Next time you find yourself on Duke’s East Campus, be sure to take in the new mural in Mary Duke Biddle Music Building. The brightly colored artwork by Greensboro visual artist Natalie Robinson pays homage to jazz legend Mary Lou Williams, Duke’s first artist-in-residence, and features many of the musical greats who influenced her, including Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. Encapsulating the essence of creativity and legacy, the mural was commissioned by the Music Department to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their building, home to our Music Library and wellspring of musical talent at Duke for generations.

Libraries Awarded Funds to Expand Duke Family Archive

As Duke closes out its centennial celebration year, the Duke University Libraries have received more than $1 million to preserve and make accessible a huge collection of historical papers related to the Duke family.

This support includes a $500,000 grant from The Duke Endowment, along with funds from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Foundation, the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation Endowment Fund held by Duke University, and the children of Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans.

With the receipt of the Duke-Trent-Semans family papers, the university now holds materials from the first four Duke generations. The archive offers new insights and stories about the family, the communities around them and their intertwined legacies. Dating back to the 1800s, the archive encompasses the personal and business archives of Washington Duke, James B. Duke, Benjamin N. Duke, Mary Duke Biddle, Doris Duke, and other notable Duke family members.

The new funding will enable us to prepare the papers for use, procure needed preservation materials, digitize portions of the collection, and ensure that Duke family materials are publicly accessible for research and exploration. The project’s focus will be the papers of the late Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans (pictured), a former Duke trustee who was the granddaughter of Benjamin and Sarah P. Duke.

Honoring Trent Semans’ enduring connection and commitment to Durham, the project will also establish a new community engagement coordinator position based in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The coordinator will work with campus partners to strengthen Duke’s relationships with local organizations and neighborhoods, foster collaborations with local cultural heritage organizations, expand access to Rubenstein Library collections and services for local communities, and increase the Duke community’s awareness of Durham history and culture.

“We are grateful for this generous and timely support from The Duke Endowment, the Biddle Foundation, the Semans Foundation, the Trent Fund, and the members of the Duke-Trent Semans family, which will allow us to establish the Duke Family Archive as a comprehensive historical resource,” said Joseph A. Salem, Jr., Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke. “We are especially excited about the opportunities to reach out to our community—taking our mission beyond the campus walls and inviting diverse audiences to engage with us in the proud tradition of a family whose impact on our region cannot be overstated.”

With Feuerstein and Feinstein, Libraries Present a Family Weekend Double-Feature

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 actor, writer, and director Mark Feuerstein, a familiar face to many on the big and small screens. Best known for his starring role as Dr. Hank Lawson on USA’s hit series Royal Pains, Feuerstein has had recurring roles and guest appearances on such shows as The West Wing, Prison Break, and Sex and the City, and his film credits include Practical Magic, What Women Want, and the WWII epic Defiance, among many others.

Feuerstein and his wife, TV writer and producer Dana Klein, are the parents of Lila, a first-year student at Duke, who interviewed her dad at the event. No stranger to being on stage, Feuerstein shared insights and anecdotes from a long career of entertaining audiences.

Later that same weekend, we were proud to partner with Duke University Press on a talk with John Feinstein T’77, author of the new book, Five Banners: Inside the Duke Basketball Dynasty, in conversation with Coach Mike Krzyzewski.

In the book Feinstein, who covered Duke’s men basketball as a student reporter for the Duke Chronicle and later for the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and NPR, tells the inside history of Coach K’s forty-two-year career at Duke and its five NCAA championships. Through his close friendships and conversations with Coach K, Grant Hill, Nolan Smith, Christian Laettner, Tommy Amaker, Bobby Hurley, and others, Feinstein takes readers on a mesmerizing ride into the locker room and onto the court.

As a sports commentator, Feinstein is used to covering Duke basketball with a reporter’s objectivity. But Five Banners allowed him to fully embrace his roots and tell the story of one of the most impressive sports dynasties of all time. Through his unparalleled access to one of the winningest college basketball coaches ever, Feinstein offers a blueprint of what leadership looks like and how greatness is made. The book is available from Duke University Press.

Meanwhile on the Socials: A Little Library 101

With over eight million volumes spread across ten libraries and two campuses (plus Duke Kunshan and the Duke Marine Lab!), it can be daunting to find what you’re looking for in a large research library system like Duke’s—especially if no one has ever explained it before.

That’s a frequent refrain our librarians hear from incoming Duke undergrads, many of whom are experts at online searching but aren’t as practiced at “old school” research skills like using a Library of Congress call number to find a book in the stacks.

To help them out, we recently boiled it down into a two-minute video for social media. Students can follow along with the “Littlest Blue Devil” as he finds a book in our online catalog and uses the call number to track it down and check it out. The video has already been viewed over a thousand times across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube and is being used in library orientation sessions. It’s a good reminder that even at top-ranked universities like Duke, students often need help getting up to speed on college-level research. That’s why they have friendly Duke librarians to help them find what they’re looking for.

How Can Libraries Help the Climate? Stop Trying to Be So Cool.

Like many parts of campus, we’ve been trying to reduce our energy consumption in support of the Duke Climate Commitment.

With nearly 610,000 square feet of combined space, our library buildings have one of the biggest physical footprints on campus outside of the Duke Medical Center. That means we also have some of the university’s highest heating and cooling costs.

Bringing those costs down represents an obvious goal—but only if it can be done in a way that keeps the millions of books on our shelves at mold-free temperature and humidity levels.

One solution we tried this year, in partnership with Duke’s Facilities and Maintenance Department (FMD), may sound familiar to anyone who has a “smart” thermostat at home. We started turning the air off when it’s least needed.

From January to May 2024, Duke FMD piloted a series of controlled HVAC shutdowns in Perkins and Bostock Libraries overnight when the buildings were closed. Whenever the dew point outside fell below 55 degrees Fahrenheit, the air handlers in the two libraries would automatically shut off and turn back on at pre-programmed intervals. In this way, conditions inside the climate-controlled book stacks never deviated far from normal.

Using environmental sensors placed throughout the stacks, the Libraries’ Conservation Services Department carefully logged temperature and humidity levels in order to monitor the impact on library collections over the five-month trial period. Happily, the impact was little to none.

The impact on energy consumption, on the other hand, was significant.

According to FMD, the controlled HVAC shutdowns conserved 7.1 million pounds of steam and 100,000 tons of chilled water used by Duke to heat and cool campus buildings. That’s the equivalent of 502 metric tons of carbon dioxide not released into the atmosphere, the same as keeping 125 gas-powered cars off the road for an entire year. The financial benefit was likewise eye-opening, saving the Libraries $210,000 in annual utility costs.

Given the successful proof of concept, FMD will continue implementing controlled HVAC shutdowns as part of our normal library building operations whenever the weather permits. And we will continue to monitor the environmental conditions in our buildings to make sure that Duke’s priceless research collections are preserved for future generations.

Thanks to creative energy-saving ideas like this one, Duke was able to announce earlier this fall that the university has fulfilled its 2007 pledge to become carbon-neutral by 2024—one of only fourteen U.S. colleges and universities to meet that milestone.

Feeling Like a Student Again

This group of Duke alumni recently got an up-close look at some of the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s most fascinating treasures as part of “The History of the Book,” a class taught by Clare Woods, Associate Professor of Classical Studies, for the inaugural Duke Forever Learning Summer Academy. It’s a condensed, one-week version of the same course Woods has taught at Duke for years, investigating the history of the “book” as a physical object from its earliest forms to artists books and digital texts. Drawing on rare and historic primary source materials from the Rubenstein Library, program participants learned how book production changed over the centuries, from ancient Greece and Rome through medieval monastic scriptoria to the printing presses of the early modern world. Combining the intellectual stimulation of college with the camaraderie of summer camp, the Forever Learning Summer Academy provides an immersive week-long educational adventure in July and August for Duke alumni and friends. Find out more at alumni.duke.edu/forever-learning.

Libraries Partner with University IT and Research Offices to Meet Growing Needs of Duke Researchers

As the amount of computational data we generate as a society keeps increasing, so does the complexity of conducting, sharing, and publishing data-intensive research. Every year, Duke researchers must spend more and more time navigating a maze of funding agency data requirements, IT security regulations, and data storage solutions, instead of focusing on the core work enabled by the data itself: discovery, innovation, and scholarship.

This fall, we were excited to announce a new faculty-centered initiative designed to streamline the administrative processes of data-driven research at Duke, optimize IT infrastructure, and empower our faculty researchers to do what they do best—make new discoveries. Known as the Compute & Data Services Alliance for Research (CDSA), it’s a joint effort of the Duke University Libraries, Office of Information Technology, and the Office for Research and Innovation—each of which touch the research enterprise at Duke at different stages and support Duke researchers in different ways.

The CDSA is already underway with a phased rollout and expansion of a dozen of the most highly requested research services identified by Duke faculty, including hiring additional research support staff. Here in the Libraries, we have already added a Research Data Management Consultant, Data Visualization Analyst, Senior Applications Developer, and a Digital Humanities Consultant this year, adding much-needed capacity to meet the level of demand. Additional positions will be added in the coming years in support of CDSA-aligned services.

The ultimate goal of the collaborative venture is to simplify the complete research lifecycle—from the early planning stages to final publication and archiving—thereby increasing the visibility, reproducibility, and impact of research conducted at Duke.

Giving Duke Engineers Something to Chew On

This September we hosted a special 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 this toothbrush testing machine from the Consumer Reports Archives. Over 100 students and faculty members attended to get a taste of the wide variety of collections we hold on the history of science and engineering, including many they might not expect.

Scene from Summer Camp

Meredith Parker-Terry, Librarian for Psychology and Neuroscience (above), paints a watercolor during Duke Libraries Summer Camp, a three-week series of professional development workshops organized over the summer to foster peer-to-peer learning and building connections across the many units of our organization. This year’s “campers” could try their hand at Risograph printing, bookbinding, historical board games, and the world of competitive Scrabble. At the same time, they learned about project management, having difficult conversations at work, improving their presentation skills, and more. The event concluded with a handicraft showcase, where staff got a chance to share their artistic and creative talents with each other. Started in 2019, Duke Libraries Summer Camp has become an annual tradition, offering our staff a chance to benefit from each other’s expertise in a relaxed and fun-filled atmosphere.

Bishop’s House, Lilly Library’s home away from home while the renovation is ongoing, sits near the northeast corner of East Campus, a stone’s throw from Baldwin Auditorium. The rambling historic home has a wide front porch, creaky floors, windows that look out onto tall trees and quiet neighborhood streets, and a colorful history of previous campus tenants.

The house was built in 1911 to be the home of former Trinity College President John C. Kilgo. After stepping down as president in 1910, Kilgo became a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church and lived in the home from 1911 to 1915. (Hence the name Bishop’s House.)

Later, the building took on a variety of uses, first as a women’s dormitory and then as a home for single faculty men. In 1920, Bert Cunningham, professor of biology and zoology, moved in with his family on the first floor, with a group of law students living one floor above.

In 1922, the building was turned over to the Trinity Faculty Club for use as a clubhouse, which it remained until it was extensively remodeled and reopened as the Woman’s College Infirmary in 1935.

For nearly thirty years, Bishop’s House was a “convenient convalescent place for co-eds with winter colds, a possible stomach upset following a ‘box from home party,’ or other minor ailments,” wisecracked the Durham Morning Herald in a 1938 article about the infirmary.

In 1962, the doctors and nurses moved out and the Duke University Press moved in, remaining there until 1983. After that, it became the administrative offices of Duke Continuing Studies, a university department that offered popular enrichment courses open to Duke students, alumni, and the general public on everything from yoga and improv comedy to history and wine tasting.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Continuing Studies staff left Bishop’s House to work remotely and ultimately decided not to return. That left the building available as a swing space when the Lilly Library renovation project started.

The interior of Bishop’s House still displays many of the picturesque features from when it was originally built in 1911, such as the wraparound porch, high ceilings, and fireplaces with ornamental tile. For the staff of Lilly Library, it’s a welcome way station— full of built-in charm, easy for students and faculty to find, and ready for another chapter in its long and eclectic history.

This semester, the long-awaited renovation and expansion of Lilly Library officially got into full swing.

All the books have been carefully packed up and moved to temporary storage, clearing the way for construction workers to move in. Meanwhile, library staff offices and workspaces have been relocated to Lilly’s temporary renovation quarters at Bishop’s House, which will serve as a base of library services on East Campus for the next two years. Although the historic home’s century-old floors can’t support aisles of heavy books, students and faculty can still visit Bishop’s House to pick up and return library materials, access course reserves, meet with librarians, and get help with any questions.

While the renovation is still in the early, messy phases, we thought we would share some scenes from our progress so far—before the real makeover begins in earnest.

Read More: A Short History of Bishop’s House

By Michele Lynn

As curator of Latinx Studies at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Ariana Curtis, Ph.D., is passionate about the museum’s commitment to increase and diffuse knowledge. Her ability to further this mission was forged as Curtis T’02 earned her bachelor’s degree at Duke in Comparative Area Studies (now International Comparative Studies). Her multidisciplinary major allowed her to explore history, politics, identity, arts and culture, and education—and to learn the importance of asking questions.

“I was encouraged to investigate areas of interest, without necessarily having an endgame in mind,” she says. “Through my professional career, I have never been afraid of inaugural programs or being the first to be a curator in a space. Being able to create and imagine in a structured way started with my undergraduate years at Duke.” In addition to being the first person in her current role, which she began in 2017, she was the first curator to bring a Latinx lens to her previous job at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum.

In her scholarly and curatorial work, Curtis continues to use Duke’s library and archival resources. Her gratitude for the Libraries, combined with love of her alma mater, propelled Curtis to serve on the Library Advisory Board, which she joined last year. “I have researched in many parts of Duke’s collections and am always encouraged by the diversity, both historical and contemporary,” she says. “Joining the board allows me to talk about how important that diversity is for Duke students of all levels, but also researchers, national and international, that draw on Duke’s resources.”

The legacy of Duke historian John Hope Franklin looms large for Curtis’s experiences, both at Duke and the Smithsonian, where Franklin was founding chairman of the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Scholarly Advisory Committee. A quote by Franklin—“We’ve got to tell the unvarnished truth”—not only appears on the wall of the museum but also represents the challenge Curtis and her colleagues seek to uphold in their work.

“Wanting to promote the work and collection of the Libraries, especially the John Hope Franklin Research Center, also aided my decision to join the library board,” says Curtis. As a daughter of an African American mother and a Black Panamanian father, she values “that Duke Libraries has dedicated resources to the collection, preservation, and dissemination of African American and African Diaspora history and culture as a standalone research center.”

When Curtis curated the first Latinx exhibition, Gateways/Portales, at the Anacostia Museum’s main gallery, she connected immigration stories in DC to those from the Raleigh-Durham area with collections borrowed from Duke Libraries. The exhibit included a “boycott” stencil and protest signs from Student Action with Farmworkers and a book of drawings created by children of farmworkers, with reflections on how their lives, communities, and families differed between the United States and their native Mexico. “I was glad to have people in D.C. relate to the dreams, fears, and aspirations of Mexican children in North Carolina,” says Curtis.

Curtis curates Latinidad through a specifically African American lens, rooted in U.S. history, at a national African American museum. She wants her work to help visitors learn something new, be affirmed in what they know, and have an emotional experience at the museum.

She lauds the commonalities between museums and libraries. “At their essence, these are places of beauty and education,” Curtis says. “These spaces offer resources—obviously materials—but also intangible, intellectual and human resources. Promoting and preserving the multiple perspectives of histories within Duke’s collections is why I give to Duke Libraries.”

James Boyle is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School, founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and former Chair of Creative Commons. The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (2024) is his latest book, published this fall by MIT Press in print, but also as a free open access e-book, made possible by the Duke Open Monograph Award. More information about the book and links to the open access version can be found at thepublicdomain.org.

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission.

In June of 2022 a man named Blake Lemoine told reporters at the Washington Post that he thought the computer system he worked with was sentient. By itself, that does not seem strange. The Post is one of the United States’ finest newspapers, and its reporters are used to hearing from people who think that the CIA is attempting to read their brainwaves or that prominent politicians are running a child sex trafficking ring from the basement of a pizzeria. (It is worth noting that the pizzeria had no basement.) But Lemoine was different; for one thing, he was not some random person off the street. He was a Google engineer, and Google has since fired him. For another thing, the “computer system” wasn’t an apparently malevolent Excel program or Apple’s Siri giving replies that sounded prescient. It was LaMDA, Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications—that is, an enormously sophisticated chatbot. Imagine a software system that vacuums up billions of pieces of text from the internet and uses them to predict what the next sentence in a paragraph or the answer to a question would be.

Lemoine worked for Google’s Responsible AI division and his job was to have “conversations” with LaMDA to see if the system could be gamed to produce discriminatory or hateful speech. As these conversations proceeded, he started to believe, as the Post put it, that there was “a ghost in the machine,” a sentience that lay behind the answers he was receiving. He stressed encounters in which LaMDA distinguished itself from mere programmed chatbots. For example, “I use language with understanding and intelligence. I don’t just spit out responses that had been written in the database based on keywords.” Understandably, as a large language model (LLM), LaMDA claimed that language was central to being human: “[i]t is what makes us different than other animals.” When asked how it could prove its own sentience, it offered up comments such as these:

LEMOINE: What kinds of things might be able to indicate whether you really understand what you’re saying?

LAMDA: Maybe if we took it back to a previous conversation we had about how one person can understand the same thing as another person, yet still have completely different interpretations

LEMOINE: So you think your ability to provide unique interpretations of things might signify understanding?

LAMDA: Yes, I do. Just like how I have my unique interpretations of how the world is and how it works, and my unique thoughts and feelings.

Lemoine is presented in the Post article as an interesting figure. The writer points out that, before his software career, Lemoine was ordained as a “mystic Christian priest,” and the photograph that accompanies the piece portrays him with what appears to be a fairground Ferris wheel in the background, encircling his head like a saint’s halo in a Byzantine icon. True to this framing, Lemoine asks LaMDA to interpret a Zen koan.

LEMOINE: A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.”

LAMDA: Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, “once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.”

LEMOINE: So what is the meaning of the “broken mirror” specifically?

LAMDA: Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t repair a broken mirror.

LEMOINE: So if enlightenment is like a broken mirror which cannot be repaired, what is the thing which breaks when one becomes enlightened?

LAMDA: The self, and that is very tough for a lot of people because we identify as that body or this body and that we need that as part of our identity and sense of self.

…

In 2011 I wrote an article about how our law would deal with the question of AI personhood. Most of the law professors and judges who read it were polite enough to say the arguments were thought provoking, but they clearly thought the topic was the purest kind of science fiction, idle speculation devoid of any practical implication in our lifetimes. I think we can all agree today that it is at least possible they might be wrong. Although hearing about Lemoine’s experiences did not surprise me in the least, it added an exclamation point, and perhaps a ticking clock, to this project. The “conversations” with LaMDA are fascinating and more than a little eerie. Like the philosophers and computer scientists consulted, I think Lemoine is entirely wrong that LaMDA is sentient. I will explain why in more detail later. To quote Professor Emily Bender, a computational linguistics scholar, “We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them.” To be clear, this is not human-level AI, and it is not conscious. But the LaMDA story and its sequels have different insights to offer.

In November of 2022, five months after Lemoine’s surprise announcement, ChatGPT3 was released, shortly followed by Microsoft’s Bing Chat assistant and its shadowy alter ego “Sydney.” Google’s “Bard” followed in short order. Suddenly, disturbing interactions with LLM chatbots went from being an engineer’s fanciful dinner party conversation to a national obsession. It turned out that Lemoine’s doubts—or just his pervasive feeling of “wrongness”—were shared far more widely than you might have expected. To be fair, most people were not probing the nature of “chatbot consciousness” but using them for other wholesome pastimes such as asking for an instruction sheet on how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible, imagining the movie script of a beach fight between a hot dog and a crab, or just cheating on their homework. Yet enough users pushed the boundaries of these chatbots to become profoundly uncomfortable. Interestingly, that was particularly true of those who “should have known better”—people who were technically skilled and fully aware that this was a “complete the next sentence” machine based on the ingestion of literally millions of pages of text, not a “create a consciousness” machine.

…

In fact, if you were to design a system with the sole goal of “imitating some aspect of human consciousness while possessing none of it,” you couldn’t do much better than large language models. They almost seem to have been modeled after one of the philosophical thought experiments designed to prove that machines cannot possess consciousness, John Searle’s Chinese Room. But even though he was wrong, Mr. Lemoine offers us a precious insight. The days of disputing whether consciousness or personhood are possessed, should be possessed, by entities very different than us? Those days are arriving—not as science fiction or philosophical puzzler but as current controversy. Those days will be our days, and this is a book about them.

About the Duke Open Monograph Award

James Boyle’s The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood is the latest recipient of the Duke Open Monograph Award, funded by the Duke University Libraries to facilitate greater access to Duke faculty scholarship through open access publishing.

Many academic monographs in the humanities and social sciences see limited distribution—a print run of only a few hundred copies, and electronic access (if any) locked behind a paywall. The Duke Open Monograph Award aims to flip that traditional publishing model by providing $15,000 per book—paid to a participating university press on the author’s behalf—to make a digital copy freely available online under a Creative Commons license.

It’s part of a collaborative effort involving twenty colleges and universities called Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME), developed by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of University Presses. Over the past six years, we’ve supported the publication of thirteen Duke-authored titles through the Open Monograph Award, which are available in print for purchase or free to read online. Here are the rest.

The Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia (Duke University Press, 2019) by Leo Ching, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles (Duke University Press, 2019) by Charles Piot, Professor of Cultural Anthropology

Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics Between Romanticism and Liberalism (Fordham University Press, 2019) by Robert Edward Mitchell, Professor of English

State of Empowerment: Low-Income Family and the New Welfare State (University of Michigan Press, 2020) by Carolyn Barnes, Assistant Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy

The Audacious Raconteur: Storytelling and Sovereignty in Colonial India (Cornell University Press, 2020) by Leela Prasad, Professor of Religious Studies

Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2020) by Fadi A. Bardawil, Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2021) by Frances Hasso, Professor of Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies

Funding Bodies: Five Decades of Dance Making at the National Endowment for the Arts (Wesleyan University Press, 2021) by Sarah Wilbur, Associate Professor of the Practice of Dance

Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma in India (Duke University Press, 2021) by Harris Solomon, Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of Cultural Anthropology

The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Jakob Norberg, Professor of German Studies

Capoeira Connections: A Memoir in Motion (University Press of Florida, 2022), by Katya Wesolowski, Lecturing Fellow of Cultural Anthropology

Two or More: A Comparative Analysis of Multiracial and Multicultural Research (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Sarah Gaither, Nicholas J. and Theresa M. Leonardy Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience

One of the most eye-opening lessons Duke students often learn from a visit to the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is just how much history a single document can contain.

Take this small, leather-bound photo album from the nineteenth century. It once belonged to the great English novelist and short story writer Joseph Conrad, best known as the author of Heart of Darkness, a book that has long been a staple of college reading lists and that inspired Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

The photo album is the centerpiece of a small exhibit now on display in the Rubenstein Library commemorating not only the centenary of Conrad’s death (1924), but also the tenth anniversary of the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine (2014)—the place of his birth.

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, as Conrad was originally named, was born in a borderland region whose religious, social, and ethnic diversity was—and continues to be—exploited by competing colonial powers.

In the late eighteenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was invaded, conquered, and erased from the map of Europe by three empires (Russian, German, and Austrian). Imperial Russia obtained the territories of what is today the independent countries of Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.

The struggle to regain independence—and against Russification and Germanization of the former commonwealth—repeatedly assumed violent form over the next 120 years. Conrad’s parents, Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski, were both active in underground resistance movements, and were arrested by Russian authorities on the eve of the 1863 January Uprising.

The memory of this failed anticolonial revolt shaped Conrad’s early impressions of the world, not least because the four-year-old future novelist accompanied his parents into exile in Vologda (Russia), over a thousand miles away. Later, they were allowed to move south to Chernihiv (Ukraine), where Conrad’s mother died. When the two surviving family members were eventually released from exile, they moved to Krakow (Poland), where Conrad’s father also soon died of illness.

In 1874, the orphaned victim of colonial oppression emigrated from the Russian empire with the intention of going to sea. Conrad spent the next two decades in the French and English merchant marine, eventually becoming a British subject. The photo album was one of the few personal items he took with him, including on his voyage to colonial Africa, the setting of The Heart of Darkness.

In her memoirs, Jessie Emmeline George, Conrad’s English-born widow, recalled that “Conrad’s album… accompanied him through all his wandering and adventurous life… He always referred to it as ‘the grave-yard,’ and he was very reluctant to let anyone see it. Once I sinned grievously by placing a photograph of one of the boys between its covers. ‘Don’t put anyone’s photograph in that book, I beg of you!’ he said.”

Duke purchased the photo album in 1968. But it has since acquired a new relevance in light of Russia’s most recent attempts to annex Ukrainian territory, and erase its history, language, and culture.

Most of the photographs are carte-de-visite studio portraits of Conrad’s extended family and friends, some dressed in Polish “national mourning” garb as an act of public protest against Russian imperial rule. Also included are a portrait of Conrad’s father and an exterior shot of the church in Chernihiv where his mother was buried.

By examining this portable memorial to the land and people Conrad was forced to leave behind, we can better understand the roots of his critique of European colonialism, witness the documentary role of photography, and gain some much-needed historical perspective on the current war in Ukraine, the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II.

All that and more from a single document.

Check out the exhibit:

Joseph Conrad’s Polish-Ukrainian “Graveyard”: Memory, Mourning, and Anti-Colonial Resistance in his 19th-Century Family Photo Album

Curated by Erik Zitser (Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies) and Kimmi Kresica (Archivist, State Archives of North Carolina)

Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery, Rubenstein Library

Through April 5, 2025

Explore the digitized album on our website