaign in its history. Made For This: The Duke Campaign will engage alumni and friends to accelerate progress in areas where Duke can make the greatest difference for the world—advancing innovation through science and technology, creating a more sustainable planet, shaping students as next-generation leaders, and advancing healthcare to help communities thrive.
The comprehensive campaign will support key priorities across the university, with a goal of raising $125 million for the Duke University Libraries.
This undertaking comes at a momentous time. The explosive growth of online information and artificial intelligence has enabled knowledge to spread faster and more easily than ever. But it has also created an environment for disinformation and distortion, eroding trust in what we see and hear.
In this disorienting world, libraries have a vital role to play. It’s crucial that we remain a trusted source of sound research and guidance, prioritizing people, deepened collaborations, and a culture that is truly inclusive.
We can’t do it alone. We rely on a community of donors who generously support our work. This campaign brings with it new opportunities to collaborate on timely, transformative projects that will not simply enable the best teaching and research at Duke, but amplify and showcase it, increasing its impact on the world and countless individual lives. With your help in achieving our goal of $125 million, we can do just that.
Support the Libraries:
To learn more about the campaign, visit library.duke.edu/support.
Scenes from the Weaver Memorial Lecture
There were few empty seats in Duke’s Page Auditorium when author Percival Everett took the stage on Thursday, October 23, to talk about his novel James, winner of the 2024 National Book Award and 2025 Pulitzer Prize. The book—a satirical reimagining of Mark Twain’s American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the enslaved character Jim’s point of view—was selected as the Duke Common Experience reading for the Class of 2029.
Everett was joined on stage in conversation with Deborah F. Rutter, former president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and newly appointed Vice Provost for the Arts at Duke. Everett’s appearance at Duke was presented as the Weaver Memorial Lecture, an endowed speaker series hosted every other year by the Duke University Libraries in memory of William B. Weaver, a 1972 Duke graduate and former member of the Duke Library Advisory Board. In addition to the public talk, Everett also met earlier that day with a group of undergraduate fellows from the Reginaldo Howard Leadership Program for a thought-provoking, insightful, up-close-and-personal conversation about the book, a free copy of which was mailed to every first-year Duke student this year before they arrived on campus.
