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)

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! Here is a selection of books you will find in these collections!


Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin. On a bitter-cold day in December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees Sadie Green amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform. He calls her name. She pretends she hasn’t heard him for a moment, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts. Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Read or listen to NPR’s delightful review of this novel here!


The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka. Maali Almeida―war photographer, gambler, and closet queen―has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake, and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster around can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to the photos that will rock Sri Lanka. Ten years after his prize-winning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka’s foremost authors, Shehan Karunatilaka is back with a “thrilling satire” (Economist). Read what The Guardian wrote about this novel: “The scenarios are often absurd – dead bodies bicker with each other – but executed with a humour and pathos that ground the reader. Beneath the literary flourishes is a true and terrifying reality: the carnage of Sri Lanka’s civil wars. Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country’s history.”


Acne: A Memoir by Laura Chinn. From the creator and star of Florida Girls comes a hilarious and profound memoir about family, happiness, and really aggressive acne. Despite having dirty-blonde hair and fair skin, Laura Chinn is mixed-race: the daughter of a Black father and a white mother, which on its own makes for some funny and insightful looks at identity. Laura’s parents were both Scientologists and nonconformists in myriad ways. They divorced early in Laura’s childhood, and she spent her teen years ping-ponging back and forth between Clearwater, Florida, and Los Angeles (with an extended stint in Tijuana for good measure). This is not a sad story. There is Jell-O wrestling. There is an abnormal amount of dancing. There is information about whether you can drink gallons of sangria while taking unregulated Accutane acquired in Mexico. But mostly there is love, and ultimately there is redemption. Laura explores her trauma through anecdotes riddled with grit and humor, proving that in the face of unspeakable tragedy, it is possible to find success, love, and self-acceptance, zits and all. Read a review from Oprah Daily to learn more.


The Dream Builders, by Oindrila Mukherjee. After living in the US for years, Maneka Roy returns home to India to mourn the loss of her mother and finds herself in a new world. The booming city of Hrishipur, where her father now lives, is nothing like the part of the country where she grew up, and the more she sees of this new, sparkling city, the more she learns that nothing—and no one—here is as it appears. Ultimately, it will take an unexpected tragic event for Maneka and those around her to finally understand how fragile life is in this city built on aspirations. Written from the perspectives of ten different characters, Oindrila Mukherjee’s incisive debut novel explores class divisions, gender roles, and stories of survival within a constantly changing society and becoming increasingly Americanized. It’s a story about India today and people impacted by globalization everywhere: a tale of ambition, longing, and bitter loss that asks what it really costs to try and build a dream.


The Family Izquierdo by Ruben Degollado. The tight-knit Izquierdo family is grappling with misfortunes none of them can explain. Their beloved patriarch has suffered from an emotional collapse and is dying; eldest son Gonzalo’s marriage is falling apart; daughter Dina, beleaguered by the fear that her nightmares are real, is a shut-in. When Gonzalo digs up a strange object in the backyard of the family home, the Izquierdos take it as proof that a jealous neighbor has cursed them-could this be the reason for all their troubles? As the Izquierdos face a distressing present and an uncertain future, they are sustained by the blood that binds them, a divine presence, and an abiding love for one another. Told in a series of soulful voices brimming with warmth and humor, The Family Izquierdo is a tender narrative of a family at a turning point. Read more about this book in The New York Times Book Review here!

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.

Announcing publishing partnership with PLOS for Duke authors

Duke University Libraries, in collaboration with the Duke Medical Center Library, is pleased to announce our new partnership with the Open Access publisher PLOS (formerly known as the Public Library of Science), a non-profit scientific publisher that has led the way in establishing high quality journals that anyone can read without a subscription. Duke University Libraries has been a leader in advancing access to scholarship and supporting the University’s commitment to knowledge in the service of society, and has been working with innovative publishers like PLOS to develop models that provide equitable access to both readers and authors. While typically authors publishing with PLOS are expected to pay a fee in order to make their articles openly available, through this new agreement, Duke authors will be able to publish in all twelve PLOS journals at no cost to themselves.

Duke authors have averaged nearly 200 publications a year in PLOS journals over the last five years. For the next two years, authors will no longer have to cover PLOS publishing costs from their own funds. The cost of this arrangement represents a major investment from the libraries, but it should result in savings for the university overall, as it will help many individual authors avoid having to pay fees separately, and make it possible for many more authors to publish open access without having to budget for it themselves.

Details for authors

This agreement covers manuscripts accepted during 2023 and 2024 with corresponding authors affiliated with Duke University, Duke University Medical Center, Duke University Health System, and Duke Kunshan University. For six of the twelve PLOS journals, there is a benefit if any contributing author is affiliated with Duke, not only the corresponding author. Eligible authors will be identified by the institutional affiliation entered in the PLOS manuscript submission system. Additional details can be found on this FAQ page.

Investing in the future of scholarly publishing

The PLOS partnership is one example of Duke University Libraries’ commitment to invest in a sustainable future for scholarly publishing that aligns with our institutional values and mission. PLOS has been an innovator in Open Access publishing since its founding in 2001. In 2020 they debuted new business models, developed with library partners, that seek to move beyond article processing charges (APCs), address equity issues, and expand access for authors. Supporting this new direction will benefit Duke authors in the short term by easing the cost to publish and in the long term by helping publishers develop in productive ways.

Model Journals Authors included Notes
Community Action Publishing PLOS Biology

PLOS Medicine

PLOS Sustainability and Transformation

Corresponding and contributing Public and capped revenue target, redistribution of fees back to members
Flat Fees PLOS ONE

PLOS Genetics

PLOS Pathogens

PLOS Computational Biology

PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases

PLOS Digital Health

Corresponding only Simple APC waiver
Global Equity PLOS Water

PLOS Climate

PLOS Global Public Health

Corresponding and contributing Supports authors from less resourced countries and institutions

We look forward to assessing the impact of this program, and to collaborating with PLOS and the academic library community on strategic next steps for support of Open Access publishing.

$1,500 Prize for Book Collecting

The Duke University Libraries are proud to present the 2023 Andrew T. Nadell Prize for Book Collecting. The contest is open to all students enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate/professional degree program at Duke, and the winners will receive cash prizes.

Submissions due by March 31, 2023

More information: bit.ly/bookcollectors

First Prize

Undergraduate division: $1,500
Graduate division: $1,500

Second Prize

Undergraduate division: $750
Graduate division: $750

Winners of the contest will receive any in-print Grolier Club book of their choice, as well as a three-year membership in the Bibliographical Society of America.

You don’t have to be a “book collector” to enter the contest. Past collections have varied in interest areas and included a number of different types of materials. Collections are judged on adherence to a clearly defined unifying theme, not rarity or monetary value.

Visit our website for more information and read winning entries from past years. Contact Kurt Cumiskey at kurt.cumiskey@duke.edu with any questions.

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.

Remembering Our Friend, Sara Seten Berghausen

Sara Seten Berghausen (left) with Exhibits Librarian Meg Brown, October 2015. Photo by Lisa Unger Baskin. Thanks to Andy Armacost, Meg Brown, Rachel Ingold, Laura Micham, Naomi Nelson, and Roshan Panjwani for their contributions to this remembrance.

On Monday, December 5, 2022, the Duke University Libraries lost a longtime colleague and treasured friend. Sara Seten Berghausen, Associate Curator of Collections in the Rubenstein Library, passed away at the age of 53 after a heroic fight with cancer. She will be deeply and greatly missed by many in Durham, at Duke, and especially here in the Libraries.

Sara had a long career at Duke—so long that her email address was simply sara@duke.edu. She worked here for just over two decades, during which time her curiosity and expertise led her to hold positions across this organization. 

She could boast degrees from both ends of Tobacco Road, including two from Duke. She came here as an undergrad on scholarship for flute performance, only to discover a passion for Russian literature and culture that led her to earn a bachelor’s in Comparative Area Studies and Russian (1991) and stay on for a master’s in Russian Literature (1993). Sara made many lifelong friendships while a student here, most importantly her future husband Alexander (Sasha) Berghausen, whom she met when they both played as undergraduates in the Duke Symphony Orchestra. They married in 1993. She added a second master’s from UNC’s School of Information and Library Science in 1996.

Sara as a Duke undergraduate (right), with future husband Sasha (center) and future sister-in-law Beth, celebrating a Duke men’s basketball team victory, 1991.

While a grad student at UNC, Sara returned to Duke as a library intern, first in our International and Area Studies Department and later in what was then called the Reference Department in Perkins Library. Several years followed working for the library systems at the University of Chicago and University of Texas at Austin, before she returned to Duke in 2001 as Librarian for Literature and Theater Studies, a post she held until 2014. Ever generous and open to new challenges, Sara also covered the occasional critical vacancy, spending a year as Interim Film and Video Librarian in Lilly Library and another as Interim Slavic and Eurasian Studies Librarian. In 2012, she was promoted to Head of the Humanities Section. Since 2014, she has served as Associate Curator in the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. It was a job she loved, as anyone who spent five minutes in a classroom with her could tell.

Her portfolio as curator included the Economists’ Papers Archive, where she worked with a number of Nobel Prize winners, and wide-ranging literary collections. The latter spanned a multitude of fascinating and notable collecting areas, covering a broad swath of British and American literary history, comic books, science fiction, utopian literature, and Southern writers, including a number with strong Duke connections, such as William Styron, Fred Chappell, Reynolds Price, Michael Malone, Anne Tyler, and Allan Gurganus. She also supported archives related to Duke, Durham, and theater studies, including the Synergetic Theater and Manbites Dog Theater. Sara loved working with scholars, writers, authors, and theoreticians to preserve their papers and develop curricula and public programming around them. Collection donors and researchers deeply respected her expertise and were drawn to her warm and lively personality.

With novelist Colson Whitehead when he visited the Rubenstein Library while on campus to deliver a guest lecture, February 2018.

As Sara’s supervisor and friend, Andy Armacost, put it: “Sara had strong relationships across campus and in the Duke community. In her time in the Duke University Libraries she helped our library, our campus, and our town feel a little more connected. She helped librarians, students, faculty, and the community to better know each other.” The person who knew your children’s names and where they went to school, asked about your ailing parents, or brought you food when you were home sick—that was Sara.

Sara was also an active campus citizen. Among the many Duke extracurriculars she participated in, one of her favorites was the Common Experience Reading Committee, where she spent nearly fifteen years reading and debating which book the next class of Blue Devils should read. She had a gift for bringing people together over books and ideas, and she shared that gift freely, enthusiastically, and daily. She was a committed undergraduate academic advisor and provided advice and guidance to hundreds of students over her career. Sara also provided support to fellow working parents by helping to establish the parents@duke listserv in the early 2000s as a way to connect and find parenting resources within the Duke community. It’s no exaggeration to say that Sara bled Duke blue, and her insider perspective as a Duke alum made her an especially good librarian, advisor, and co-worker.

Sara was committed to social justice, and to Durham, and she led by example both at work and in the Triangle community. The list of nonprofit organizations for which she volunteered or served as a board member could fill a whole page, including Schoolhouse of Wonder, Preservation Durham, Urban Ministries, and St. Phillips Episcopal Church, among many others. She greatly admired the work of the Equal Justice Initiative, and one of the highlights of her career was meeting founder Bryan Stevenson after his book Just Mercy was chosen as the summer reading pick for the Class of 2020, thanks to Sara’s advocacy on the selection committee.

Assisting a patron at the Perkins Library Reference Desk, February 2011.

After she died, those of us in the Libraries began to share some of our fondest memories of Sara with each other. But because she touched so many lives, we wanted a space for the entire Duke community to be able to share stories and reminiscences about her, virtually. If you’re reading this and would like to contribute your own memory of Sara, please drop it in the comments section below. We’ll be sure to include it.

Sara leaves behind many friends in Durham, at Duke, around the country, and internationally. We wish to express our deepest sympathies in particular to Sara’s family, especially her husband Sasha; children Alexander, Ellen, and Jane; parents Charles and Nancy Seten; and her brother Charles Seten. Her library family grieves with you.

The night before Sara passed away, her close friend and colleague in the Rubenstein Library, Meg Brown, sat with her and read her a poem by Wendell Berry, which we would like to close with—in grief and in cherished memory of our good friend, Sara. 

 

The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 


Memorial Service

All are welcome to join in celebrating the life of Sara Seten Berghausen at a memorial service on Saturday, January 7, 2023, at 2:00 p.m. in Duke Chapel. The service will be followed by a public reception hosted by the Duke University Libraries in the Gothic Reading Room on the second floor of Rubenstein Library.

Gifts of Remembrance 

The family has asked that gifts in Sara’s honor be directed to the Equal Justice Initiative. Donations can be made through their website. Be sure to check the box that says, “Dedicate my donation in honor or in memory of someone,” to indicate your gift is in memory of Sara Seten Berghausen.

Sara printing in the Durham studio of Brian Allen, December 2017.

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! Here is a selection of books you will find in these collections!


Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam. Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives.  Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures. Read this The New York Times review to learn more.


Becoming Eve: my journey from ultra-Orthodox rabbi to transgender woman by Abby Stein. The powerful coming-of-age story of an ultra-Orthodox child who was born to become a rabbinic leader and instead became a woman. Abby was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern life. Stein was born as the first son in a dynastic rabbinical family, poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews. But Abby felt certain at a young age that she was a girl. She suppressed her desire for a new body while looking for answers wherever she could find them, from forbidden religious texts to smuggled secular examinations of faith. Finally, she orchestrated a personal exodus from ultra-Orthodox manhood to mainstream femininity-a radical choice that forced her to leave her home, her family, and her way of life. Powerful in the truths it reveals about biology, culture, faith, and identity, Becoming Eve poses the enduring question: How far will you go to become the person you were meant to be? Learn more in this review by The Humanist.


Fairest: A Memoir by Meredith Talusan. Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a “sun child” from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of U.S. citizenship, Talusan found childhood comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as others treated her with special preference or public curiosity. As an immigrant to the United States, Talusan came to be perceived as white. An academic scholarship to Harvard provided access to elite circles of privilege but required Talusan to navigate the complex spheres of race, class, sexuality, and her place within the gay community. She emerged as an artist and an activist questioning the boundaries of gender. Talusan realized she did not want to be confined to a prescribed role as a man and transitioned to become a woman, despite the risk of losing a man she deeply loved. Throughout her journey, Talusan shares poignant and powerful episodes of desirability and love that will remind readers of works such as Call Me By Your Name and Giovanni’s Room. Learn more about Talusan’s memoir in a review from The New York Times.


Sorted Growing up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place: A Transgender Memoir by Jackson Bird. When Jackson was twenty-five, he came out as transgender to his friends, family, and anyone with an internet connection. Assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, he often wondered if he should have been born a boy. Growing up in Texas in the 1990s, he had no transgender role models. In this “soulful and heartfelt coming-of-age story” (Jamia Wilson, director, and publisher of the Feminist Press), Jackson chronicles the ups and downs of growing up gender-confused. With warmth and wit, Jackson recounts how he navigated the many obstacles and quirks of his transition–like figuring out how to have a chest binder delivered to his NYU dorm room and having an emotional breakdown at a Harry Potter fan convention. From his first shot of testosterone to his eventual top surgery, Jackson lets you in on every part of his journey, explaining trans terminology and little-known facts about gender and identity along the way. Sorted demonstrates the power and beauty in being yourself, even when you’re not sure who “yourself” is. Learn more in this LGBTQ Reads guest post by Bird.


The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara. A gritty and gorgeous debut that follows a cast of gay and transgender club kids navigating the Harlem ball scene of the 1980s and ’90s, inspired by the real House of Xtravaganza made famous by the seminal documentary Paris Is Burning. It’s 1980 in New York City, and nowhere is the city’s glamour and energy better reflected than in the burgeoning Harlem ball scene, where seventeen-year-old Angel first comes into her own. Burned by her traumatic past, Angel is new to the drag world, new to ball culture, and has a yearning to help create a family for those without. When she falls in love with Hector, a beautiful young man who dreams of becoming a professional dancer, the two decide to form the House of Xtravaganza, the first-ever all-Latino house in the Harlem ball circuit. But when Hector dies of AIDS-related complications, Angel must bear the responsibility of tending to their house alone. Told in a voice that brims with wit, rage, tenderness and fierce yearning, The House of Impossible Beauties is a tragic story of love, family, and the dynamism of the human spirit. Learn more here.


 

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:

 

Donate Children’s Books to Book Harvest

Look at all those joyous little faces. That’s the power of books! (Image courtesy of Book Harvest.)

In memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and in support of our local community, the Duke University Libraries are running a children’s book drive now through January 10, 2023.

The books we collect will be donated to Book Harvest, a North Carolina nonprofit that believes in the power of books to change children’s lives and works to ensure that all children can grow up in homes full of books. Since it was launched in 2011, Book Harvest has donated almost 2 million books to children throughout North Carolina.

We need new and gently used books for children of all ages, especially board books and picture books for the youngest readers, as well as Spanish and bilingual books, and books with diverse characters and story lines. Please, no encyclopedias, dictionaries, or books in poor condition.

Where to Donate Books

Look for the book collection bins in the following locations, and please help us fill them!

  • Perkins Library, in the lobby across from the von der Heyden Pavilion
  • Perkins Library, Shipping and Receiving (Lower Level 1, near the Link)
  • Lilly Library, main lobby
  • Music Library, main lobby
  • Smith Warehouse, Bay 10, Shipping and Receiving
  • Ford Library, Fuqua School of Business
  • Goodson Law Library, Law School
  • Medical Center Library

Don’t have books but want to donate? 

We’ve got you covered with the help of the Regulator Bookshop in Durham! Here’s how it works:

  • Select books from Book Harvest’s online wishlist.
  • Upon checking out, use the code libraries to ensure your books count toward our book drive. (NOTE: This is not a discount code. You will not see a change in price.)
  • Select “In store pickup” as the shipping choice, and the Regulator will make sure the books get to Book Harvest.

You are also invited to volunteer for the MLK “Dream Big” community drive and to attend the 2023 celebration! Duke University Libraries is a proud sponsor of this annual event.

Learn more about Book Harvest on their website.

Your End-of-Semester Library Toolkit, Fall 2022

Students studying at table

You’re nearly there! Here are some resources to power you through the end of the semester and beyond.

End-of-Semester Library Events

Miniature Therapy Horses at Lilly Library – Sunday, December 11th from 11 AM to 1 PM. Take a break from studying and drop by Lilly Library to de-stress with the miniature therapy horses from Stampede of Love and relax with some snacks and hot cider!

Let’s Create: Zine Making PartyMonday, Dec. 12th, 2:30 to 4 pm, and Thursday, Dec. 15th, 11 am to 12:30 pm in The Oasis, Room 418, Perkins Library – Studies show creating art reduces stress and enhances well-being. So come make a zine with us during finals week to reflect on your semester. Zine making materials and snacks will be provided. 

 Crafternoon – Tuesday, December 13th from 3 to 5 PM. Stop by Perkins Library to relax and clear your mind with various crafting activities: coloring, origami, make-your-own bookmarks and zines, and more!

Lilly Relaxation Station – Sunday, December 11th to Monday, December 19th. Take a break and refresh during Reading and Exam Period! Open 24/7: Puzzles, games, Play-Doh, origami, coloring… just chill for a bit in Lilly’s 1st floor classroom!

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. 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

Get Ready for Finals at Lilly!

Celebrate the end of Fall Semester 2022
with the Stampede of Love!

Kiwi of the Stampede of Love – photo courtesy of Stampede of Love stampedeoflove.org

Have you heard about the “mane” event
at Lilly Library?

Where did Fall Semester go? December is here, and with it, exams await all Duke students. Because the First-Year students live on East Campus, the staff at Lilly Library does its best to offer support and relieve the stress of the fall semester for our “neighbors” experiencing their first finals at Duke. Extending our hours to a 24/7 schedule during exams, offering a study break with refreshments, and providing a room dedicated as a relaxation station are longstanding Lilly traditions.

Our favorite tradition is hosting the Stampede of Love, miniature therapy horses who bring smiles to stressed students (and librarians!). If you decide to trot over to East Campus neigh-borhood, saddle up for Lilly’s end of semester events:

  • Saturday, December 10th:  225 continuous hours!?!
    Beginning at 10am, Lilly expands its schedule to 24/7 through the examination period, ending at 7pm on Monday, December 19th. Info for all Duke Library Hours
  • Sunday, December 11th  11am – 1pm : What we are all waiting for – it’s the Study Break with the Stampede of Love details here
  • Sunday, December 11th: Relaxation Station in Lilly opens for students
8 people and one miniature horse
Kiwi and Librarians in 2018

It’s been a great fall semester
and best of luck to everyone during Finals!

Let’s Create: Zine Making Party


Studies show creating art reduces stress and enhances well-being. So come make a zine with us during finals week to celebrate and reflect on your semester. Zines are mini-magazines that can be anything you can imagine. For this project, we will create a personal storybook to remind us of the challenges and accomplishments we’ve nailed this semester. We will repurpose book jackets by cutting them up and adding collages to our zine pages; no two zines will be alike! All you need to do is drop in between exams and studying. Zine-making materials and snacks will be provided.


Where: The Oasis, Room 418, Perkins Library

When: Monday, Dec. 12th, 2:30 to 4 pm, and Thursday, Dec. 15th, 11 am to 12:30 pm


 

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)

 

South Asia Cooperative Acquisitions Program (SACAP): 60 Years of Building Unique Collections

Today, as inflation and economic uncertainty put severe stress on library collection budgets across North America, cooperative collection development is en vogue once again. Fortunately, librarians who collect for international and area studies have always been at the forefront of collaborative efforts to build robust and distinctive collections, even during tough economic times. One of the earliest and finest examples of such initiatives is the South Asia Acquisitions Program (SACAP), which this year celebrates its sixtieth anniversary.

The South Asia Cooperative Acquisitions Program (SACAP) was launched by the Library of Congress in 1962. This federal initiative was intended to foster the systematic and collaborative collecting of books, journals, and ephemera from this large, diverse, and multi-lingual region by research libraries right here in the United States. Recognising the importance of this field of study and the timeliness of this project, Duke University Libraries joined 10 peer institutions in agreeing to pay an annual fee of $500 USD—over $4,900 USD by today’s standards (according to the CPI Inflation Index)—in exchange for a selection of the latest South Asian publications. This collective investment in international collecting was an unparalleled success and SACAP continues to this day with Library of Congress field offices in New Delhi and Islamabad.

The materials on display in this 60th anniversary exhibition come from Duke University Libraries’ South Asia Pamphlet collection. Reputed to be the largest such collection in North America, it contains approximately 7,500 English-language pamphlets, with another 392 in Urdu and Bengali still waiting to be catalogued. The pamphlets cover a plethora of subjects: in addition to the items currently displayed in the Hubbard Case, there are pamphlets documenting tourism, economic development, arts, and refugees, among other topics. The collection comes from several South Asian countries: India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.

The items in the Hubbard Case will be on display until 2 January 2023. After exploring this exhibition, come on up to the International & Area Studies suite, on the second floor of Bostock Library, to view the exhibition “Land of Lapis lazuli and Gold Afghanistan in the Collections at Duke University Library” while it lasts.

Additional resources

  • Patterson, Maureen L. P.  “The South Asian P.L. 480 Library Program, 1962-1968.” The Journal of Asian Studies, 28: 4, (Aug., 1969):  743- 754.

(Photo credits: Sean Swanick & Luo Zhou)

5 Titles: Stories as Medicine

The 5 Titles series highlights books, music, and films in the library’s collection, featuring topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and/or highlighting authors’ work from diverse backgrounds. Each post is intended to briefly sample titles rather than provide a comprehensive topic overview. This month, the five titles have been selected by Librarian for Philosophy and Religious Studies, Cheryl Thomas. The “Love Medicine” stories of writer Louise Erdrich are an example of the ways in which fiction can be a catalyst for sharing the stories of marginalized communities and informing readers through the lyricism of prose about unfamiliar worlds and cultures. Erdrich’s stories introduce us to the lived experience of Native American Indians, drawing ley lines between the past and present, telling stories of loss, fragmentation, community, and a searing quest for identity in the face of deliberate erasure. Edrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. She opened Birchbark Books in her hometown of Minneapolis in 2001 to birth a space where Native American Voices could be discovered. Her bookstore features a robust collection of current and emerging Native Voices. Begin your introduction to Erdrich’s writings with the “Love Medicine Series.”


Set on a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, Love Medicine is an epic story about the intertwined fates of two families: the Kashpaws and the Lamartines. With astonishing virtuosity, each chapter of this stunning novel draws on various voices to lighten its tales. Black humor mingles with magic, injustice bleeds into betrayal, and through it all, bonds of love and family marry the elements into a tightly woven whole that pulses with the drama of life. Erdrich has written a multigenerational portrait of strong men and women caught in an unforgettable whirlwind of anger, desire, and the healing power of love medicine.

The Beet Queen covers the years from 1932 to 1972 and takes place primarily in the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota. One of the story threads centers on Russell, a war hero, highlighting the presence of Native Americans in the US Military, their sacrifice, and the grudging acceptance they found there. In November 2020, the National Native American Veterans Memorial opened in Washington, D.C., dedicated to the Native heroes and their distinguished service to the US military.

Tracks is a tale of passion and deep unrest. Over the course of ten crucial years, as tribal land and trust between people erode ceaselessly, men and women are pushed to the brink of their endurance—yet their pride and humor prohibit surrender. Tracks expose the tension – a thread throughout Erdrich’s novels – of traditional Indigenous culture and beliefs and Catholicism’s role in forcing assimilation and how the “old ways,” for some Native Indians, were abandoned to survive in a white Christian colonial society. Tracks characters also tell the stories of two significant epidemics that decimated the Ojibwe tribe; smallpox and tuberculosis. 

The Bingo Palace was written shortly after the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. At its essence, this story is about postcolonial capitalism, the gains and losses for the Indigenous community, and the complexities of casinos on reservation land. It is also a tale of spiritual death and reawakening; of money, desperate love, wild hope; and the enduring power of cherished dreams.

The final novel in the “Love Medicine Series” The Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse, centers on Father Damien Modeste, who has served his beloved Native American tribe, the Ojibwe, on the remote reservation of Little No Horse, for over fifty years. Now, nearing the end of his life, Father Damien dreads the discovery of his physical identity, for he is a woman who has lived as a man. Deftly Erdrich weaves a story through the lens of a gender-fluid priest who questions the very roots of his belief system; sent to the reservation to convert, he finds within Indigenous spirituality acceptance unavailable within Catholicism while also being honored by that very system for his “good” work with the Ojibwe people.

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!


Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old. Our Missing Hearts is an old story about how supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s a story about the power—and limitations—of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact. Learn more here, The New York Times Book Review.


Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is a story of a boy born to a teenage single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damage to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion and, above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Read more in The Washington Post’s book review.


Acceptance by Emi Nietfeld. As a homeless teenager writing college essays in her rusty Toyota Corolla, Emi Nietfeld was convinced that the Ivy League was the only escape from her dysfunctional childhood. But upward mobility required crafting the perfect resilience narrative. She had to prove that she was an “overcomer,” made stronger by all she had endured. The truth was more complicated. Emi’s mom was a charming hoarder who had her put on antipsychotics but believed in her daughter’s brilliance—unlike the Minnesotan foster family who banned her “pornographic” art history flashcards (of Michelangelo’s David). Emi’s other parent vanished shortly after coming out as trans, a situation few understood in the mid-2000s. Both a chronicle of the American Dream and an indictment of it, this searing debut exposes the price of trading a troubled past for the promise of a bright future. Told with a ribbon of dark humor, Acceptance challenges our ideas of what it means to overcome. Read this NPR review to learn more.


Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land by Toni Jensen. Jensen is a Métis woman, and she is no stranger to the violence enacted on Indigenous women’s bodies on Indigenous land. In Carry, Jensen maps her personal experience onto the historical, exploring how history is lived in the body and redefining the language used to speak about violence in America. In the title chapter, Jensen connects the trauma of school shootings with her experiences of racism and sexual assault on college campuses. “The Worry Line” explores the gun and gang violence in her neighborhood the year her daughter was born. “At the Workshop” focuses on her graduate school years, during which a workshop classmate repeatedly killed off thinly veiled versions of her in his stories. In prose at once forensic and deeply emotional, Toni Jensen shows herself to be a brave new voice and a fearless witness to her own difficult history–as well as to the violent cultural landscape in which she finds her coordinates. Read more about Jensen’s debut book here and an interview with Clemson University here.


Dog Flowers: A Memoir by Danielle Geller. A daughter returns home to the Navajo reservation to retrace her mother’s life in a memoir that is both a narrative and an archive of one family’s troubled history. When Geller’s mother dies of alcohol withdrawal while attempting to get sober, Geller returns to Florida and finds her mother’s life packed into eight suitcases. Most were filled with clothes, except for the last one, which contained diaries, photos, letters, a few undeveloped disposable cameras, dried sage, jewelry, and the bandana her mother wore on days she skipped a hair wash. Geller, an archivist and a writer uses these pieces of her mother’s life to try and understand her mother’s relationship to home and their shared need to leave it. Geller embarks on a journey that will end at her mother’s home: the Navajo reservation. Dog Flowers is an arresting, photo-lingual memoir that masterfully weaves together images and text to examine mothers and mothering, sisters and caretaking, and colonized bodies. Read more about this story in the Southern Review of Books.


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)

Lilly Collection Spotlight: a Horror-ful Halloween

What is it about Horror in 2022?

It’s Alive: Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Movie Posters

A hallowed tradition at Lilly is shining our collection spotlight on  seasonal films and readings to reveal treasures hidden in our collections. For Halloween in 2022, a thirst for 1970s and 80s type horror film is all the rage.  Dare to visit the Lilly Library Lobby to discover films and books that will haunt you!

What is it about Horror – Films

When gathering the frightful films featured, we asked Stephen C., the Duke Libraries’ Team Lead for Western Languages in Monographic Acquisitions  for suggestions. Because of Stephen’s knowledge and interest in film, we invited him to curate (and order) new titles to give our horror collection a jolt! Enjoy Stephen’s latest batch of  horror-ful Halloween picks just waiting for you below:

Death Screams – Lilly DVD 34682 (filmed in North Carolina)

Death Screams
A slow-burn slasher filmed in and around Shelby, NC in 1982. It’s the last night of the local carnival and a maniac with a machete is picking off the local teens. A low-budget marvel full of regional charm (Red Bridges Barbecue Lodge anyone?) with some of the best extended small-Southern-town fair/carnival footage ever.

Mutations
Like an update on Tod Browning’s Freaks  crossed with an unfunny Little Shop of Horrors, this British production from 1974 features Donald Pleasence as a mad scientist turning his victims into plant-infused monsters. Featuring a cast of sideshow performers; including Kenly, NC native Esther Blackmon, the alligator-skin woman (who also appeared in The Sentinel)

Mystics in Bali
Indonesian supernatural horror from 1981 that is guaranteed to be one of the weirdest things you’ll ever see! The plot concerns an American woman named Cathy who ventures to Bali to learn about black magic but is soon a floating vampiric head with trailing organs/entrails under the control of a witch called the Queen of the Leák. And it only gets more odd from there!

Alison’s Birthday – VC 12657

Alison’s Birthday Any movie that begins with teens using a Ouija board is nearly guaranteed to portend evil befalling the cast and this 1981 horror from Down Under is no exception. Alison’s 19th birthday is upcoming and a wicked ritual is in the works for her that will transfer her soul to a crone. Acquired on the original VHS for extra experience enhancement.

Pieces  A sick 1983 Spanish piece of chainsawsploitation from director Juan Piquer Simón. Filmed in Madrid but supposed to be set on a Boston college campus, this sordid tale tells of a madman sawing up co-eds for his own ghastly ends. If you can somehow survive the duration you’ll be “rewarded” with a shocker of an ending!

Bloodthirsty Trilogy A fangsome trio of early/mid 70s vampire films from Japan’s Toho Studios: ‘Lake of Dracula’, ‘Vampire Doll’ and ‘Evil of Dracula’. Creepy mansions, golden eyes, hellish prophecies, empty coffins, dark secrets, thunderous nights and terrifying nightmares reign in these atmospheric and stylish cinematic takes on the vampire.

The Bloodthirsty Trilogy — Lilly DVD 34699

 

 

Films and their descriptions curated by Stephen Conrad. For other windows into our horror collection, check out Stephen’s previous posts: 5 Titles: Horror from African American Directors  and Scary Movies for a Horror-ful Halloween.

What is it about Horror – Books

Is it alive? Perhaps! Your appetite for  the horror film genre may be alive, so also check out our collection spotlight books to satisfy.  Explore horror films around the world, and learn about their creators and audiences.  Classic movie posters,  graphic novels, analysis of the use of music, and film criticism compel you, yes, compel you to read them.

Giallo! : genre, modernity, and detection in Italian horror cinemas

It’s alive! : classic horror and sci-fi movie posters from the Kirk Hammett Collection
This generously illustrated book highlights the finest examples from Metallica’s lead guitarist, Kirk Hammett’s personal collection—an astonishing trove of horror and sci-fi film posters that span the history of the genre.

Giallo! : genre, modernity, and detection in Italian horror cinemas
Taking their name from the Italian for yellow– reflecting the covers of pulp crime novels–these genre movies were principally produced between 1960 and the late 1970s.
These cinematic hybrids of crime, horror, and detection are characterized by elaborate set-piece murders, lurid aesthetics, and experimental soundtracks.

Jordan Peele’s Get out : political horror

Jordan Peele’s Get out : political horror
This  collection of sixteen essays is devoted to exploring Get Out’s roots in the horror tradition and its complex and timely commentary on twenty-first-century US race relations.

Scored to death 2 : more conversations with some of horror’s greatest composers
Scored to Death 2 collects 16 brand-new, info-packed, terrifyingly entertaining interviews with renowned composers who have provided the music for some of horrors most revered films, film franchises, and TV shows, including Get Out, Us, Martin, Re-Animator, The Walking Dead, Puppet Master, Saw, Creepshow, Day of the Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, Dark Shadows, Burnt Offerings, The Terminator, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Ring, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Audition, Ghoulies, Happy Death Day, It Follows, Gretel & Hansel, and many more!

Queer horror film and television : sexuality and masculinity at the margins
Moving from the margins to the mainstream, via the application of psychoanalytic theory, critical and cultural interpretation, interviews with key directors and close readings of classic, cult and modern horror, this book will be invaluable to students and researchers of gender and sexuality in horror film and television

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

Mobile Apps: Research, Read, and Watch on the Go


Have you wondered if there are mobile apps that could assist you in conducting research from a smartphone or tablet? We did, and here are the ones we’ve tried and verified. These apps are accessible to you as a student, researcher, or faculty member affiliated with Duke. Each application was easy to download, authenticate, sign in, and begin using! Follow the hyperlinks for step-by-step instructions on uploading and using.


The Ebsco Mobile App is designed for library users to access library resources for scholarly research on the move. What can you do? Download and read EBSCO eBooks™., listen to your PDF articles via audio play, save articles for later reference, pull up your previously viewed or searched results, stay organized with access to the items you’ve saved across devices, and share articles or links with your peers easily. Imagine you’re on the C-1 bus thinking about that one research question you need to find peer-reviewed literature to answer. With the Ebsco app, you can type in your question and pull up relevant articles before you reach your stop!


The Ask a Librarian App is a hands-down winner. After you set up Duke University Libraries as your default library (instructions here), you can reach out via email or phone, but most importantly by chat, and a real-live librarian (no bots here!) will support you in answering all of your research questions. Chatting is as easy as texting! We love the convenience of this app and being able to help you find the resources you need in real-time. Hours of operation are here.


The DukeMobile App is an excellent shortcut for getting to the library catalog on the go. When you go to the menu bar, you’ll see an open book icon that says “Library” click on that, and then you’ll be taken straight to Duke University Libraries, where you can access all our digital resources. If you’re like us, sometimes our aha moments come when we’re away from the desk. If you’re walking between classes and think of a book or journal article you’d like to locate, you can instantly do so from your DukeMobile app without missing a step!


The Zotero App is a great research assistant that helps organize and manage your citations (and annotations), and now you can update references on the go. And if you prefer Endnote for your citation needs, there’s an app for you too! The Endnote Mobile App allows you to collect, collaborate, and create bibliographies anywhere. The benefit of both citation apps is that wherever you are, you can pull up your synced references and bibliographies, and if you are browsing an article on your phone that you want to save, you can quickly add it to your list.


What about library resources for research and pleasure? Forget Netflix; we recommend the Kanopy Mobile App for streaming educational documentaries, great films, and movies! Kanopy provides access to independent and documentary films ─  titles of unique social and cultural value from The Criterion Collection and Media Education Foundation. The beauty of the Kanopy app is that you can watch films on your phone or tablet regardless of where you are. Loung in the comfort of your dorm room while streaming that documentary you’ve been assigned for class!


Have you added the Libby by Overdrive Mobile App to your phone yet? Do it today, and start listening to popular fiction or nonfiction as an audiobook or curl up with a great eBook wherever you are. Libby offers offline access, which means when you download your selection, you can read or stream when you’re offline. The Libby app audiobooks are a great way to mix up your next gym workout and get to that booklist you’re dying to read!


We are always looking for mobile-friendly research resources that make your life easier. Please comment below the post if you have apps you use for research you’d like to share!


 

New Artwork at East Asian Collection

This blog post was contributed by Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian, International & Area Studies Department, Duke University Libraries.

A beautiful silk painting has just been hung above the microfilm cabinet across from the Gillespie East Asia Reading Room.  The work of an unknown artist, this contemporary Japanese silk painting (16.5” x 48” with frame) is a replica of a famous Chinese painting called Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple (煙寺晚鐘圖) by the Chan Buddhist monk painter Muqi (Muxi) 牧谿 (1207–1291), who lived towards the end of the Southern Song Dynasty period (1127-1279). Muqi is the art name (Hao 號) of the monk’s Dharma name (Fachang 法常). He was initially from Sichuan and later moved to Hangzhou, the capital of Southern Song Dynasty. Although he was not very well known in his lifetime, he is today widely recognized as the predecessor of Chinese Chan (Japanese: Zen) Buddhist painting.

Art historians generally agree that Chan painting in China developed in the thirteenth century. Chan Buddhist painters used the same tools and techniques created and refined by generations of Chinese artists, but they applied these means in the Chan spirit, which could be explained as the abundance of emptiness or the nothing of Being.

Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple (煙寺晚鐘圖) by Muqi Fachang. Source: Hatakeyama Memorial Museum of Fine Art

Muqi received a more immediate recognition in Japan. His works were collected and brought from China to Japan.  Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple is one of his surviving works from the original set of Eight View of the Xiao and Xiang River (瀟湘八景) paintings. It is currently housed at Hatakeyama Memorial Museum of Fine Art (畠山記念館) in Tokyo, Japan. The painting is found to be listed in the Ashikaga Shugunate collection. The collector, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (足利義滿, 1358-1408), the military ruler in Japan, was passionate about Muqi’s paintings. His collection catalog listed 134 works of Muqi. Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple used to be displayed in his tea room. His seal as a collector (道有) shown below, is one important key to link this silk painting with Muqi’s original art work.

Collection Seal of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu

It is unknown exactly how the contemporary Japanese version of the Muqi painting arrived at Duke University, but we do know that it was most likely first hung in the office of University Librarian Jerry D. Campbell, who worked at Duke from 1984 to 1995. For a long time after Campbell’s departure, this objet d’art was housed in an office in Lilly Library, on Duke’s East Campus.

This Japanese silk painting is now located above the microfilm cabinet and next to the religion section of the East Asian collection, where books on Buddhism, Daoism, and other Asian religious forms and practices can be found.

Please stop by and take a look!

 

What to Read this Month: October 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 is a selection of books you will find in these collections!


Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi. This winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize and national bestseller is “an innovative reimagining of the family saga.” In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present. Through the sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth. The first novel originally written in Arabic to ever win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English. Read more about this striking novel in a thoughtful review by The New Yorker.


Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir by Erika L. Sánchez. From the New York Times bestselling author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, an utterly original memoir-in-essays that is as deeply moving as it is hilarious. Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the nineties, Erika was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment–a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy, often laughing so hard with her friends that she had to leave her school classroom. Twenty-five years later, she’s now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she’s still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her. Raunchy, insightful, unapologetic, and brutally honest, Crying in the Bathroom is Sánchez at her best–a book that will make you feel that post-confessional high that comes from talking for hours with your best friend. Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with Erika’s poignant memoir, and listen to her interview with NPR to learn more.


I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life. In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, she is thrust into fame. Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants. Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair. Read more in this review by The Atlantic.


The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison. Here is the Nobel Prize winner in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades that “speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines” (NPR). These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s),” human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work and that of others. An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice. Learn more in Morrison’s candid interview with Bitch Media.


The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings. Reminiscent of the works of Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, and Octavia Butler–a piercing dystopian novel about the unbreakable bond between a young woman and her mysterious mother. Josephine Thomas has heard every conceivable theory about her mother’s disappearance. That she was kidnapped. Murdered. That she took on a new identity to start a new family. That she was a witch. This is the most worrying charge because in a world where witches are real, peculiar behavior raises suspicions and a woman–especially a Black woman–can find herself on trial for witchcraft. But fourteen years have passed since her mother’s disappearance, and now Jo is finally ready to let go of the past. Yet her future is in doubt. The State mandates that all women marry by the age of 30–or enroll in a registry that allows them to be monitored, effectively forfeiting their autonomy. At 28, Jo is ambivalent about marriage. When she’s offered the opportunity to honor one last request from her mother’s will, Jo leaves her regular life to feel connected to her one last time. Read the LA Times Book Review to learn more.

RESCHEDULED: Environmental Peacebuilding: A Conversation with Dr. Erika Weinthal


Guest post by Haley Walton, Librarian for Education and Open Scholarship

NOTE: This event was originally scheduled for October 25 but has been rescheduled to November 10.

As part of the Duke Libraries’ annual celebration of International Open Access Week 2022, Bostock Library will host Dr. Erika Weinthal, Professor of Environmental Policy and Public Policy at the Nicholas School for the Environment, to speak on her research into environmental peacebuilding.

Dr. Erika Weinthal, Professor of Environmental Policy and Public Policy

Defined in Dr. Weinthal’s co-authored 2021 paper (published openly in the journal International Affairs), environment peacebuilding is “the multiple approaches and pathways by which the management of environmental issues is integrated in and can support conflict prevention, mitigation, resolution and recovery.” In a world where armed conflicts continue to rage and the environmental crisis is worsening, Dr. Weinthal’s research emphasizes the critical need for collaboration to resolve those conflicts in keeping with principles of environmental consciousness.

Join us in the Bostock Library Workshop Room (127) on Thursday, November 10, 2022 from 4:30-5:30pm for Dr. Weinthal’s talk.

A link to the event on the Libraries’ calendar can be found here.

For more Open Access Week events, visit this site.

5 Titles: Disability Justice

The 5 Titles series highlights books, music, and films in the library’s collection featuring topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and/or highlighting the work of authors from diverse backgrounds. Each post is intended to briefly sample titles rather than provide a comprehensive topic overview. This month, the five titles have been selected by Graduate Humanities Intern Rebekah Cowell.

Audre Lorde wrote, “There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Discussing social justice issues without including disability justice and its intersections with race, sexuality, gender, and socioeconomic class is impossible. According to 2015-2016 data from the U.S. Department of Education, over 19 percent of all enrolled undergraduate students and 11.9 percent of post-baccalaureate students self-identified as having a disability. In higher education, disability justice is another access point to achieving Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Disability at Duke is a robust student and faculty collaboration bringing disability justice and pedagogy together. These five titles selected for consideration come from Duke University Libraries and feature the lived experiences of activists who have fought and continue to fight for disability justice.


Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life by Alice Wong. In Chinese culture, the tiger is deeply revered for its confidence, passion, ambition, and ferocity. Drawing on a collection of original essays, previously published work, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more, Alice uses her unique talent to share an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organizer, media maker, and dreamer. From her love of food and pop culture to her unwavering commitment to dismantling systemic ableism, Alice shares her thoughts on creativity, access, power, care, the pandemic, mortality, and the future. As a self-described disabled oracle, Alice traces her origins, tells her story, and creates a space for disabled people to be in conversation with one another and the world. Alice is the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project and the editor of the acclaimed anthology Disability Visibility.


Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. A personal collection about creating spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of colour and creative “collective access” — access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure — in our communities and political movements. They write, “When we do disability justice work, it becomes impossible to look at disability and not examine how colonialism created it. It becomes a priority to look at Indigenous ways of perceiving and understanding disability…” Bringing their survival skills and knowledge from years of cultural and activist work, she explores everything from the economics of queer femme emotional labor to suicide in queer and trans communities to the nitty-gritty of touring as a sick and disabled queer artist of colour. Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of colour are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind.


Exile and Pride by Eli Clare. Exile and Pride is essential to the history and future of disability politics. With a poet’s devotion to truth and an activist’s demand for justice, Clare deftly unspools the multiple histories from which our ever-evolving sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home: home as place, community, bodies, identity, and activism. Here readers will find an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually live with the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance. At the root of Clare’s exploration of environmental destruction and capitalism, sexuality and institutional violence, gender and the body politic, is a call for social justice movements that are truly accessible to everyone. With heart and hammer, Exile and Pride pries open a window onto a world where our whole selves, in all their complexity, can be realized, loved, and embraced.

 


Haben: The Deafblind Woman that Conquered Harvard Law by Haben Girma. Haben is a human rights lawyer advancing disability justice. She believes disability is an opportunity for innovation and teaches organizations the importance of choosing inclusion. Haben grew up spending summers with her family in the enchanting Eritrean city of Asmara. There, she discovered courage as she faced off against a bull she couldn’t see and found in herself an abiding strength as she absorbed her parents’ harrowing experiences during Eritrea’s thirty-year war with Ethiopia. Their refugee story inspired her to embark on a quest for knowledge, traveling the world in search of the secret to belonging. Haben defines disability as an opportunity for innovation. She learned non-visual techniques for everything from dancing salsa to handling an electric saw. She developed a text-to-braille communication system that created an exciting new way to connect with people. Haben pioneered her way through obstacles, graduated from Harvard Law, and now uses her talents to advocate for people with disabilities.


Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann. One of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her personal story of fighting for the right to receive an education, have a job, and just be human. A story of fighting to belong in a world that wasn’t built for all of us and of one woman’s activism–from the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco to inside the halls of Washington– Being Heumann recounts Judy Heumann’s lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society. Paralyzed from polio at eighteen months, Judy’s struggle for equality began early in life. From fighting to attend grade school after being described as a “fire hazard” to later winning a lawsuit against the New York City school system for denying her a teacher’s license because of her paralysis, Judy’s actions set a precedent that fundamentally improved rights for disabled people. As a young woman, Judy rolled her wheelchair through the doors of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco as a leader of the Section 504 Sit-In, the longest takeover of a governmental building in US history. Working with a community of over 150 disabled activists and allies, Judy successfully pressured the Carter administration to implement protections for disabled peoples’ rights, sparking a national movement and leading to the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

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.

Congratulations to Our Research and Writing Award Winners!

We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2021-2022 library writing and research awards. Every year the Duke University Libraries run a series of essay contests recognizing the original research and writing of Duke students and encouraging the use of library resources. Congratulations to this year’s winners!

Lowell Aptman Prize

Recognizing excellence in undergraduate research using sources from the Libraries’ general collections.

  • First/Second Year Winner: Laura Boyle for “Pop Prophet: King Princess’ Subversion of Dominant Desire,” nominated by Dr. Matthew Valnes
  • Third/Fourth Year Winner: Darren Janz for “Somlandela: Julius Malema and the Rise of a New South African Populism,” nominated by Dr. Karin Shapiro
  • Honors Thesis Winner: Caroline Petronis for “Blurring Contagion in the Information Age: How COVID-19 Troubles the Boundaries of the Biomedical and Socioinformatic,” nominated by Dr. Nima Bassiri

Chester P. Middlesworth Award

Recognizing excellence of analysis, research, and writing in the use of primary sources and rare materials held by the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

  • Undergraduate Award: Adrianna DeLorenzo for “To What Extent Did British Prisoners of War During World War One Feel Ashamed as a Result of Captivity?” Nominated by Dr. Kristen Neuschel
  • Graduate Award:  Mariko Azuma for “The Lure towards Comfōto: Japan’s Early Hotels of the 20th Century.” Nominated by Dr. Gennifer Weisenfeld

Ole R. Holsti Prize

Recognizing excellence in undergraduate research using primary sources for political science or public policy.

  • Ana Herndon for “The Historical Merit of Ethnic Studies: A Study on the Importance of Diverse Higher Education on Social Change.” Nominated by Dr. Cecilia Márquez

Rudolph William Rosati Creative Writing Award

Recognizing outstanding undergraduate creative writing.

  • Jocelyn Chin for “Waiting at the Well: Essays”
  • Thang Lian for “Kan i ton than lai (We will meet again): A Lai Mi Family Oral History”
  • Tina Xia for “Waiting to be seen”

Join Us at the Awards Reception!

We will be celebrating our winners and their achievements at a special awards reception coinciding with Duke Family Weekend.  All are invited to join us for refreshments and the opportunity to honor the recipients.

Date: Friday, October 14
Time: 3:00-4:00 p.m.
Location: Carpenter Conference Room (Rubenstein Library 249)

Event Debrief: “Manuscript Fragmentation Across Cultures”

This post was authored by Matthew Hayes, Librarian for Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies.

On September 9, 2022, Duke faculty, librarians, archivists, graduate students, and affiliates from the Manuscript Migration Lab gathered in the Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall at Smith Warehouse to discuss how incorporating cultural diversity can broaden humanities research in general and, in particular, the young and interdisciplinary field of “fragmentology.”

The disassembly of manuscripts into fragments is something that happens over time, whether by accident or design. Despite the fact that fragmentation occurs in every textual culture, however, scholars who study medieval manuscripts have tended to ignore the contextual and cultural diversity of fragments. As a result, their primary sources (and objects of discussion) have often been only manuscripts from medieval Europe, to the exclusion of the rest of the world. This symposium was an attempt to broaden our perception of the term “fragmentology” to include these often-ignored cross-cultural realities.

To this end, symposium attendees were asked to consider several guiding questions: Can we apply the term “fragmentology” equally to textual cultures well beyond medieval Europe? How might we define the production, use, and value of manuscript fragments in cultural contexts that may have very different considerations in the production, use, and valuation of texts as objects? And what broad conclusions can we draw from these comparisons with regard to the role of fragmentary manuscripts in Europe and parts of East Asia? Each of the three invited speakers sought to answer these questions from their own regional perspective.

Dr. Christopher Nugent, Professor of Chinese at Williams College, was the first speaker and focused on the example of the literary anthology titled Repository of Rabbit Garden Questions (Tuyuan cefu 兔園冊府). The content of this anthology is delivered in a question-and-answer-style model and annotations added later were meant to prepare individuals for civil service examinations. Yet, among those manuscripts unearthed at Dunhuang, they only contain the first fascicle of this anthology. Dr. Nugent highlighted the tension between, on the one hand, textual contraction by way of fragmentation and, on the other, textual expansion by way of annotation, and enumerated several issues that remained in conversation throughout the afternoon: Why were fragments important to premodern communities that engaged with them? What does the fragmentation of manuscripts tell us about their reception and reuse over time?

Dr. Nugent referring to one of the cave interiors at Dunhuang. Photo by the author.

Dr. Nugent’s discussion concluded with further provocations surrounding heritage and repatriation by focusing on the figure of the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot (pictured below), known for having helped to excavate the “Library Caves” at Dunhuang and for removing large caches of texts that are now housed in museums and libraries around the world. Considering the fact that premodern Dunhuang was a multiethnic region historically occupied by not only Chinese, but also Mongol, Tibetan, and Uyghur peoples, among many other groups, Dr. Nugent asked: To whom do we repatriate these fragments? How do we mediate between modern territorialities and the multiethnic realities of premodern eras?

Paul Pelliot at work in the “Library Caves” at Dunhuang. Wikimedia Commons.

Dr. Lisa Fagin Davis, paleographer, codicologist, and Professor of Manuscript Studies at Simmons College, was the second speaker and explored some of the common criteria for fragmentation in medieval European contexts, with a focus on the status of collections within the United States. With regard to common criteria, Dr. Davis gave an overview of the practice of fragmentation in the context of loose leaves and ornamental cutting, but also of in situ fragmentary reuse, such as in new bindings and paste-downs. In all of these cases, we can observe sets of social practices that differed markedly from those explored by Dr. Nugent.

Dr. Davis covering some examples of in situ uses of fragments. Photo by the author.

Like Dr. Nugent’s discussion of the exploits of Paul Pelliot, Dr. Davis also focused on an infamous figure in the world of “book-breaking” named Otto Ege. Ege spent several decades of the 20th century disassembling the pages of dozens of medieval illuminated manuscripts, which he reassembled into “portfolios” according to his own loose themes; two of these are held by Duke Libraries (see below) and Dr. Davis referred to both during her talk. As Dr. Davis described, Ege has been a major influence on the current state of fragmented manuscripts in the United States and worldwide; he has produced “portfolios” of unidentifiable provenance under disjointed themes and has misidentified or misdated dozens of the fragments therein. One positive outgrowth of Ege work, however, has been recent initiatives to digitally reassemble the leaves from the Ege “portfolios.”

Cover of Ege’s “Fifteen original Oriental manuscript leaves of six centuries : twelve of the Middle East, two of Russia and one of Tibet : from the collection of and with notes,” Rubenstein Library, Duke University. Photo by the author.
Prayer scroll leaf fragment (Tibet) from Ege’s “Fifteen Original Oriental Manuscripts.” Photo by the author.

The final speaker of the symposium was Dr. Akiko Walley, Maude I. Kerns Associate Professor of Japanese Art at the University of Oregon. Dr. Walley’s talk focused on the production and use of sets of sutra fragments (kyо̄gire 経切) and “mirrors of hands” or calligraphic fragments (tekagami 手鏡) in early modern Japan. Dr. Walley introduced these genres by first exploring the phenomenon of statuary and architectural fragmentation. As she described, whether in the case of the broken-off heads of Buddha statues or broken rooftiles, the fragmented pieces are representative of the larger whole. Art historians can study these fragments as a means of learning about the whole, but even Buddhist devotees will ontologically value the head of the Buddha just the same as they would the entire statue.

Dr. Walley opening her talk with reference to statuary fragments and restoration practices. Photo by the author.

Kyо̄gire and tekagami functioned similarly insofar as they are fragmentary, but were also valued as a representation of the complete source from which they derived; kyо̄gire represent the entire sutra and, ultimately, every word spoken by the Buddha, while tekagami represent the calligrapher’s entire corpus of written work. These fragments were assembled into albums and other ornamental collections and were often displayed as an object of appreciation beginning in the Edo period (1603-1868). In this way, Dr. Walley introduced us to yet another type of social practice surrounding fragments, which differed from the cases of China and Europe.

Dr. Walley presents an image of a burned fragment of the Daihōkō butsu kegonkyō 大方廣佛華嚴經 (Skt: Avataṃsaka sūtra). Photo by the author.

During the Q&A portion of the event, symposium attendees picked up on several threads from the speakers’ talks, especially about the role of technology in the reassembly of fragments, imperatives to repatriate manuscript fragments, instances of talismanic or religious uses of fragments, methodological approaches to Quranic manuscript fragments, and other varieties of social practices surrounding the use of fragments. The event concluded with a group-wide acknowledgment that events like this one, which appears to have been the first of its kind among the young subfield of fragmentology, is only the beginning of a much more comprehensive dialogue surrounding the effectiveness of the term “fragmentology,” what is meant (and not meant) by the term “fragment,” and how cross-cultural considerations can help us to better understand these issues in the context of textual studies, librarianship, and archival and museum practices.

Two opposing leaves from Apidamo dapiposha lun” (“Great Exegesis of Abhidharma,” Rubenstein Library, Duke University). This is another example of Buddhist fragments and does not derive from Ege’s “portfolio.” Photo by the author.

The “Manuscript Fragmentations Across Cultures” symposium was  sponsored by the Manuscript Migration Lab and the Franklin Humanities Institute. For questions about this symposium, please contact its co-organizers, Matthew Hayes (Librarian for Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies) and Clare Woods (Associate Professor of Classical Studies).

My education in digital scholarship from Duke Libraries

This post by Joseph Mulligan is part of an occasional series on graduate students’ “Intern Experience” at Duke University Libraries. Joseph received his PhD in Romance Studies in 2022 and is currently a Post-Doctoral Associate at Duke.

Like many graduate students, I spent much of my academic career reading and researching in the library. But I also participated in initiatives based out of the Libraries (like Archival Expeditions) and worked in various Libraries departments. Perhaps my most formative experience was through my work as a Humanities Unbounded Graduate Assistant (2019-2022) in Duke Libraries’ Digital Scholarship and Publishing Services (DSPS) department. The skills I learned from my libraries work have been translatable in surprising ways. In this post I share my experience so that graduate students in the earlier stages of their programs might see how working with the libraries can be an integrating force in their doctoral experience.

In the first semester working with DSPS, I spent much of my time in the proverbial sandbox: researching current trends in digital humanities scholarship, identifying methodologies used widely in academia, and studying how digital projects are organized and funded. For instance, I learned how interactive web maps are being used by practitioners of spatial history. I discovered that corpus analytics, or text mining, is entirely accessible for scholars who wish to incorporate digital methods into their research — even if they are not card-carrying, self-proclaimed Digital Humanists. Moreover, I started thinking about the critical importance of applying metadata to items in one’s digital research archive. Through these first explorations, I discovered methods and tools that would advance my research agenda, and, to my surprise, I realized I could use these same tools in the undergraduate classroom, to help facilitate students’ critical reflection on primary sources.

The digital methods I learned from this first semester with DSPS carried over into my pedagogical research as a fellow in Archival Expeditions, directed by Katie Henningsen of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. In my project, sponsored by José María Rodríguez García of Romance Studies, I innovated a module of a modern Spanish literature survey course by integrating digital image repositories and web mapping activities into lesson plans that promoted collaborative inquiry. Specifically, I created a digital reproduction of two art exhibits that were displayed in the Museo Circulante (also known as Museo del Pueblo) of the government-sponsored service-learning program Misiones Pedagógicas in 1930s Spain. These exhibits reproduced paintings that dated back to the 16th and 17th centuries. I complemented this digital reproduction by compiling an archive of photographs which documented the exhibit openings as well as other activities undertaken by the program. Additionally, I incorporated this archive of documentary photographs into an interactive web map – Misiones Pedagógicas Cartografiadas – which visualizes the dispersion of the outreach program and identifies participants at a given location, visually representing the participants in the form of a photograph, when one is available. (Access the module here.) The following year, I incorporated these digital approaches into a seminar I developed for first-year students, Culture on Wheels (taught with the support of the Bass Instructional fellowship). I also presented this work at the 2022 Modern Language Association annual convention, as part of a panel I convened titled Digital Methods in Humanities Pedagogy.

Aside from helping me incorporate digital methods into my teaching, the Humanities Unbounded assistantship with DSPS also developed my ability to support the research of fellow graduate students as well as Duke faculty and visiting scholars, specifically with respect to digital image management, text mining, and network analysis. For the MicroWorlds Lab, the Manuscript Migration Lab, and the National Humanities Center, I designed and led workshops that explored how digital images can be managed as data (using Tropy), how large digital corpora may be approached efficiently (using OverviewDocs), how networks of intellectual and material exchange can be studied and visualized from a relational perspective (using Kumu). In my prsentations I highlighted key features of the relevant tools and developed video tutorials that were used as pre-workshop activities but also designed as standalone modules open to the public.

Finally, during fall 2021, I worked closely with Humanities Unbounded Visiting Scholar Dr. Gay Byron of Howard University, who spent the 2021-2022 academic year deeply engaged in archival research on the collection of Ge’ez (Ethiopic) manuscripts held in special collections at the Rubenstein Library. At the intersection of philology and the history of religion, Dr. Byron’s research consisted, in part, in complementing and supplementing the Rubenstein’s catalogue description of this collection as well as creating a digital archive of the manuscripts and scrolls. With the support of Andy Armacost (the Rubenstein Library’s Curator of Collections) and through consultations with other archivists, I helped Dr. Byron establish a workflow for her project, designate roles between her and her assigned Research Assistant, incorporate the software Tropy into her research process, and build a customized taxonomy with a metadata template that, when applied to her files, effectively organized her archive for easy reference, annotation, and sharing.

In each of these cases, my position in the Libraries allowed me to collaborate with faculty and students to create, develop, and sustain innovative scholarship. The Libraries are distinctive in offering these kinds of opportunities for exploration and cross-disciplinary partnership, and as a result of my work here, I’ve been able to cultivate skills that continue to enrich my scholarship and teaching.

Lilly Collection Spotlight: Library Things for Your Curiosity Voyage

Library Things –
Embark on Your Curiosity Voyage

Films, Books, and Music of the 1980s in the Libraries’ Collections

Do you know that the creators of Stranger Things are from Durham, North Carolina?
The supernatural series may be set in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, but creators Matt and Ross Duffer grew up in Durham. Although the identical twins grew up in the 90s, the series is awash with popular culture references from the 1980s. They lived in Durham County and attended the Duke School for elementary and middle school, graduating from Jordan High School. The Duffer brothers later attended Chapman University in California where they studied film and media arts.

Enjoy the ambience of Hawkins – we mean Durham – and immerse yourself in the 1980s. Discover movies, books, comics, and music of the era in our Duke Libraries’ collections.

Films of the 1980s

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Spain) DVD 30088

To give a sense of the world beyond Hawkins/Durham, we’ve highlighted international films from the same period including Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Spain), Police Story (Hong Kong), Cinema Paradiso (Italy), and My Neighbor Totoro (Japan).

Films that the Hellfire gang watched include popular titles like Ghostbusters and E.T. – and, yes, those are in our film collection.

Visit the Library Things Collection Spotlight  in our lobby to browse these films*  – and more (the full list is here) –  that we’ve selected from our film collection.

Note: The list incudes some titles which  you can stream via your Duke NetID.

Music of the 1980s

LL Cool J’s Radio (1985)

Heavy Metal, Punk, Rock, Electronic, Pop, Rap – the 1980s are calling! Songs and artists featured in the show are seeing a resurgence of interest and gaining new audiences. If you wonder why “old” music such as Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill (1985), Metallica’s Master of Puppets (1986), and the Clash have been at the top of playlists, you can thank Stranger Things. The 1980s also saw the rise of Rap as a musical force with the emergence of iconic performers such as LL Cool J, Grandmaster Flash, and Run D.M.C.

The Duke Music Library has a collection of CDs embracing all musical genres including rock, folk and rap. Don’t want to immerse yourself in the 1980s  with a boombox or other older formats?  Your Duke NetID  provides access to streaming music platforms.  Interested in the same sort of 1980s  (and more recent) music of Stranger Things?  Alexander Street Music database can lead you directly to genres of popular music.

Books of the 1980s

Stephen King’s It

While film, music, and the rise of gaming of the 1980s populate the atmosphere of Stranger Things, books about – and of – the period illuminate popular culture.  A selection of suspense and fantasy novels by writers such as Stephen King, graphic novels (which evolved from comic books), and books examining contemporary culture are available in the Lilly Library lobby.  Peruse these highlighted titles, plus a few eBooks in our Lilly Collection Spotlight Reading List.

To quote  Stranger Things‘ character  Dustin:
… I am on a curiosity voyage, and I need my paddles to travel. These books… these books are my paddles…

Our Duke Libraries and your Duke NetID  provide “paddles” that encompass books, film, music, and a breadth of online resources.  Explore Duke Libraries’ “library things” and embark on your own curiosity voyage!

 

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.

What to Read this Month: September 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 is a selection of books you will find in these collections!


The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan. Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. She can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their cherubic daughter does Frida finally attain the perfection expected of her. Until Frida has a very bad day. Because of one moment of poor judgment, a host of government officials will now determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion. Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that a bad mother can be redeemed. That she can learn to be good. An “intense” ( Oprah Daily ) page-turner that is also a transgressive novel of ideas about the perils of “perfect” upper-middle class parenting; the violence enacted upon women by both the state and, at times, one another; the systems that separate families; and the boundlessness of love. Using dark wit to explore the pains and joys of the deepest ties that bind us, Chan has written a modern literary classic. Watch Chan discuss her novel on the Today Show and listen to her on the Lit Hub Radio podcast.


Nuclear Family by Joseph Han. Things are looking up for Mr. and Mrs. Cho. Their daughter, Grace, is busy finishing her senior year of college and working for her parents, while her older brother, Jacob, just moved to Seoul to teach English. But when a viral video shows Jacob trying—and failing—to cross the Korean demilitarized zone, nothing can protect the family from suspicion and the restaurant from waning sales. Struggling with what they don’t know about themselves and one another, the Chos must confront the separations that have endured in their family for decades. Set in the months leading up to the 2018 false missile alert in Hawaiʻi, Joseph Han’s profoundly funny and strikingly beautiful debut novel is an offering that aches with histories inherited and reunions missed, asking how we heal in the face of what we forget and who we remember. Learn more in The New York Times Book Review and NPR’s Book of the Day podcast interview with Han.


Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse is the mesmerizing story of a landmark sexual assault investigation and the female private investigator who helped crack it open. In the fall of 2002, Erika accepts a new contract job investigating lawsuits as a private investigator. Erika knows she should turn the assignment down. Her own history with sexual violence makes it all too personal. But she takes the job anyway. Over the next five years, Erika learns everything she can about P. I. technique, tracking down witnesses and investigating a culture of sexual assault and harassment ingrained in the university’s football program. But as the investigation grows into a national scandal and a historic civil rights case, Erika becomes increasingly consumed. When the case and her life both implode simultaneously, Erika must figure out how to help win the case without losing herself. Read The Washington Post review and listen to her Colorado Public Radio interview to learn more.

 


We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom. This New York Review of Books article asks the hard questions about oil extraction, climate change, and the intersectionalities in Mbue’s visionary novel.


Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after a tragedy. In twelve striking, luminescent stories, a boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family’s unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s projects the past onto her grandson; and two friends, inspired by Antiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs. Night of the Living Rez is an unforgettable portrayal of an Indigenous community and marks the arrival of a standout talent in contemporary fiction. Listen to Talty, a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation discuss how these stories came to be in his NPR interview.

The New Chat App for Mobile Research

If you want easy access to answers for burning research questions we have the app for you!

Duke University Libraries are pleased to introduce the new chat app from our library chat vendor.

Go to this link and download the app that corresponds to your device:

http://askalibrarian.ninja/

When you open the app on your device, it will show you a world map and give you locator options.  Navigate or browse to Duke and save the location.

When our chat service is not available the chat option will not show on your screen.   The app also provides access to the library homepage,  email, and  phone number.  The app is a mobile version of Ask a Librarian

 

A course to change the face of philosophy

Philosophy is a discipline whose historical canon is dominated by European males (despite active and influential contributions of women in the field’s formation) and that typically attracts fewer women to its college classrooms. Want to change the face of philosophy?

This fall, Duke undergraduate students can contribute to a global initiative to reform philosophy while learning about and taking part in open scholarly publishing. Project Vox, a collaboration between Duke University Libraries and the Department of Philosophy, is the basis for a new tutorial course, ISS 395T. In this course students will learn and apply skills in researching primary and secondary sources and images and in writing for Project Vox’s audience — teachers, students, scholars, and interested members of the public.

The two graduate instructors leading this course, Dana Hogan and Yasemin Altun, are alums of the Project Vox team. Their recent posts to its “Behind the Scenes” blog series offer insight into the skills and experience they’ve acquired as well as the kinds of work students will do in this course:

This tutorial course is hosted through the Information Science + Studies program and supported by an award from Bass Connections. To learn more about the course and to enroll, contact projectvox@duke.edu. Drop / Add for Duke undergraduates ends September 9.

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.

Exciting Times for Duke’s Latin American, Iberian, and Latinx Studies Collections

This month witnessed two exciting developments in Latin American Studies at Duke University.

On August 4, 2022, Duke University Libraries welcomed Diego A. Godoy, the new Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latinx Studies.

A native Angeleno of Mexican parentage, Diego comes to Duke from the University of Texas at Austin’s Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, one of the premier libraries in the world for Latin America and Latina/o Studies. During his time at UT Austin, Diego played a pivotal role in initiatives to develop the Benson Collection’s digital holdings, while pursuing his Ph.D. in history.  His dissertation explored the influence of Lombrosian criminal anthropology and Freudian psychoanalysis on the life and thought of Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, a mid-twentieth-century Mexican criminologist (“an amalgam of Freud and J. Edgar Hoover”), who was responsible for championing penitentiary reform, tracking down international counterfeiters, and discovering the true identity of Leon Trotsky’s killer.  Diego is author, most recently, of the article “Inside the Agrasánchez Collection of Mexican Cinema,” which appeared in the fall 2020 issue of Portal.

As his previous experience and research suggests, Diego is broadly interested in Latin American intellectual and cultural history, particularly journalism, media, and film, as well as the role that cultural heritage institutions (museums, archives, and libraries) play in commemoration.  He is looking forward to working with faculty and students affiliated with Duke’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies as well as across the various departments (Romance Studies, History, etc.) that offer courses on this vibrant region of the world. Diego’s office is located on the second floor of Bostock Library, in the Department of International & Area Studies, and he can be reached at diego.godoy@duke.edu.

Diego’s arrival coincides with an announcement about the funding that the UNC-Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies has been awarded for the next four years by the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI program. In addition to graduate and undergraduate language fellowships (FLAS awards), language instruction, lectures, conferences, films, teacher training, and other programs, this money will provide additional support for expanding the Latin American, Iberian, and Latinx Studies collections of both libraries.

Together, these two developments augur well for the future of Latin American and Caribbean studies at Duke University, an institution that prides itself on having a library collection that matches its century-long history.  If you are interested in reading more about the history of this collection, and the collaboration that went into building it, please consult the article co-authored by Dr. Holly Ackerman (Diego’s immediate predecessor as Duke’s Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latinx Studies) and Teresa Chapa (Latin American, Iberian and Latina/o Studies Librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill), “Promoting and Maintaining Collaborative Collecting: A Case Study,” in Latin American Collection Concepts: Essays on Libraries, Collaborations and New Approaches (2019), 99-119.

A New Addition to Duke’s Uyghur-Language Collection

This post was co-authored by Sean Swanick, Librarian for Middle East, North Africa, and Islamic Studies, Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian, and Ernest Zitser, Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies.

Many people in the West have heard about the sad fate of the Uyghurs, the Turkic-Muslim minority group that is being systematically persecuted by the Communist government of the People’s Republic of China. However, very few people know the backstory of this slowly unfolding genocide. And fewer still have access to relevant research materials, especially ones published in Uyghur (ئۇيغۇرچە‎), a Turkic language written primarily in a Perso-Arabic script (though Cyrillic and Latin scripts are also used by Uyghurs who reside in the countries of former Soviet Central Asia).

“Map of the Western and Southern Parts of Kashgariia” from B. L. Grondchevskii, Otchet o poezdke v Kashgar i iuzhnuiu Kashgariiu … (Margilan [Uzbekistan], 1888). Source: Gunnar Jarring Central Eurasia Collection, Swedish Research Institute.

The reason for this information gap is the colonialist past of the area of the world inhabited by the Uyghurs, who live on territories that stretch across the boundaries of different countries, primarily along the ancient Silk Road leading from China to Central Asia, and then heading west to the Middle East and Europe, and south to India and South Asia. For millennia, this region has been the epicenter of a global struggle between different colonial empires (most recently Russia/USSR, Britain, and China).  And the Uyghurs have been among their primary victims.  Since it is the victors who tend to write history, and to do so in their own language, it is not surprising that works in Uyghur are rarely represented in the library collections of imperial metropoles.

In order to redress this imbalance, and to contribute to the global effort to de-colonize the library collections of former (and current) imperial powers, the librarians of Duke’s International and Area Studies Department have been collaborating on acquiring materials about this part of the world in general, and the Uyghurs in particular.  This blog post is about one recent example of such cross-regional collaboration: the joint purchase of a rare*, early 20th-century Uyghur language book by Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian and Sean Swanick, Librarian for Middle East, North Africa, and Islamic studies.

Title page and colophon of A Sequel to the ABC Books. Second Part (Kashgar: S. M. F. [Printing Office of the Swedish Mission], 1922). Source: Duke University Libraries. Photo by Johnny Shanahan.

This new library acquisition is a 111-page Uyghur-language manual called A Sequel to the ABC Books (ا ب کتسبى نينک تدريچى ايكنجى جز / a-b kita:bïnïղ tεdri:ʤi ikinʤi ʤůzε). It was published in 1922 by the Printing Office of the Swedish Mission in Kashgar, a city situated in what is today known as China’s Xianjiang Province.  As the title page indicates, the book is the “Second Part” of a primer first published in 1920 by the Missionary Press, which operated between 1901 and 1938.  As one would expect, the main focus of the Missionary Press was to disseminate translations of the Bible in an effort to convert Kashgaris and, more broadly, all the people of the region (including the Uyghurs) to Christianity. In order to accomplish this task, the Missionary Board in Stockholm sent a printing press and related printing equipment to Kashgar soon after the Swedes arrived in town, in 1894. The print shop contained the necessary equipment along with metal-type in Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin.

“The City of Kashgar,” 1915. Source: Lt. Col. Sir Percy Sykes photograph album, Duke University Libraries.

Although the Swedish Missionary Press was the first printing press in Kashgar, A Sequel to the ABC Books was itself part of a long tradition of Turkic-language instruction in the region.  In fact, one of the earliest such manuals, a comprehensive dictionary of the Turkic languages known as Compendium of the Languages of the Turks (Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk), was written as far back as the 11th century by Mahmud ibn Husayn ibn Muhammed al-Kashgari, an influential Kara-Khanid scholar and lexicographer from Kashgar.  As in other parts of the Muslim world, most instruction was conducted on a one-on-one basis, between a religious teacher and a cohort of young pupils, such as those pictured in this black-and-white photograph of a “Kashgar School.”

“A Kashgar School,” 1915. Source: Lt. Col. Sir Percy Sykes photograph album, Duke University Libraries.

This photograph comes from the early 20th-century album of Lt. Col. Sir Percy Sykes (1867-1945), illustrating the British officer’s travels through “Chinese Turkestan, the Russian Pamirs, and Osh,” between April and November 1915.  Sykes’ photo album was acquired last year by Duke University Libraries to complement its growing collection of Uyghur materials, including a few language manuals. Now Sykes’ photos of the city of Kashgar and its school serve as a primary source for understanding the historical context, and for visualizing the possible original users of the recently purchased copy of A Sequel to the ABC Books. Such cross-referencing is not only the product of thoughtful collection development and description.  It is also a concrete example of the way that the intervention of area studies librarians can help contemporary researchers read the imperial archive against the grain and, thereby, restore the humanity of marginalized indigenous groups who have been, or like the Uyghurs, are in danger of being erased from the historical record.

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*As far as we know, the only other existing copy of A Sequel to the ABC Books is held in the Gunnar Jarring Central Eurasia Collection and has been digitized by the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, Turkey.

Further readings:

 

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!

Open Access Fee Fund COPE Set to Conclude in Summer 2022

Post by Haley Walton, Librarian for Education and Open Scholarship

For over a decade, the Duke University Libraries have been invested in open access to scholarly literature: the sharing of research outputs freely on the internet with no paywalls. In 2010, the faculty adopted an Open Access Policy to enable Duke authors to share their research papers in an open repository, DukeSpace, maintained by the Libraries. At the same time, the university signed onto the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE), a program that aimed to remove disincentives to publishing in open access journals by helping authors pay article processing charges (APCs).

Our COPE Fund’s founding mission was to support “pure” open access publishers operating entirely on APCs rather than subscriptions—this in order to promote equity among subscription-based publishers and APC-based open access, which was, at the time, an innovative publishing model. COPE was designed to encourage the overall creation and sustainability of fully open publishing, as well as lower the cost barrier of APCs for Duke authors. Our goal was to endorse the open exchange of scholarship produced at the university.

With funding from the Duke University Libraries, the School of Medicine, the School of Nursing, and the Office of the Provost, COPE helped defray publication costs for our authors continuously for the subsequent 12 years. This included funding the publication of nearly 500 articles by 470 individual Duke authors (faculty, graduate students, postdocs, and undergraduates). However, in June 2022, the COPE program will be coming to an end as the Libraries pivot to open access initiatives that are more relevant in today’s publishing landscape. (See our list of Duke-supported open access initiatives for more information.) This does not mean we are less dedicated to supporting OA at the university, but that the Libraries are choosing to invest in more contemporary models of openness, and ones that will have broader benefit in the Duke community and beyond.

As administrator of the fund for the last 6 years, I have enjoyed thoughtful correspondence with authors whose concerns about the publishing ecosystem are considerable. Openness is encouraged as demands for citations and numerous publications grow for students and faculty. But in the time since COPE’s creation, APC-based open access has matured into a mainstream part of the scholarly publishing ecosystem (rather than being the innovative model it was in 2010). Market-dominant, for-profit publishers and university presses have seen the benefits and popularity of open access, subsequently making modifications to their own models to include OA options (e.g. pay-for-OA in closed-access journals and/or entirely open journals started by “traditional” publishing houses).

As a consequence, there is less delineation between “pure” OA and a hybrid model of open options and subscriptions. This has made it difficult for our COPE Fund to operate effectively using the principles upon which it was founded, namely that we had to restrict the journals and publishers we could fund, excluding any journals that had been purchased or launched by publishers such as Wiley, Nature, or Elsevier. This led to frustration for both authors and for the Libraries as the open access publishing landscape became more convoluted. The technicalities of balancing COPE’s mission with the changing norms in OA publishing necessitated long-form communication with applicants and limitations on the fund that were more problematic than helpful for the Duke community. The Libraries assessed the dwindling ability of the fund to cover more than 20-40 article APCs per year (and often not the entire fee, as costs have been going up) and concluded that we could reinvest the COPE funds in other publishing activities that would benefit a greater number of authors on campus (such as the read and publish deal with Cambridge University Press that started in January 2022).

In my time working with Duke authors who were utilizing the COPE Fund, I had the privilege of seeing the groundbreaking research happening at the university and of having in-depth discussions about our community’s needs as academia grows and changes into the 21st century. I worked with authors across disciplines, from medicine and psychology to the social sciences and math. These are people dedicated to their work and determined to share knowledge with their colleagues and the general public. While COPE’s footprint on campus grew smaller with each passing year—limited funding and rising APC costs—I was still glad to keep a finger on the pulse of publishing on campus through the program. The Libraries (myself included) fully intend to continue to advocate for openness in scholarly publishing and for the interests of Duke authors in an ever-evolving world of openness in research, albeit without the COPE Fund.

It’s a bittersweet farewell I say to the program, but encourage all Duke faculty, students, and other researchers to keep an open dialog with the Libraries about what you need when it comes to resources to publish openly in your discipline. We are determined to invest library resources in an open infrastructure that supports our authors and their scholarly endeavors into the future.

For questions and to offer feedback, please reach out to ScholarWorks, a Center for Scholarly Publishing at the Duke University Libraries: scholarworks@duke.edu.

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.

5 Titles: What Is It Like to Be an International Student?

Stephanie FordThe 5 Titles series highlights books, music, and films in the library’s collection featuring topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and/or highlighting the work of authors from diverse backgrounds. Each post is intended to provide a brief sampling of titles rather than a comprehensive overview of the topic. This month, the five titles have been selected by Evening Research Services Librarian Stephanie Fordand they all relate to the experiences of international students in higher education.


What Do International Students Think and Feel?: Adapting to U.S. College  Life and Culture (Michigan Teacher Training (Paperback)): Gebhard, Jerry  G.: 9780472034062: BooksWhat Do International Students Think and Feel? Adapting to U.S. College Life and Culture by Jerry G. Gebhard (2010). This collection gathers personal stories from international students studying at schools throughout the United States. Students write about their cultural adaptation, including their challenges, problems, and accomplishments. Topics include the experience of the U.S. classroom (the comparative informality of it, customs around class participation, and even eating/drinking inside the classroom as accepted practices); student residential life; making friends with students who do not share their culture or language; encountering prejudice; and strategies for adapting to one’s new environment.


Succeeding as an International Student in the United States and Canada,  Lipson, GoodmanSucceeding as an International Student in the United States and Canada by Charles Lipson (2008). This is an American professor’s how-to guide designed to help international students make the most of their study abroad experience. It offers practical advice on how to secure a visa, what to pack and what to leave behind, how to secure housing, the first ten things to do upon arrival in a host country, and useful guidance on how to succeed academically in classrooms in the U.S. and Canada. Some of the advice seems geared toward wealthier international students, as it directs incoming international students to bring $2,000.00 in traveler’s checks, and some of the references (to bringing a Blackberry and an iPod) date the volume’s advice to technology of yesteryear.


Cross-Cultural Narratives: Stories and Experiences of International Students  by Ravichandran Ammigan, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®Cross-Cultural Narratives: Stories and Experiences of International Students, edited by Ravichandran Ammigan (2021). This book features international student stories from the University of Delaware, including a graduate student from Ghana who appreciates the mentorship from her professors and the organization and quality of equipment in the lab where she conducts research, but is shocked by how brazenly undergraduates “talk back” to professors who teach them. Other stories describe the difficulty of acclimating to American food, including a German student’s surprise at the taste of American bread purchased from Walmart and the challenge of understanding colloquial English, as a Russian student encounters with her American roommate.


Amazon - Understanding the International Student Experience (Universities  into the 21st Century): Montgomery, Catherine: 9781403986191: BooksUnderstanding the International Student Experience by Catherine Montgomery (2010). This book aims to help those who work in higher education, or those who study higher education, to understand the “social and academic experience” of international students. The author studies the social networks of international students in the UK and the impact of the social network on their learning experience. The author concludes that international students build strong social groups in their host country and (concurrently) demonstrate fierce independence, breaking away from these groups at times to travel solo and even to form different social groups at will. The international students she studies also perceive themselves to be more mature than the students they encounter in their host country; this comparison, along with incidents of prejudice in the host country, sometimes impedes the formation of friendships between international students and students living in the host country.


Improving Library Services in Support of International Students and English  as a Second Language Learners – ACRL InsiderImproving Library Services in Support of International Students and English as a Second Language Learners, edited by Leila June Rod-Welch (2019). This is a collection of individual articles by different authors on subjects pertaining to library services as they relate to international students and ESL students. Each article stresses a different theme. In “Talking about the ‘Culture Bump’: Using Student Voices to Increase Cultural Sensitivity of Library and University Staff,” authors Olga Hart and Carol Olauson describe a panel presentation by international students, educating library staff about the difficulties and prejudices they have encountered. Other essays include “Let’s Travel the World Together via the Library”; “The Diversity and Global Engagement Exposition”; and “Libraries as Cultural Crossroads.”


5 Titles is directed by the Research & Instructional Services (RIS) Department at Duke University Libraries.

What to Read this Month: April 2022

Congratulations on making it through another academic year! Now that we’re just about done with final exams, why not catch up on some reading? As always, our New & Noteworthy and Overdrive collections are waiting for you!

On a somewhat sadder note, this will be my final What to Read post, as I will be leaving Duke next week. I’ve had such a fun time curating this series for the past couple of years, so I’ve decided to leave you with some of my favorite titles I’ve selected for this series. Enjoy, and have a great summer! What to Read will be back soon with a new author.


My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir | IndieBound.orgMy Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland. In this genre-bending memoir (not a biography, though it contains elements of one), Shapland comes to understand facets of her own life as a queer and chronically ill person while studying the life of Carson McCullers, the renowned 20th-century Southern Gothic novelist, and herself a queer and chronically ill person. McCullers, perhaps best known for her novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding, empathetically wrote of outsiders in her fairly short lifetime, drawing on a personal experience that Shapland finds to have been largely overlooked by her biographers. Her experience with McCullers begins with an internship at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, an archive in which she discovers a number of McCullers’ love letters to another woman. What follows is a strong investigation into McCullers’ life as a lesbian in the mid-twentieth century, interspersed with Shapland’s personal anecdotes about coming to terms with her own sexuality. Throughout this intense discussion of McCullers’ life, Shapland readily questions her own perception of the author, and her personal identification with her, making for an engaging and self-aware read. You can read reviews here and here.


The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been  Unequal--and How to Set Them Right: Harris, Adam: 9780062976482:  Amazon.com: BooksThe State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal–and How to Set Them Right by Adam Harris. In this book, Atlantic staff writer Harris takes an incisive look at the resource-related disparities that often exist between historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and predominantly white institutions, focusing particularly on the policy decisions–historical and current–that underpin them. Harris reveals that so many HBCUs were essentially set up to fail from their inception, with federal and state governments working to maintain segregation in American higher education while also deliberately underfunding predominantly Black institutions. These issues of chronic underfunding persist to this day, leaving many HBCUs egregiously lacking in resources. In chronicling this history, Harris also provides compelling portraits of the many Black scholars across generations who have worked to rectify these imbalances, and also weighs the benefits of many potential solutions to this systemic problem. You can read a review here and listen to an interview with Harris here.


The Disaster Tourist: A Novel: Ko-Eun, Yun, Buehler, Lizzie: 9781640094161:  Amazon.com: BooksThe Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun (translated by Lizzie Buehler). In this dark satire of late-stage capitalism, originally published in South Korea in 2013 but published in English for the first time in 2020, Yun tells the story of Yona, an employee at a travel company that specializes in disaster tourism, arranging tours to locales devastated by all kinds of momentous crises for the perceived moral betterment of their customers. Yona has worked for the company for 10 years, coordinating tours and assessing what locations would bring in the most clients, but is on the brink of quitting after facing the sexual harassment of her boss and getting demoted for no clear reason. In a last-ditch effort to keep her in the company, she is directed to travel to an island called Mui, the company’s least popular destination. There, Yona discovers a seemingly ludicrous plot being carried out by the company: to bring in more clients, the company will create a disaster on the island, one that will surely kill a significant number of its inhabitants. From here, Yona must make some critical decisions, and Yun portrays her subsequent period on the island in a terrifying and yet darkly humorous way. You can read reviews here and here.


Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner: 9780525657743 |  PenguinRandomHouse.com: BooksCrying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. In this memoir Zauner, founder of the band Japanese Breakfast, depicts her often complicated relationship with her mother Chongmi, as well as her grief following Chongmi’s death from cancer in 2014. Though Zauner describes a childhood and adolescence in which she attempts to distance herself from her and Chongmi’s Korean heritage (Zauner’s father Joel is white American), she finds that her ties to her mother always remain in some form, and often hinge upon their shared love of Korean cuisine. Just when Zauner begins to increasingly reconnect with her mother in her twenties, Chongmi is diagnosed with cancer. Zauner describes the futility of the treatments and her mother’s slow death, and spends the rest of the book depicting the ways in which her intense grief shaped her life and musical work. In describing these emotionally wrought events, the memoir serves as a unique meditation on the relationship between food and identity, as well as grief. You can read reviews here and here.


Chouette: Oshetsky, Claire: 9780063066670: Amazon.com: BooksChouette by Claire Oshetsky. Oshetsky’s debut novel tells the otherworldly story of Tiny, a cellist living with her reliable–if somewhat boring–husband, who inexplicably has an affair with a female owl and even more inexplicably becomes pregnant with a hybrid owl-human baby, the eponymous Chouette. Despite the child’s obvious strangeness, which isolates Tiny from others in her life and evokes dire warnings from nearly every doctor who sees her, her mother immediately loves her unconditionally. She is fully supportive of Chouette and seeks not to change her, even as she is forced to give up her career and even as Chouette’s undeniably owl-like behavior completely upends all normalcy in her life. She faces a tough battle in this determination as her husband seeks exactly the opposite, pursuing “cures” for Chouette at every turn. In tracing Tiny’s pregnancy, Chouette’s early childhood, and her later independence, Oshetsky, who is herself autistic and a mother, offers a unique meditation on the nature of neurodivergence, pregnancy, and motherhood, the fantastic elements of her story providing a unique lens through which to view and understand these massive topics. You can read reviews here and here.

Greetings from Egypt! أهلاً في مصر

International and Area Studies at Duke University Libraries

Greetings from Egypt! أهلاً في مصر

Egypt, known in Arabic by its sobriquet “Mother of the World” (Umm al-dunya, أم الدنيا), remains the most important and -studied country and culture in the South-West Asian/North African region. A recently acquired collection of 163 postcards (dating from the 1880s to the 1930s) provides an immersive overview of some of the wonders and joys of Egypt, from the north of the country in cities like Port Said and Alexandria to iconographic places like Cairo and Luxor along one of the most important waterways in the world, the Nile River.

Cairo

Cairo (القاهرة- al-Qāhirah), the capital of Egypt, is a megacity, with a current population of more than 20 million people, or about one fifth of the country’s total population.  This panoramic view of Cairo (French: Le Caire: Vue panoramique) depicts the city’s Citadel complex. Originally built in the 9th century, it has had many additions throughout its history. In the 12th century, Saladin (Salah al-Din, 1171-1193), the Kurdish-born sultan of Egypt and Syria, fortified the complex to stave off the attacks of the Crusaders. Successive Muslim rulers have since then added to the Citadel. The large alabaster mosque in the upper-right corner of this image is named after Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Albanian-born Ottoman governor and the de facto ruler of Egypt from 1805 to 1848, who is considered the founder of modern Egypt. He is also credited with the development of the Bulaq (Bulak) Press, one of the most important printing press operations in the Middle East.

The Mogamaʻ (مجمع)

This striking image is a photograph of the Mujamaʻ, or Mogamaʻ in Egyptian dialect (مجمع التحرير).  The Mogamaʻ stands over Maydan al-Taḥrīr (ميدان التحرير) in the bureaucratic centre of Cairo. The building was constructed on the orders of King Farouk and was designed by Muḥammad Kamal Ismāʻil, an Egyptian engineer and architect to be a government building—see this map for an overview of different offices. Ismāʻil also designed the expansion of the Great Mosque of Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. The Mogamaʻ was completed in 1952 shortly before the ‘Free Officers’ coup and the rise to power of Gamal Abdel Nasser. It stands at 14 storeys as a towering figure over Taḥrīr square, its architecture garners many debates from those who consider it magnificent and those who object to its utilitarianism. For better or worse, the Mogamaʻ recently closed, in part due to its dilapidated state. It is now being refurbished and remodeled into a luxury hotel.

Maydan al-Taḥrīr, from where the Egyptian revolution of 2011 took place is in the foreground of the photo and to the right of the Mogamaʻ is the Omar Makram Mosque. Omar Makram was a political leader of the late 18th century, his mosque was designed by the Italian architect, Mario Rossi. Rossi designed or helped design several important mosques in Egypt.

The Nile

Cairo sits on the headwaters of the Nile River, which has provided the water for not only the capital but also the entire country from time immemorial.  The importance of water and the Nile is apparent in the following postcard, which references to one of the historically more important jobs, that of the water bearer (saqa, سَقى). Water bearers, a profession dating back to ancient times were generally young, healthy men who, according to this al-yawm al-sābiʻ article had to prove their endurance and strength by carrying a 67-pound bag of sand for 3 days and nights without sitting or sleeping. Once passing this test, a saqa delivered fresh drinking water to the public water fountains (sabil, سبيل) for locals to drink freely. The profession no longer exists, at least in the traditional form due in large part to the founding of the Egyptian water company in 1865.

Qahwah (قهوة)-Kahve (Turkish)-Coffee

 The fascinating history of coffee has been condensed by the rappers Omar Offendum & Thanks Joey suggest in this YouTube video, the Story of Qahwah ☕️ is the story not only of Egypt, but the entire Middle East.

This postcard depicts a typical Cairo street scene, showing men playing backgammon next to a large coffee stand manned by a young barista. The coffee stand includes a representation of a Turkish coffee pot (Turkish: cezve, Arabic: جذوة), a small, long-handled pot with a pouring lip designed specifically to make Turkish, Arab, or Greek style coffee. It is traditionally made of brass or copper, occasionally also silver or gold.

Duke University Libraries’ Egyptian Postcard Collection: https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/egyptpostcards includes many more fascinating images. For more information about the collection, contact Sean Swanick, Librarian for Middle East, North Africa, and Islamic Studies.

 

 

New Opportunities to Make Your Publications Open Access

Cambridge Open Access

Guest post by Paolo Mangiafico, Scholarly Communications Strategist and Co-Director, ScholarWorks Center for Scholarly Publishing; Haley Walton, Librarian for Education and Open Scholarship; and Elena Feinstein, Head of Collection Strategy and Development


In keeping with our long-held goal of putting knowledge in service to society, Duke University has been an early and strong proponent of open access publishing. So many scholarly journals and books remain behind subscription paywalls—while members of the Duke community can get access to many of them through Duke Libraries, researchers at less privileged institutions or in other countries, independent researchers, policymakers, and the general public often can’t. This is where open access comes in—through a variety of funding and publishing models, researchers can increasingly make their publications and data and other research outputs freely available to anyone to read and use, resulting in increased reach and impact for Duke research, and benefits to the world at large.

Duke’s Academic Council adopted an open access policy in 2010, making it possible for Duke faculty to share their own scholarly articles via an open access repository supported by Duke Libraries, and link them from their Scholars@Duke profiles and lab, department, school, and institute web sites. This is sometimes known as “green open access”—referring to authors making their own articles available via preprint servers or other other repositories, in addition to publishing them in a traditional journal. Some journals also make it possible for publications to be made open access directly from the journal—known as “gold open access”—either by publishing the journal through volunteer labor of scholars themselves, or by institutions and foundations sponsoring the journal’s publishing costs, or by publishers charging authors an article processing charge (APC) when their article is accepted for publication. Duke has provided support for all of these models over the years, encouraging more researchers and more journals to make their work openly available, and providing financial and in-kind support to help do so.


“Duke Libraries have recently entered into a new agreement with Cambridge University Press (CUP) that will both provide subscription access to Cambridge journals for the Duke community as well as cover open access article fees for Duke authors publishing in CUP journals.”


Starting in January, a new opportunity to publish open access became available to Duke authors. Duke Libraries have recently entered into a new agreement with Cambridge University Press (CUP) that will both provide subscription access to Cambridge journals for the Duke community as well as cover open access article fees for Duke authors publishing in CUP journals. This program applies to all 380 journals that Cambridge University Press publishes as either fully open access or hybrid (the journal itself is subscription access, but individual articles may be made open access)—you can find the full list of applicable journals here. If you submitted your article to one of these journals after January 1, 2022, and the corresponding author has a Duke email address, CUP will waive open access fees. CUP open access fees average $3,945 per article, so this agreement will result in a significant savings for Duke authors, help make more Duke research openly available to anyone to read, and increase the potential readership and impact for Duke researchers. The program includes authors affiliated with Duke University (including the professional schools), School of Medicine, and Duke Kunshan University, but not Duke University Health System.

These kinds of arrangements are called “transformative agreements” because they aim to begin the shift from institutions paying for limited access subscriptions toward paying for open access publishing, with the ultimate result of a transformed scholarly publishing landscape, with neither readers nor authors having to pay for publishing or access. These kinds of programs are a welcome transition away from a purely subscription landscape toward greater access, but they have the potential to further establish a different kind of inequity by privileging authors who are at institutions like Duke that can afford to enter in this kind of arrangement, and privileging large publishers who can afford to experiment with new funding models and make large-scale deals.

As a key player in the shifting scholarly publishing landscape, Duke Libraries will continue to experiment with a variety of models, and monitor the costs and benefits to the Duke community and effects on the broader research community, aiming to keep moving toward models that promote greater access and equity, and that align with our institution’s values.


“So at the end of this fiscal year… the COPE fund will wind down as we pivot to new models like the Cambridge program… and others that build partnerships between publishers and libraries to collectively fund journals and books so neither authors nor readers need to cover the costs.”


One experiment we began more than a decade ago is now winding down, as the landscape has changed significantly over those years. In 2010 Duke became a signatory to the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE), a program that aimed to remove disincentives for researchers to publish in open access journals, by helping cover some of the article processing charges (APCs) open access journals were starting to charge to cover their costs. With financial support from the Provost, Duke Libraries, the School of Medicine, and School of Nursing, a fund was established to cover some open access fees for Duke authors. Over the years this program has funded open access publication of nearly 500 articles, supporting 470 Duke authors, including faculty, graduate students, postdocs and even undergraduates. The journal publishing landscape has changed over the time this program was active—APC-funded publishing is now well-established, sponsors of funded research now generally allow inclusion of these costs in grant budgets, and new models have emerged that can provide broader benefit a lower cost. So at the end of this fiscal year (in June) the COPE fund will wind down as we pivot to new models like the Cambridge program described above (which provide benefit to all Duke authors, not just those who applied for and were awarded reimbursement from COPE) and others that build partnerships between publishers and libraries to collectively fund journals and books so neither authors nor readers need to cover the costs. Duke University Press is establishing itself as a leader in this area with the innovative model it has established for the Demography journal. UNC Press, MIT Press, the University of Michigan Press, and many others are also building sustainable open access funding models, and Duke is partnering with them to help build more open access for Duke researchers and readers everywhere.

To learn more about other programs supported by Duke Libraries to help increase open access to Duke research and promote a more equitable scholarly publishing ecosystem more broadly, and how you can use them when you publish, see this page, talk with your librarian, or email open-access@duke.edu.

5 Titles: American Foodways

Jodi PsoterThe 5 Titles series highlights books, music, and films in the library’s collection featuring topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and/or highlighting the work of authors from diverse backgrounds. Each post is intended to provide a brief sampling of titles rather than a comprehensive overview of the topic. This month, the five titles have been selected by Librarian for Chemistry and Statistical Science Jodi Psoter.

Food and flavor connect us to a place, telling a story of where we come from. For the south and ultimately the entire United States, the influence of enslaved Africans shaped the region’s food. Food and people continued their impact as different waves of immigration influenced the culinary history and culture of the United States. Learn about this significant impact with these five titles that celebrate American foodways. The titles explore food’s significance and its impact in a historic context on capitalism, in culture, on economics, and within gender studies.


The Routledge History of American Foodways - 1st Edition - Michael D.The Routledge History of American Foodways, edited by Michael D. Wise and Jennifer Jensen Wallach (2016). A collection of essays from leading scholars, The Routledge History of American Foodways celebrates food’s journey to and within the Americas. Spanning the pre-colonial era to the present day, the writers combine history with research in food studies to tell food stories. These “twenty-five essays analyze not only how American foodways have changed over the last five centuries, but also how narratives about food in the past continue to shape our present-day food cultures and controversies.” A common theme unites each section of the work. The first section, “Cooking Times,” explores historic foodways during specific eras such as food’s journey during the precolonial period. Key ingredients such as grains and sugars, their arrival in the US, and their impact on how we eat today, are the theme of section two. Section three, “Recipes,” connects the food we eat to its presentation by discussing culture, holidays, tourism, and restaurants. Finally, “Appetites” looks at food in relation to immigration, race, gender, and regionalism. The textbook-style resource can be read cover to cover or on the individual chapter level.


High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America: Jessica B.  Harris, Maya Angelou: 9781608194506: Amazon.com: BooksHigh on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America by Jessica B. Harris (2011; also available as an ebook). Professor and author of twelve cookbooks, Harris’s work focuses on foods “originating all over the African continent.” Her research and teaching make her an expert in African American foods, foodways, and their influence on how we eat in the United States. In High on the Hog, Harris shifts her writing style, “construct[ing] an elegant narrative history that connects the culinary experiences of the African and American continents to show how African Americans shaped the country around them.” Written chronologically in chapter form, each chapter is themed and written in three parts. The first part of each chapter is Harris telling a personal story. Part two is really the subject of the chapter: “a topical analysis of African American contributions to American society and culture.” Each chapter ends with a look at a specific food related to the chapter’s theme and time. In 2021, Jessica Harris appeared on Time 100 – the list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. Ten years after publication, Harris’s work continues to teach, now as a food docuseries available on Netflix. Interested in reading more? Search the TRLN libraries to borrow other books by Jessica B. Harris.


Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original: Franklin, Sara B.:  9781469638553: Amazon.com: BooksEdna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original, edited by Sara B. Franklin (2018). In this collection of stories, the reader meets Edna Lewis (1916-2006), dressmaker, chef, activist, and one of five chefs whose portrait was featured on a stamp in the US Postal Service’s 2014 “Celebrity Chef Series.” Lewis was also a female, an African American, and a cookbook writer who focused on regional cooking. She cooked seasonally and locally, writing stories to capture memories that describe her childhood and document where she came from. This book is a collection of essays about Lewis written by family, friends, and food world celebrities. They talk of meeting Lewis, their impressions of her, as well as her impact and legacy in food, culture, and women’s history. The resurgence of Edna Lewis as a chef began in 2017 when her cookbook was rereleased on what would have been her one-hundredth birthday, and the television show Top Chef featured a challenge to have the contestants cook a dish inspired by Lewis’ cooking. This tribute to Lewis, viewed by millions, introduced her to a new generation. Lewis’s 1976 cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking, was published at the same time that another famous female culinary star, Alice Waters, was promoting the farm-to-table movement on the west coast. As you read Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original, look for Alice Waters’s “menu to celebrate the anniversary of Edna Lewis’s birth.”


The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the  Old South: Twitty, Michael W.: 9780062379290: Amazon.com: BooksThe Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty (2017). Awarded the 2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year award, The Cooking Gene has been described as “a culinary Roots.” Twitty, a Black, gay, Jewish, culinary historian, seeks to know himself and his own history through the lens of food. This first person narrative focuses on African-American foodways and influence of slavery on southern cooking; an influence described in terms of the mixing of food traditions as cultures and genetics mix. To accomplish this, Twitty “traces [his] ancestry through food and genetic testing.” He writes that his genealogical research “…trace[s] my ancestry to Africa and follow[s] its lineages across the Southern map into the present day. Author of Afroculinaria, a food blog exploring the culinary traditions of Africa, African Americans, and the African diaspora, Twitty not only explores his heritages but also lives it by cooking in costume over a wood fire at historical plantation sites. He writes, “They call this a costume but it is my transformative historical drag; I wear a dusting of pot rust, red clay and the ghost smells of meals past.” Through his heritage, Twitty shines a new light on the traumatic and complicated history of foodways in the South.


Amazon.com: Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in  America: 9781324004516: Sen, Mayukh: BooksTaste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America by Mayukh Sen (2022). Mayukh Sen, self-described as a queer person of color and a child of Bengali immigrants, chooses to write about women to give voices to people our “culture skews away from.” In this well-researched and well-documented text, Sen introduces the reader, through biographical chapters, to seven immigrant women whose cooking and writing have influenced the “food establishment.” Spanning the period of World War II to the present, the taste makers include: Chao Yang Buwei and her 1945 book How To Cook and Eat in Chinese, Elena Zeleyeta, a Mexican chef who continued to work after losing her eyesight, and French chef Madeleine Kamman, a contemporary of Julia Child. The second part of the book shares the stories of Italian immigrant Marcella Hazan, author of The Classic Italian Cook Book: The Art of Italian Cooking (1973), “The Indian Culinary Authority” in the United States, Julie Shani, Iran’s Najmieh Batmanglij, who writes cookbooks “adapting authentic Persian recipes to tastes and techniques in the West,” and Jamaican chef Norma Shirley. By describing their journey and that of the food of their homeland, Sen shows how the women “used food to construct an identity outside their own country.” As described in the NY Times Book Review, Taste Makers “…embeds these themes within intimate, individual stories as a way to unravel how his subjects’ achievements — and struggles — have contributed to what and how we eat in America today.”


5 Titles is directed by the Research & Instructional Services (RIS) Department at Duke University Libraries.

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:

Just announced: Open Access South Asian Newspapers

International and Area Studies at Duke University LibrariesThe Global Press Archive and the Center for Research Libraries have just launched South Asian Newspapers, the sixth open access collection of titles digitized under their Alliance. This collection of South Asian Newspapers encompasses over 185,000 digitized pages from 10 publications, including: Dainika basumatī, Lahore Chronicle (founded in 1849 in Lahore), and Dnyānaprakāśa, among others.

 

Your End-of-Semester Library Toolkit, Spring 2022

Students studying at table

You’re nearly there! Here are some resources to power you through the end of the semester and beyond.

End-of-Semester Library Events

Miniature Therapy Horses at Lilly Library – Saturday, April 23rd from 11 AM to 1 PM. Take a break from studying and drop by Lilly Library to de-stress with the miniature therapy horses from Stampede of Love and relax with some snacks!

Crafternoon – Tuesday, April 26th from 1 to 3 PM. Stop by Perkins Library to relax and clear your mind with various crafting activities: coloring, origami, make-your-own bookmarks and zines, and more!

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. 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

You Passed! Now Pass It On. Donate Your Textbooks to the Library.

For the last several years, the Duke University Libraries has purchased copies of the assigned texts for a wide range of Duke courses and made them available to check out for free. It’s one of our most popular services, and students regularly tell us how much they appreciate it. And no wonder, when the cost of a single textbook can often exceed $300.

Now there’s a way you can help us make the program even better and do something about the ridiculous cost of textbooks at the same time. At the end of this semester, donate your textbooks to the library. We’ll make them available for other students to check out for free.

Don’t you wish someone had done that for you? Be that someone.

Look for the textbook donation bins in Perkins, Bostock, Lilly, and Divinity libraries starting this week. When you’ve finished with your classes, simply drop your books in the bin and enjoy the satisfaction of knowing you’ve made some future Duke student’s day.

So if you passed your classes, pass it on. Donate your textbooks to us and make a Duke education more affordable for all.

(And if you didn’t pass, we’ll understand if you need to hang on to those books a little longer.)

Diversifying the Curriculum & Decolonizing the Collection

International and Area Studies at Duke University LibrariesPlease join us on Friday, April 22, 2022 from 2:00 – 4:00 PM for a discussion of how librarians are currently working to decolonize library collections and diversify scholarship in the curriculum.

Part 1: The Collector and the Collected (2:00 PM – 3:00 PM)

Anna Arays, Librarian for Slavic & East European Studies, Department of Area Studies and Humanities Research Support (DASHRS), Yale University, will discuss the results of her work as co-editor of The Collector and the Collected: Decolonizing Area Studies Librarianship (Library Juice Press, 2021).

Part 2: Diversifying Scholarship in the Curriculum (3:10 PM – 4:00 PM)

Staff members of Duke University Libraries’ committee on “Diversifying Scholarship in the Curriculum” (Heather Martin, Amy McDonald, Jodi Psoter, Lee Sorensen, and Haley Walton) will lead a round robin about their committee report.

Both meetings are held at the same Zoom link:
https://duke.zoom.us/j/95268364809?pwd=eWlFQisyMWVxcGR6YjdrbFRNRFNIQT09
Meeting ID: 952 6836 4809
Passcode: 110684

This two-part event is organized by the librarians of the International and Area Studies Department at Duke University Libraries.  If you have any questions, please contact Heidi Madden, Ph.D., Head, International and Area Studies.

Celebrate National Library Week!

April 3-9, 2022 marks National Library Week. Celebrate libraries and librarians by “checking out” (get it?) one of these excellent films in Duke Libraries’ collection:

film image
dir. Alain Guillon, 2020

Chut…! 
Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis. In a society where everything is commercial, where time is limited, where transmission is devalued, there is a place of gratuitousness and encounter where all kinds of people, cultures, practices meet, where we constantly fight inequalities and social violence, a place of sharing, a refuge, an island. Quietly, joyfully, something important is being made here, invisible to the hurried or accounting gaze: the development of a new social contract.

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dir. Frederick Wiseman, 2017

Ex Libris: New York Public Library
“I’ve always loved and used public libraries for what I can learn and discover and for the surprises and stimulation they offer. I was not familiar, before I made the film, with the depth, scope and range of the New York Public Library and the wide range of services they provide to all classes, races and ethnicities in the main library and its 92 branches.” — Frederick Wiseman

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dir. Vivienne Roumani-Denn, 2013

Out of Print
Every aspect of the written word is changing—from publishing to writing and selling to reading. If books are the foundation of civilization, how does that change the world of ideas? And how does it change us? With the unique perspective gained as a director at the Library of Congress and the UC Berkeley Library, filmmaker Vivienne Roumani tackles the questions confronting today’s word industry and shows that much more is at stake than how quickly we can access the latest byte. Out of Print is narrated by Meryl Streep and features Jeff Bezos, Scott Turow, Ray Bradbury, Jeffrey Toobin, Robert Darnton, Jane Friedman, Alberto Manguel, booksellers, cognitive scientists, architects, educators, parents, and students.

film image
dir. Megan Rossman, 2018

The Archivettes
For more than 40 years, the Lesbian Herstory Archives has combated lesbian invisibility by literally rescuing history from the trash. The Archivettes provides a comprehensive look at the history of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the personal lives of the women involved in it, and the materials it protects and the challenges arising as the founders face their final years. The Lesbian Herstory Archives began in 1974, when a group of women involved in the Gay Academic Union realized that lesbian history was disappearing as quickly as it was being made. It is now home to the world’s largest collection of materials by and about lesbians and their communities.

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dir. Julian Samuel, 2004

Save and Burn
The first half of the film discusses the history of libraries and how they have facilitated the cross fertilization of ideas from one culture to another throughout history. The second half switches focus towards libraries in the political realm, including a discussion of the fate of libraries and their collections during periods of social unrest. Topics in this portion include the Patriot Act, the destruction of Palestinian libraries by Israeli soldiers, and the fate of Iraqi libraries during the country’s “liberation.”

film image
dir. Terry Sanders, 1987

Slow Fires: On the Preservation of the Human Record
This award-winning documentary tells the unforgettable story of the deterioration and destruction of our world’s intellectual heritage and the global crisis in preserving library materials. Sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources. Millions of pages of paper in books, photographs, drawings, and maps are disintegrating and turning to dust. This remarkable film provides a comprehensive assessment of the worldwide situation, demonstrates methods of restoration and preservation and suggests ways to prevent new documents from facing ultimate destruction.

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dirs. Sawyer Broadley, Jill Baron, Óscar Rubén Cornejo Cásares and Melissa Padilla, 2019

Change the Subject
No human being is illegal. When Dartmouth College students challenged anti-immigrant language in the Library of Congress, their activism sparked a movement–and a cataloging term became a flashpoint in the immigration debate on Capitol Hill.

Films curated by Danette Pachtner, Librarian for Film, Video & Digital Media and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies

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.

 

For Library Staff, Remote Work Is a Booklover’s Paradise

Relocating Duke’s priceless special collections 4,700 miles away from the researchers who need to consult them will help ensure their long-term preservation.

With Duke’s recent addition of Hawaii to the list of states where university employees are allowed to work remotely, the Duke University Libraries announced today that its entire 250-person staff will be working full-time from the Aloha State, starting this spring and summer.

In what’s being described as a radical experiment in putting the lessons of the pandemic to work, Duke will have the first library system in the nation to be operated entirely remotely, from nearly 5,000 miles and five time zones away.

Though it will take some getting used to, the change will come with major benefits for students, said retiring University Librarian Deborah Jakubs, who has already gone ahead to the popular vacation destination to oversee the staff move.

“For years, Duke students have been asking us for more study space in the libraries,” said Jakubs from a private lanai overlooking a breathtaking Pacific sunset. “Now we’re finally able to give them what they want. With staff offices empty and all of us out of the way, students can finally have the entire place to themselves,” she added between sips from a tall, cool Mai Tai.

How exactly will a remotely operated research library work? Largely on the honor system and with the help of student employees, said Dave Hansen, Associate University Librarian for Research, Collections & Scholarly Communication. “The past two years have prepared us well for maintaining high levels of service even when we’re not onsite,” said Hansen, sporting a three-day beard under a wide-brim sun hat. “The Libraries employ almost 200 highly trained student workers who are already accustomed to assisting patrons and performing various support functions that keep our operations going.”

Books and other materials in the circulating collection will be available on a self-checkout basis, Hansen explained. The Libraries are purchasing additional self-checkout stations, which will be installed near every library entrance.

“And here’s the best part—once you’re done with your books, DVDs, whatever, you just put them back on the shelves where you found them,” said Hansen, the faint sounds of a ukulele strumming somewhere behind him. “We totally trust you.”

“Our librarians will still be available for consultation via Zoom,” said Emily Daly, Interim Head of Research and Instructional Services, casually waxing a Duke blue surfboard. “Whenever students or faculty need help with a class or research project, we’ll be just the click of a button away,” Daly added, as dolphins could be seen cavorting in the gnarly whitecaps behind her “office.” When scheduling Zoom appointments with library staff, Duke students and faculty are advised to add a 30-minute buffer on either end to account for “island time.”

While books and other materials in the Libraries’ general collection will remain onsite in Durham, some 65,000 linear feet of archival material in the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library will be relocated to a secure facility on Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island.

“We believe the best way to preserve Duke’s priceless special collections is to put about 4,700 miles of distance between them and the researchers who need to consult them,” said Naomi Nelson, Associate University Librarian and Director of the Rubenstein Library. “With its low temperatures, low humidity, and clean air, Mauna Kea has some of the best environmental conditions anywhere on earth for preserving rare books and historical papers,” Nelson explained, tossing a few more logs into a fire pit where she planned to slow-roast a pig over the course of the day. “Not to mention the billions of stars you can see out here at night. Really helps you keep all that important ‘research’ in perspective, you know?”

Nelson confirmed that the Rubenstein Library will continue to staff a reading room for researchers who wish to consult special collections material in person, “assuming they don’t mind a 15-hour flight.”

With Duke’s current University Librarian Deborah Jakubs set to retire in May, one unanswered question is whether her eventual successor will join the library staff or remain in Durham as the “face” of the Libraries on campus.

“We appreciate everyone’s patience and flexibility as we work to serve Duke better,” said Jakubs, reclining into a hammock slung between two palm trees that gently swayed in the sea breeze. “Mahalo.”


Can this flexible work arrangement be for real? Unfortunately it’s not a “remote” possibility. Happy April Fools’ Day, Dukies!

What to Read this Month: March 2022

Hello again from the library! I know what you’re probably thinking: it’s getting close to the weekend, and you’ve got absolutely nothing scheduled,  so now’s the perfect time to pick up a new book (what do you mean, there’s a huge game this weekend???). If that’s you–or even if you do have plans to watch something this weekend–I’ve come to help with some suggestions! I’ve personally been on a memoir kick, as you’ll see with these titles I’ve picked out, but if that’s not your thing, never fear. All of these titles come from either the Libraries’ Overdrive ebook collection, or the New & Noteworthy collection. These collections contain all sorts of popular reading, so do check them out! I can guarantee you’ll find something that grabs your interest.


Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School: James, Kendra:  9781538753484: Amazon.com: BooksAdmissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School by Kendra James. In this memoir, writer James recounts her time at the Taft School, an elite Connecticut boarding school. Despite graduating in 2006, James was the school’s first Black legacy student (her father attended the school and was a trustee during her time there), and much of her account details her experiences as one of the school’s only Black students in the early to mid-2000s. James describes an institution with near-countless opportunities for scholarly enrichment and connections to prestigious colleges and universities, but despite these features, she struggles socially due to the racism of her primarily white peers, despite arriving at the school eager to form lasting ties. Although the experiences she describes are markedly difficult, James frequently punctuates her account with humor, and thoughtfully examines the ways her time at Taft has shaped her present-day life. You can read reviews here and here.


Lost & Found: A Memoir: Schulz, Kathryn: 9780525512462: Amazon.com: BooksLost & Found: A Memoir by Kathryn Schulz. In this memoir, journalist Schulz recounts two major personal events that have impacted the trajectory of her life over the past decade: the death of her father and the formation of her relationship with her current partner. Although Schulz’s account of this former event is often fittingly sober and steeped in grief, it is also quietly hopeful and grateful in its contemplative tone; Schulz notes that her father was largely able to live a happy and intellectually stimulating life, as he so wished. She also meditates on the ways his life influenced her own, and finds solace in the fact that her relationship with him was both healthy and very much mutually beneficial. Shortly before her father’s death, Schulz met the woman who would become her partner, and the beginnings of this relationship form the backbone of the memoir’s second half. Here, Schulz discusses the serendipity of meeting her partner, and marvels at the chance circumstances under which the two were able to build such a meaningful relationship. You can read reviews here and here.


Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia: Catte, Elizabeth:  9781948742733: Amazon.com: BooksPure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia by Elizabeth Catte. In this book, author Catte traces the often obscured history of the eugenics movement in Virginia, contextualizing it within the broader history of eugenics in the United States, and centering a number of historical events and locations throughout the state, from which she hails. Writing that eugenics “is everywhere and nowhere,” Catte focuses both on the 20th-century initiatives undertaken by the state with directly pro-eugenics motives–including the history of Western State Hospital in Staunton, in which many disabled Virginians were forcibly confined, as well as the Virginia-based US Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, which sanctioned involuntary sterilization throughout the United States–and events that had indirectly eugenicist outcomes, including the forced uprooting of Appalachian families during the formation of Shenandoah National Park, and Charlottesville’s destruction of its most prominent historically Black neighborhood. Importantly, Catte also emphasizes the dangerous systematic erasure of these events, and calls on her readers to learn from the fraught history she discusses. You can read a review here and read an interview with Catte here.


The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness: O'Rourke, Meghan:  9781594633799: Amazon.com: BooksThe Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke. In this book, writer O’Rourke makes the case for a radical reframing of chronic illness in both the medical profession and broader American culture, centering her argument in both extensive research and an account of her own experiences with chronic illness. Developing an unnamed autoimmune condition in her adulthood, O’Rourke painstakingly chronicles a near decade-long search for a medical practitioner who can accurately diagnose and address the complicated and troubling array of debilitating symptoms she faces, with many dismissing her outright when the tests she takes are repeatedly inconclusive in their results. O’Rourke likens this period of inadequately addressed suffering to being invisible, and she details how this experience of invisibility is distressingly common, with many chronically ill people taking, on average, several years to receive a correct diagnosis. Although O’Rourke eventually does receive the treatment she needs, she notes that she is still not completely well, and she urges her readers to understand the everyday complications of existing with chronic illness. You can read reviews here and here.


Amazon.com: Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful  Recommendations on How to Become American: 9780393867978: Ali, Wajahat:  BooksGo Back to Where You Came From and Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become an American by Wajahat Ali. In this memoir, author Ali recounts both his coming-of-age as a child of Pakistani immigrants, and his complex reckoning with American identity as an adult. Growing up in California’s Bay Area, Ali describes a 1980s-90s childhood in which he bears witness to his family and other members of the area’s Pakistani immigrant community as they chase the American dream, which Ali closely aligns with typical markers of whiteness. Ali more directly confronts his own racial and national identity in college after 9/11 happens, an event which, as illustrated by Ali’s observations, drastically changed white American society’s perception of Middle Eastern and South Asian people, particularly Muslims. Faced with a sudden swell of islamophobia, Ali feels driven to artistically make sense of his complicated feelings, but struggles until his college mentor, renowned playwright Ishmael Reed, encourages him to write a play. In the rest of the memoir, Ali discusses how his eventual work, The Domestic Crusaders, both launched his eventual writing career and assisted in his understanding of identity in the face of bigotry. You can read reviews here and here.

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.

Blue Dean Named Associate University Librarian for Development

Headshot of Blue Dean
Blue Dean, Associate University Librarian for Development

The Duke University Libraries are pleased to announce the appointment of L. Blue Dean as Associate University Librarian for Development, effective March 28, 2022.

Reporting to the University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs, Dean will serve as a member of the Libraries’ Executive Group and lead organizational efforts to sustain and expand philanthropic support for one of the nation’s top research library systems.

A seasoned fundraiser with more than twenty years of experience in higher education and the nonprofit sector, including prior appointments at Duke, Dean comes to us from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she has served as Executive Director for Library Development since 2019. Previously, she was the Executive Director of Development for Duke University’s Department of Medicine and the Duke Heart Center, earning a strong record of progressively successful fundraising leadership over eight years.

Dean has also led development efforts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville—her alma mater, where she earned a B.A. in English—as the Director of Development for the University Libraries and, later, the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences. She has also held fundraising positions at the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and oversaw the volunteer and visitor experience at the Knoxville Museum of Art.

During her time at UNC-Chapel Hill, Dean served as a member of the University Libraries Leadership Team and successfully raised over $20 million for the Libraries. At the start of the pandemic, she co-chaired a steering committee that determined how to reopen the libraries and provide services for students, faculty, and the community while prioritizing the safety of library staff. She also served on the University Development Office’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee and on the taskforce that launched the OneCarolina Pilot Mentorship Program.

“I look forward to welcoming Blue to the Duke University Libraries, and I am excited about the energy and experience she will bring to this position,” said Deborah Jakubs, the Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs. “This is a time of transition for the Libraries,” said Jakubs, who will retire from Duke in May 2022, “and Blue’s track record as a successful fundraiser with strong connections at Duke and a passion for libraries will go far to ensure that a world-class university like Duke will continue to have a world-class library at its center.”

“I am excited to return to Duke and am especially excited and honored to work with the Duke University Libraries,” said Dean. “You cannot have a top research university without a top research library, and I look forward to partnering with alumni, families, and friends to continue the strong tradition of supporting Duke’s libraries. A philanthropic investment in the Duke University Libraries is an investment in every student, faculty member, and researcher in all of Duke’s schools, departments, and programs.”

In her new role, Dean succeeds Tom Hadzor, who will retire on May 17, 2022. Hadzor began his career at Duke in 1996 as Associate Director and Executive Director of Development and Communications for the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center. In 2003, he became Associate Dean for Alumni and Development at the Duke Law School, where he led its building campaign. In 2006, he joined the Duke University Libraries and has served as the Associate University Librarian for Development ever since. During that time, he has raised over $120 million for the Duke University Libraries. Until his official retirement from Duke in May, Hadzor will continue to work for the Libraries in a special capacity, raising major gifts for the Lilly Library renovation and expansion project.

Lilly Collection Spotlight: Notable Women in Science and Beyond

Notable Women in Science and Beyond

Lilly Library celebrates Women’s History Month  by shining our spotlight on Notable Women in Science and Beyond. Films and books that highlight the vital role of women in the sciences as well as other areas of society and culture are featured. Below are just a few of the many titles  – check them out in person or online!

Books about Women in the Sciences

Book cover Jennifer Doudna
Code Breaker: Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna

Life in code : a personal history of technology
Pioneering computer programmer Ellen Ullman worked inside the rising culture of technology and the internet. In Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective.

The code breaker: Jennifer Doudna, gene editing, and the future of the human race
Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues including Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2020. She and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions, a life science revolution.

The doctors Blackwell: how two pioneering sisters brought medicine to women–and women to medicine
In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. She was joined by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician. Exploring the sisters’ allies, and challenges, we see a story of trial and triumph. Together, the Blackwells founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women.

Films about Women in the Sciences … and Beyond

Hidden Figures available via streaming or DVD

Hidden Figures via Streaming , DVD, Book, or Audio book
NASA found untapped talent in a group of African-American female mathematicians that served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in U.S. history. Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson crossed all gender, race, and professional lines while their brilliance and desire to dream big, beyond anything ever accomplished before by the human race, firmly cemented them in U.S. history as true American heroes.

Geek Girls DVD 31054
Filmmaker Gina Hara, struggling with her own geek identity, explores the issue with a cast of women who live geek life up to the hilt: A feminist geek blogger, a convention-trotting cosplayer, a professional gamer, a video-game designer, and a NASA engineer.

Illustration of three women scientists
Picture a Scientist

Picture a Scientist DVD 33770 or Streaming
This documentary film chronicles the groundswell of researchers who are writing a new chapter for women scientists. A biologist, a chemist and a geologist lead viewers reveal their experiences as they confront brutal harassment, institutional discrimination, and years of subtle slights to revolutionize the culture of science.

We are the Radical Monarchs  Streaming
This film documents the Radical Monarchs–an alternative to the Scout movement for girls of color, aged 8-13. Its members earn badges for completing units on social justice including being an LGBTQ ally, the environment, and disability justice.

Daughters of the Forest  Streaming
This documentary tells the story of a small group of girls in one of the most remote forests left on earth who attend a radical high school where they learn to protect the threatened forest.

DVD cover photo collage of women
The Gender Chip Project

The Gender Chip Project DVD 5320
Filmmaker Helen de Michiel documented several young women majoring in the sciences, engineering and math at Ohio State University. They met regularly over their next three years of college, and created a community to share experiences and struggles. This documentary reveals women finding new ways to honor their own growth, motivations and experience as they imagine how to make the science and technology workplace a comfortable environment for women.

Symbiotic Earth : how Lynn Margulis rocked the boat and started a scientific revolution via DVD 31267 or Streaming
Symbiotic Earth explores the life and ideas of Lynn Margulis, a brilliant and radical scientist, whose unconventional theories challenged the male-dominated scientific community and are today fundamentally changing how we look at evolution, the environment, and ourselves.

My Love Affair with the Brain: the life and science of Dr. Marian Diamond  DVD 31280 and Streaming
As one of the founders of modern neuroscience, Dr. Diamond challenged orthodoxy and changed our understanding of the brain–its plasticity, its response to enrichment and to experiences that shape both development and aging.


Curated by:
Danette Pachtner
Librarian for Film, Video & Digital Media and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies

Carol Terry
Lilly Library Collection Services, Communications & Social Media Coordinator

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.

Duke University Libraries Summer Research Grants for LIFE Students — DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MARCH 29

  • Do you have a cool project idea that uses extensive library resources, such as archival materials or foreign language books?
  • Are you a first generation and/or low income undergraduate student?
  • Would having up to $4500 assist with your project idea?

If you answered yes to all three, then consider applying for the Duke University Libraries Summer Research Grants (DULSRG)! We welcome applications from students with all levels of prior experience using library materials. Our application deadline this year has just been EXTENDED to March 29th, 2022!

DULSRG are awarded to first-generation and/or low-income undergraduate students to support original library research either at Duke or at another library or cultural institution with a library. Awards are granted up to a maximum of $4500 to cover expenses such as campus housing, transportation, meals while conducting research, online trainings, and digitization expenses. Because research expenses can vary depending on the field of research and the duration of the project, students are able to pool grant funding with other awards.

With the pandemic, we know you’re probably wondering what research might even look like this summer. At this time, we expect Duke will allow on-campus housing and in-person research at Duke, but this is subject to change and subject to university policy.

We’d like to stress that your research does not need to be conducted in person! The grant will cover any expenses related to virtual research and access using Duke or another library’s resources! This could include utilizing digitized collections such as Duke’s own University Archives or Government Documents, or accessing the digitized collections of another university or cultural institution! While the pandemic may have slowed the pace of in-person research, virtual resources for research have become more plentiful than ever – this grant could be your ticket to accessing what’s out there!

To help facilitate planning for alternative means of researching, we will be asking in the submission form for a brief description of alternative ways to work on the project.

You can find out more details about the award, including how to apply and examples of past projects, here:  https://library.duke.edu/research/grants

Deadline: March 29th, 2022

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

Resources on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

International and Area Studies at Duke University Libraries

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, on 24 February 2022, has quite understandably alarmed the international community.  This unprovoked act of military aggression against the territorial integrity of a neighboring sovereign state not only violates numerous international treaties and legal conventions.  It also recalls the immediate prelude to World War II, when Nazi Germany invaded the Second Polish Republic (1939), sparking a military conflict that led to the death of millions of people all over the world.  This time, however, the armed aggressor is not only a dictatorship headed by a white Christian nationalist, but also a major nuclear power, with the capacity to destroy all life on our planet.  Suddenly, to know something about Russia, Ukraine, and eastern Europe is in everyone’s interest – if only to figure out how to prevent immediate, complete, and total annihilation.

As Duke University’s Librarian for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies, it is my professional responsibility to help patrons identify, locate, and access the scholarly resources that they need to study and teach about this region of the world.  As a native of Odesa (Ukraine), the grandson of Holocaust survivors, and a first generation American, I also feel a personal sense of responsibility for helping the citizens of my adopted homeland to appreciate the gravity of the situation and work towards the peaceful resolution of Russia’s war against Ukraine.  To that end, this blog post not only offers some basic starting points for comprehending the current crisis, but also offers suggestions for what Duke library patrons (and others) can do to stay well-informed and actively engaged.

Please note that this is by no means a complete list of resources on the topic, which is being covered by specialized centers, such as Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute, whose webpage on Russia’s War on Ukraine contains useful information and links to open access electronic resources; or the resource page on the same topic created by The Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US. Similarly, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta has a series of short videos called “Did you know?” that answers questions such as “Are Ukrainians and Russians the same people,” “Are Ukrainian and Russian the same language,” “Is the conflict in Ukraine an ethnic conflict?” And the Media Hub of Ukrainian Institute London has not only recordings of various talks on Ukrainian culture but also a video series called 10 Things You Should Know about Ukraine.  Also in the UK, Sheffield Hallam University is hosting Peripheral Histories’ guide to War in Ukraine: Resources for Researchers, Teachers and Students. (Thanks to Ksenya Kiebuzinskii, Slavic Resources Coordinator at the University of Toronto Libraries and  Head, Petro Jacyk Central & East European Resource Centre, and Jurij Dobczansky, Senior Cataloging Specialist, Germanic & Slavic Division, Library of Congress, for alerting me to some of these other, non-US-based initiatives).

News

Much of the international news coverage on the Russian invasion of Ukraine can be accessed via Duke University Libraries’ paid subscription to

To get a local perspective on the situation on the ground, without succumbing to either propaganda or disinformation (such as the kind associated with the hashtag #BlackinUkraine), you will need to consult trusted, independent, and alternative news sources from Russia and Ukraine proper:

Ukraine

Russia

You can also follow Ukraine-based journalists and correspondents on Twitter:

  • Terrell Jermain Starr, non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and senior reporter at the The Root, an English-language online magazine of African-American culture.
  • Olga Tokariuk, Kyiv-based independent journalist and non-resident Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
  • Christopher Miller, an American retired United States Army Special Forces colonel and former acting US Secretary of Defense.
  • Natalia Gumeniuk, head of Hromadske International.
  • Illia Ponomarenko, defense reporter with The Kyiv Independent.
  • Francis Scarr, reporter for the British Broadcasting Company.
  • Neil Hauer, independent journalist in country.
  • Shaun Walker, journalist for The Guardian.
  • Christopher Miller, correspondent for BuzzFeedNews.
  • OSINTtechnical, American blogger and freelancer at UK Defense Journal, who publishes open source imagery of fighting.

Scholarship 

Unless they are open access, most works of scholarship produced on the basis of primary sources can take some time before they are published. Consequently, there is a bit of a time-lag between current events and their scholarly analysis.  Nevertheless, it is possible to find numerous works on the history of post-Cold War world and the immediate causes of Russia’s war on Ukraine, which began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

To find books and monographs on the topic, conduct a “subject” search in the “Books & Media” tab of the Duke University Libraries’ online catalog for the following controlled vocabulary (Library of Congress Subject Headings):

To find scholarly articles on the topic, conduct a search in one of our research databases, which index or provide full text to journals in different academic disciplines, research areas, and world regions. For the topic in question, you might want to consult the databases in the following categories:

A curated list of relevant article databases can also be found on the “Articles” tab of the Duke University Library guide to Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies.

For documentaries, check out the offerings on Duke’s subscription streaming video platforms such as Docuseek, which includes the following Ukraine-related films:

  • Town of Glory (2020)
    Spotlights a small and prototypical provincial Russian town, where people admire Vladimir Putin for making Russia great again.
  • Nine Month War (2018)
    The experience of a young man in western Ukraine who is drafted into the Ukrainian army when Russia annexes Crimea.
  • The Gas Weapon (2014)
    Post-Soviet Ukraine’s (and Europe’s) dependence on Russian gas.
  • How Putin Came to Power (2005)
    Uses archival footage to trace the stunningly rapid ascension of a political unknown to leadership of the Kremlin.
  • The Democratic Revolutionary Handbook (2007)
    Includes interviews with the organizers of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution.

Finally,  for award-winning Ukrainian feature films on the war in the Donbas, check out the following tiles:

  • Donbass (2022)
    Ukraine’s official submission to the 91st Academy Awards is a tale about the hybrid war in Eastern Ukraine, a world lost in post-truth and fake identities.
  • Bad roads (2022)
    Ukraine’s official Oscar submission for the 2022 Academy Awards is a collection of four short stories are set along the roads of Donbass during the war.
  • The Earth is blue as an orange (2020)
    A film about the daily trauma of living in a war-zone, in Donetsk, told from the perspective of a young mother and her children.

Activism

Here are just some suggestions for how you can get involved and stay active.

  • Attend/organize an anti-war rally, vigil, or teach-in
  • Write your elected representatives in Washington, DC and tell them to pass legislation
    • authorizing additional humanitarian, financial, and military assistance to Ukraine
    • setting up a UN-enforced no-fly zone over Ukraine
    • expediting the immigration and resettlement of war refugees in the US
    • excluding Russia’s entire banking system from SWIFT international payment network
  • Donate to charities specifically seeking to ameliorate the human suffering caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A list of such charities has been compiled by several different organizations:
  • Learn a Slavic language, so you can increase your cultural literacy when it comes to Russia and at least some of the countries of Eastern Europe.
    • Duke University Libraries have online language guides for Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian.
    • Duke University’s Slavic and Eurasian Language Resource Center (SEELRC) has created a set of reference grammars for the languages of the entire region.

Hopefully, peace will prevail and nonviolent solutions will ultimately be found. Whatever happens, I will continue to fulfill my mission of acquiring relevant resources for Duke University Libraries’ Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies collection and assisting patrons in using it to better understand the current situation. That is the least I can do at this time. In the future, I plan to learn more about the process of decolonizing the academic library in general, and area studies librarianship in particular.  And to do a better job of foregrounding the voices of Ukrainians and the many other non-“Western” peoples who once inhabited or continue to find themselves living in the shatterzone of empires, a beleaguered region of Europe still known as the bloodlands.

If you have any questions about the resources mentioned in this blog post or have suggestions for other items to include on this list, please send them to ernest.zitser@duke.edu. Duke patrons with a NetID can also suggest a purchase by filling out this online request form.

Meet Scifinder-n! Live Training Sessions and Other Resources

SciFinder-n is now available to all Duke students, faculty, and staff!  The new interface offers new features, improved searching, and better integration of content. These enhancements make finding information easier, giving you more time for your research.  Use your current SciFinder username and password to log in and start searching.

Trainers Edwin Robinson and Scott Hertzog of Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Service (ACS), will be on campus to offer in-person demonstrations and answer questions. Join us to learn about new tools designed to help researchers in chemistry, engineering, biology, the environment and medicine.

Students and faculty, new and veteran searchers, are encouraged to attend one or more sessions. Bring your laptop to search along!  All training sessions will be held in French Family Science Center 2237.

View the entire schedule and sign up for events here: https://tinyurl.com/scifindern.

Can’t attend in-person? Please email jodi.psoter@duke.edu to request a virtual training session for your research group. You can also take a look at the quick reference guide and training materials on specific topics and watch the series of 30 minute recorded webinars.

**As you begin exploring SciFinder-n, don’t forget to migrate your current saved answers and alerts from CAS SciFinder You will no longer be able to access the classic platform after June 30, 2022.

What to Read this Month: February 2022

We hope you all had a good February! While we at the library know full well that this is a busy time in the semester, we also realize that you might want to spend your limited free time in the company of a good book, or maybe pick up a new title just in time for spring break. If that describes you, then look no further! Here are some interesting titles from our New & Noteworthy collection. On the off chance none of these titles grab your attention, however, then don’t worry. We’re always adding new popular titles to both our New & Noteworthy and Overdrive ebook collections, so we encourage you to take a look at both of them. Happy reading!


Amazon.com: The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Oprah's Book Club Novel  (Oprahs Book Club 2.0): 9780062942937: Jeffers, Honoree Fanonne: BooksThe Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. This debut novel by poet Jeffers, nominated for last year’s National Book Award for fiction, chronicles the multigenerational and multicultural history of the African American Garfield family, anchored by the late 20th century events surrounding its protagonist, Ailey Garfield. Interspersed with the main narrative thread of Ailey’s educational experiences and family research, in which she divides her time between an unnamed city and her family’s ancestral hometown in rural Georgia, are segments, referred to as songs, that delve into the histories of her individual ancestors of African, Creek, and Scottish origin. As Ailey learns more about these ancestors, so too does she come to understand her present-day family. As the title suggests, too, the works of W.E.B. Du Bois play a prominent role, informing both the content of the novel as well as its very structure. You can read reviews here and here.


Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes: Phillips, Barnaby: 9781786079350:  Amazon.com: BooksLoot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes by Barnaby Phillips. In this book, journalist Phillips offers a comprehensive and compelling history of the Benin Bronzes, metal plaques and ivory artworks dating from the 13th through 18th centuries in the Edo Kingdom, located in what is now southern Nigeria. Prior to 1897, most of the bronzes were kept in the royal palace of Benin City for the kingdom’s rulers, but this changed when British forces invaded, an act that ultimately led to the downfall of the Edo Kingdom and the establishment of the British Southern Nigeria Protectorate. During the invasion, the bronzes were sacked by the British and taken back to England as loot, where many remain today. Although Phillips notes that the Nigerian government has repeatedly called for the repatriation of the bronzes since 1974, this has largely been ignored. Today, most remain in Europe (specifically the UK), with still others scattered across Canada and the United States. In addition to relaying this fraught history, Phillips also makes his own case for repatriation and delves into the mindset of many of the institutions still possessing the bronzes in Europe. You can read more here and here.


Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch: A Novel: Galchen, Rivka:  9780374280468: Amazon.com: BooksEveryone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen. This novel, Galchen’s second, tells the story of Katharina, a German woman accused of witchcraft in 1615. Based on historic events–several hundred women were executed for alleged witchcraft throughout the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth century–Katharina finds herself the object of suspicion in her small town for a confluence of seemingly ridiculous reasons: she is a widow, perceived to be too independent by those around her, and is not particularly well-liked. Most importantly, she has been accused of poisoning a local woman. Though the accusation itself is baseless, Katharina finds that many people in her community are all too eager to testify against her, seemingly determined to portray her as a malicious witch bent causing harm to anyone and everyone. Though the novel is peppered with dark humor (often in the form of Katharina’s dry mental observations about those around her), the subject matter, and the course of the story, prove to be rather harrowing. You can read reviews here and here.


How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across  America: Smith, Clint: 9780316492935: Amazon.com: BooksHow the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith. In this book, Atlantic staff writer Smith studies the way the history and legacy of slavery in the United States has been dealt with at nine historic sites (eight in the US, and one abroad). As Smith observes, each site reckons with the subject quite differently—he contrasts, for example, the centering of enslaved people’s lives at Louisiana’s Whitney Plantation with the glorification of the Confederacy at Virginia’s Blandford Cemetery—reflecting the contradictory and tumultuous understanding of slavery present in American culture at large. Smith’s depiction of these sites is multi-faceted and richly described, in no small part because he interviews such a wide range of people, including tourists and tour guides, historians and other experts, and formerly incarcerated people. In presenting such a complex picture of historical reception in the contemporary United States, Smith offers a compelling and extremely relevant read. You can read reviews here and here.


Amazon.com: I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness: A Novel: 9780593330210:  Watkins, Claire Vaye: BooksI Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins. This novel, Watkins’ second, traces the story of one fictional writer named Claire Vaye Watkins as she travels away from her husband and newborn child in Michigan for a book event in Nevada (despite the character having the same name and a number of characteristics as Watkins, the novel is fictional). In the throes of postpartum depression, Claire finds herself in crisis, and she takes the time away from her orderly life in Michigan as an opportunity to reassess the decisions she has made, to confront a variety of personal issues she has been avoiding, and, more unfortunately, to unravel somewhat. Having grown up in the west, her travels reunite her with several relics from her past, including a group of living college friends as well as a dead ex-partner. As Claire grapples with her own grief and reckons with her own life, she acts a witness towards those around her who are struggling with similar issues. Though the novel is often disorienting, it remains a cogent examination of grief, depression, poverty, drug addiction, and a host of other themes. You can read reviews here and here.

Lilly Collection Spotlight: Banned and Challenged Graphic Novels

Badly drawn, badly written and badly printed – a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems.” – Sterling North, Literary Editor, Chicago Daily News, 1940

Challenged from the Start

From the beginning, comics and graphic novels have had fans and detractors. To critics, comics were at a minimum second-rate and low-brow while at the extreme end, a corrupting force leading to juvenile delinquency.  In 1954, Frederic Wertham published the now infamous Seduction of the Innocent, linking juvenile delinquency to comics which led to a de facto censorship system which lasted for decades.

Fast forward to today, graphic novels, fiction and non-fiction works in comic-strip format, are frequent targets for challenges and bans. Though the majority of challenges come from parents and other concerned citizens, state officials have often lodged complaints. North Carolina’s own Lt. Governor, Mark Robinson, vehemently protested the inclusion of the graphic novel, Gender Queer, in school library collections, calling for its immediate removal.

Why graphic novels? 

Expanding beyond superheroes, authors and illustrators are connecting with their audiences on a variety of topics and issues through text and images. The combination of subject matter and static images makes graphic novels uniquely vulnerable to challenges.

Since 2013, graphic novels have made frequent appearances on the American Library Association’s yearly “Top 10 Most  Challenged Books.” In addition, the numerous challenges faced by publishers, libraries, retailers, and even readers over comics and graphics gave rise in 1986 to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit whose mission is the protection of the “First Amendment rights of the comics art form.”

Below are some titles in our collection that have been frequent targets of these challenges (click on the images for library location information). 

Blankets Book Cover
 

Color of Earth Book Cover Drama book cover

Fun Home Book Cover Gender Queer Book Cover

Maus Book Cover Persepolis Book Cover

Saga Book CoverThis One Summer Book Cover

War in Ukraine: Where do we go from here?

War in Ukraine: Where do we go from here?

March 1, 2022 – 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
Social Sciences 139, LaBarre Auditorium and on ZOOM
REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6zY2tGzUGcQTyNU

Participants

  • Ambassador Patrick Duddy, Rethinking Diplomacy Program Fellow, Duke Center for International & Global Studies
  • Professor Charlie Becker, Department of Economics
  • Professor Simon Miles, Sanford School of Public Policy
  • Professor Michael Newcity, Deputy Director, Duke University Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies
  • Professor Gionvanni Zanalda, Director, Duke University Center for International and Global Studies

Moderator

  • Professor Edna Andrews, Director, Duke University Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies and Duke University Slavic and Eurasian Language Resource Center

Sponsored by Duke University’s Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies & the Slavic and Eurasian Language Resource Center (CSEEES & SEELRC).

Contact Cathy Lewis, c.lewis@duke.edu, with any questions.

5 Titles: Native American Women Anthropologists

Linda DanielThe 5 Titles series highlights books, music, and films in the library’s collection featuring topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and/or highlighting the work of authors from diverse backgrounds. Each post is intended to provide a brief sampling of titles rather than a comprehensive overview of the topic. This month, the five titles have been selected by Librarian for Sociology and Cultural Anthropology Linda Daniel. Linda is also the head of the Social Sciences Section within the Libraries’ RIS department.

Native American women anthropologists have a rich history of analyzing and writing about ethnographic field work in their own communities. In addition to the challenges of academic scholarship, they face the complexities of how to be an anthropologist and also, as noted Native American anthropologist Beatrice Medicine wrote in 1978, remain “Native” and “a student in [their] own culture.”

These five titles highlight women anthropologists who have masterfully navigated these challenges and write about economic sovereignty, nationalism and nation building, urban communities, and everyday life faced by Native Americans. While differing in format and focus, they each provide a deeper understanding of the histories of these Native American cultures and how they are evolving.


Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty (Critical Indigeneities): Lewis, Courtney: 9781469648590: Amazon.com: BooksSovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty by Courtney Lewis (2019). Lewis’s research tells the compelling story of how skilled Native American small business owners thrived through the Great Recession and economic downturn of 2009. Her work follows the personal experiences of contemporary Eastern Band business owners, located on the Qualla Boundary, homeland to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee. This ethnographic study provides stories, like that of Charla’s and Zena’s “Cherokee by Design” enterprise, that reveal the importance of their support networks and the difficulties that these American Indian small-business owners encounter as they work to remain financially stable. Lewis’s research reveals situations specific to Native Nations and Native American business owners. She focuses on economic sovereignty and self-determination as a way that these small businesses can reduce their precarious economic situations and support their community’s economic stability. In doing so, this demonstration of indigenous agency shows how these small businesses can provide their nation with cultural, economic, and political strength.

Dr. Lewis will join Duke’s Cultural Anthropology Department in fall 2022.


Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First-Century Osage Nation ( First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies (University of North Carolina Press Paperback)): Dennison: 9780807872901: Amazon.com: BooksColonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty First-Century Osage Nation by Jean Dennison (2012). Dennison, noted Osage anthropologist, focuses on the 2004-2006 constitutional reform process in the Osage Nation of Oklahoma and writes about the debates that ensued about biology, culture, natural resources, and sovereignty. It’s a fascinating account of the tension between the colonial entanglements of the Osage and their nationhood, and how indigenous sovereignty and self-determination offer a framework to understand how positive action can emerge out of Osage history that doesn’t mirror its colonial oppression. Dennison provides the reader with clear historical context for the entanglements, discusses what should determine citizenship for the Osage, and whether traditional patterns of governance should influence current policies. Dennison’s ethnographic research provides a compelling account of how indigenous sovereignty, history, identity, and politics interacted in this governmental reform of the Osage nation.


Waterlily: Deloria, Ella Cara, Gardner, Susan, DeMallie, Raymond J.: 9780803219045: Amazon.com: BooksWaterlily by Ella Cara Deloria (1988). Deloria, born in 1889 on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, was a specialist in American Indian ethnology and linguistics. Her work resulted in several books: Dakota Texts, Dakota Grammar, and Speaking of Indians. By the 1940s, Deloria was considered a leading authority on Sioux culture and language. Waterlily gives a portrait of 19th-century Sioux life and is unique as it is told from women’s perspectives. The story focuses on Waterlily, her mother, and her grandmother and provides a view of Sioux social life – the kinship system, the structure of society, and its daily responsibilities. The writing is based upon the ethnographic materials Deloria gathered over years of scholarly work. Deloria chose to write this work as narrative fiction as she wanted to share this culture with a wide audience. It provides an important personal record of the complexities and richness of Sioux life.


Choctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian Resurgence (North American Indian Prose Award): Lambert, Valerie: 9780803224902: Amazon.com: BooksChoctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian Resurgence by Valerie Lambert (2007). Lambert documents one of the most important eras in the history of the Choctaw Nation – the building of a new order with the 1983 ratification of the tribe’s constitution. She places this creation of tribal nation building in the context of her tribe’s history, the economic and political implications of the tribe’s location in southeastern Oklahoma, and the unique personalities of the leaders involved in this movement. Each of these elements influenced the rebuilding of Choctaw nationalism. Lambert’s ethnographic analysis examines specific events to reveal the rearrangement of power in the new order and the importance of tribal sovereignty. She describes the tribal election of a Choctaw chief to expose the diverse ideas of citizenship that define the tribe. She explores the building of a small, rural tribal economic development project to understand the links between Choctaws, non-Indians in the community, and the local tribal government. She analyzes the 2001 water-rights claim that the Choctaws own all the water in southeastern Oklahoma to document the conflicts between the tribal government, the US government, and the Oklahoma state government. These events show how the Choctaw have negotiated their sovereign rights and built new political structures that reflect their tribal identity and empowerment.


Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond - Kindle edition by Ramirez, Renya K.. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond by Renya K. Ramirez (2007). Ramirez’s ethnographic work focuses on indigenous people who live in urban areas, specifically in the San Francisco Bay area, where thousands of Native Americans were federally relocated since the 1950s. This research has significance as the US census shows that the majority of Native Americans now live in cities. Ramirez focuses on female interviews in her book as a response to writings about Native Americans that have kept women’s voices silent and to demonstrate the importance of their full membership in discussions about tribal sovereignty and nationalism. Ramirez uses the concept of “hubs,” geographic and psychological sites that bring people together, to show how identities of indigenous people can be created and sustained in locations apart from their tribal homelands. These hubs allow Native Americans to maintain a connection between their urban and tribal homes, provide a sense of belonging, and may increase political power. Ramirez’s work reinforces the concept of unity of tribal communities that span across geographic distances as a way to strengthen identity.


5 Titles is directed by the Research & Instructional Services (RIS) Department at Duke University Libraries.

Lilly Streams: Documentary Films for Black History Month

Post by Danette Pachtner, Duke Libraries’ Librarian for Film, Video & Digital Media and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies

Black History Month is dedicated to the histories and stories of Black Americans and the African diaspora who have systemically been sidelined for centuries. Duke Libraries’ film collection has a treasure trove of titles to view and explore.

The Docuseek African-American Studies Collection is an interdisciplinary streaming video collection of over 80 award-winning films, featuring popular and classic films plus dynamic new releases, focused on social, political and cultural history and contemporary issues that are ideal resources for Black History Month.

Duke Libraries provides access to these streaming videos in The Docuseek Complete Collection, with Duke NetId/password authentication.

John Lewis
John Lewis: Get in the Way | dir. Kathleen Dowdey | 2020

John Lewis: Get in the Way tells the gripping tale of Lewis’s role in the vanguard of the Civil Rights Movement through never-before-seen interviews shot over 20 years.

Power to Heal: Medicare and the Civil Rights Revolution details the history of how Medicare was leveraged to desegregate hospitals. Before Medicare, fewer than half the nation’s hospitals served black and white patients equally, and in the South, 1/3 of hospitals would not admit African-Americans even for emergencies.
Power to Heal illustrates how Movement leaders and grass-roots volunteers pressed and worked with the federal government to achieve a greater measure of justice and fairness for African-Americans.

Film poster
Horror Noire: a History of Black Horror | dir. Xavier Burgin | 2019

Horror Noire traces the extensive history of Black horror films. Delving into a century of genre films that by turns utilized, caricatured, exploited, sidelined, and finally embraced them, Horror Noire traces a secret history of Black Americans in Hollywood through their connection to the horror genre.

Al Helm follows an African American Christian choir’s journey to the Palestinian National Theater to put on a play about Martin Luther King, Jr. A rousing portrait of the changes unfolding in the Middle East as a nonviolent movement grows in Palestine, this dynamic and complex work is born of a brilliantly simple and potent idea: what would happen if African American Christians—the same group who served as exemplars of the Civil Rights Movement—could witness firsthand the plight of Palestinians today?

Still of Lovings
The Loving Story | dir. Nancy Buirski | 2011
Film Poster
A Crime on the Bayou | dir. Nancy Buirski | 2020

The classic documentary film, The Loving Story, from Nancy Buirski’s trilogy profiling brave individuals who fought for justice in and around the Civil Rights era, is a heart-rending story of the Lovings and the ground-breaking court case that legalized marriage between interracial couples. A Crime on the Bayou, is the final film in Buirski’s trilogy, which outlines the extraordinary story of Gary Duncan, arrested for touching a white boy’s arm, whose civil rights case in Louisiana went all the way to the Supreme Court in the late 1960s.

River City Drumbeat chronicles Edward “Nardie” White’s instruction of ancestral Pan-African culture and drumming in Louisville, Kentucky. For three decades, Edward “Nardie” White has been leading the River City Drum Corps in order to instill a foundation of purposeful resilience within his neighborhood youth. Against the backdrop of the American South, Mr. White’s drumline and its multi-generational network of support has been a lifeline for many young African Americans. In his final year as director he trains his successor Albert Shumake, a young artist whose troubled life was transformed by the drumline and Mr. White’s mentorship when he was a teen. During this transitional year, Mr. White and Albert reflect on the tragedies and triumphs in their lives and the legacy of the drum corps.

Father’s Kingdom depicts the untold story of the remarkable civil rights pioneer Father Divine. Once a celebrity who was decades ahead of his time fighting for civil rights, he has largely been written out of history because of the audacity of his religious claims, Father’s revolutionary ideas on race and identity still resonate today.

Film still
Black Girl in Suburbia | dir. Melissa Lowery | 2016

Black Girl in Suburbia takes a look at the suburbs of America from the perspective of women of color. Through conversations with her own daughters, with teachers and scholars who are experts in the personal impacts of growing up a person of color in a predominately white place, this film explores the conflicts that many Black girls in homogeneous hometowns have in relating to both white and Black communities.

New Docuseek releases include Stateless, a film that reveals the dark and deadly history of institutionalized oppression of Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, and Oliver Tambo, about the man responsible for the release of Nelson Mandela and who helped to end the apartheid in South Africa.

If you would like to explore more streaming video brought to you by Duke Libraries, browse titles in Kanopy, Swank Digital Campus, Films on Demand World Cinema and Feature Films for Education as well as the Academic Video Online collections.

 

 

 

 

“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)

The Oriental – Durham’s first Chinese Restaurant

 

Oriental Matchbook
Ebay

In 1949, after living and working in the US for 30 years and making his home in Durham for over 10 years, Der Wo, the owner and operator of Durham’s first, very popular, Chinese restaurant was joyfully reunited with his family for the first time in 18 years.

Durham Morning Herald, 25 February 1949

Der Wo was originally from the Chinese province of Guangdong (called Canton by Westerners of the time) near Hong Kong. He immigrated to the US to work in Chinese restaurants in Washington DC. Before he came to Durham, he had 16 years of experience in the Chinese/American restaurant business. Der Wo brought his skills and joined a venture in Durham backed by the very successful sister restaurant, also the Oriental, based in  Charlotte NC.  Although the term “Oriental” is no longer used to identify people of Asian ancestry, in the period of the founding of this cafe, the term was widely used. The term “Chinese /American” more accurately reflects the people born in China who lived and worked in the United States.

Chinese /American cuisine had been a national fad in urban areas across the United States since the early 1900s. By the mid-1930s, Chop Suey, the common name for a Chinese/American adaptation of stir fry, was only available in Durham as a canned good from La Choy, founded in the US midwest in 1922, or from the Pines Tea Room near Chapel Hill, run by a Mrs. Vickers.

Collection of John DeFerrari, http://www.streetsofwashington.com/2021/11/chinese-restaurants-in-dc-at-mid-century.html

The Immigration Act of 1790 and the Chinese Exclusion Acts, in force from the 1880s until 1942, meant that Der Wo could not become a US citizen. In 1915 a court action opened the door for more Chinese restaurant workers to enter the US, but this immigration was tightly controlled. In the 1930 US Census, Durham had only 3 people identified as Chinese-born.

Nonetheless, by 1938 downtown Durham had the Oriental Restaurant, a thriving Chinese/American eatery. The Oriental, like other Chinese-owned businesses, followed Exclusion era practices by employing Chinese “bachelor” cooks and staff, several of whom lived on the premises. In the 1940 Census, Der Wo and five of his employees were listed as living above the restaurant on Parrish St.

A system of mutual support developed among Chinese/Americans and among business owners and restauranteurs called Huiguan. This relatively informal association system was similar to clans or a guild system for the management of both the supply of Chinese food and specialty products, and the flow of restaurant workers into the United States. The small staff of Chinese men gathered in Durham in the mid-1930s to open the new Chinese restaurant.

Durham Sun, 18 August 1938

The Oriental was essentially a 90-seat `white tablecloth restaurant well-sited in downtown Durham about equidistant from the two largest hotels in the downtown area and two blocks from the busy passenger train station. The Oriental was whites only. The operators chose Parrish St, also known as the “Black Wall Street,” because of proximity to patrons via the railroad and hotels, but the business did not make any accommodation for black patrons. The presence of Black Wall Street in a white downtown was an anomaly as was a segregated Chinese Restaurant just steps from the two largest black-owned enterprises in the city.

By the early 1940s, a Chinese restaurant for black patrons, the Asia Cafe, was established about a mile from the Oriental. Located in Hayti, Durham’s black business district,  the restaurant was near the important intersection of Fayetteville St and Pettigrew St.  The Asia Cafe was operated by Hugh Wong. The site was taken under urban renewal as part of  Durham Freeway.

The Oriental used many of the marketing tools available in the 1930s. Der Wo advertised his restaurant in the Duke Chronicle, UNC’s Daily Tar Heel, and the Durham newspapers as well as the City Directories and the telephone books. Der Wo arranged for civic groups to hold meetings and banquets in his facility. In addition to supporting the American war effort during World War Two via war bond drives and other donations, Der Wo’s earlier activism included support for the nationalist Chinese cause including holding a banquet at the Oriental in honor of a barnstorming Chinese aviatrix raising funds for the support of the nationalists against the Japanese.

Open Durham

A grand opening for the Oriental was held on Saturday June18th 1938 and the restaurant was a hit from the start. Der Wo with the backing of the owner of the Oriental in Charlotte had rented a white brick two-story restaurant building with granite details likely built in the late teens or early twenties. Since he came from restaurants in more architecturally sophisticated urban Washington DC, the Oriental exterior was modernized in the Moderne style with full plate glass doors and windows surrounded by opaque panels of pigmented structural glass, probably Vitrolite, in ivory and black . The name “The Oriental Restaurant” was in a green bamboo style script in the glass panel above the front facade and there was a neon sign. The colors of the renovated interior were cream and brown and the main dining room seated 60 and included both high booths and tables. There was an adjoining dining room seating 30 for meetings. The restaurant was fully air-conditioned at a time that many offices and hotel rooms were not.

Open Durham

The preferred Chinese/ American dish in the 1930s remained Chop Suey, but in a recent survey on social media of long-term Durham residents now in their 60’s and older, the Oriental’s Chicken Chow Mein is the most frequently remembered dish. The owner of a local plumbing company was so fond of the Oriental that his family ate there once a week throughout the 1950s and 1960s and many survey respondents remembered special Sunday lunches at the Oriental. The judgment concerning the popularity of the Oriental’s Chow Mein is verified in a 1950s newspaper article about the long-time cook at the Oriental, Frank Dea Toy.

George Lougee, a local newspaper reporter for the Durham Herald Sun, wrote affectionately not only about Der Wo, but also about the kitchen workers like Frank Dea Toy over several decades. Lougee’s primary beat was the Courts, and the Oriental was just around the corner from the Courthouse and jail.

From the Durham Herald Co. Newspaper Photograph Collection #P0105, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Among the most interesting aspects of the Oriental story is Der Wo and his family’s path from China to Durham which was detailed in Lougee’s 1949 feature newspaper story about the reunion of Der Wo and his family after the long separation because of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the disruption of World War II.

In 1919, Der Wo immigrated from China via San Francisco to Washington DC to make his way in the restaurant business. No doubt he improved his English and he learned about the operations of restaurants.

In 1931 Der Wo was successful enough to make the two-month journey to return to China to marry. Der Wo’s parents had arranged his marriage to Wu Mei On, an eligible young woman. Before Der Wo returned to the US about a year later, Wu Mei On had had a daughter and was pregnant. Wu Mei On and her children lived with Der Wo’s parents. Der Wo returned to the restaurant business in Washington DC in 1932 before coming to Durham in late 1937.

In 1941, the Japanese bombed and invaded the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The danger and brutality of the attack prompted the extended Der Wo family to flee into the interior of China. After a few months, they returned to Hong Kong to find their home intact and they resumed their lives there.

Der Wo, Immigration records, ancestry.com

In some of the records of the census and other Federal agencies from the 1930s and 1940s, Der Wo is listed as white. In 1949 Der Wo began Naturalization proceedings and was finally reunited with his wife and met, for the first time, his 18-year old son. Part of the delay in the reunion was because of immigration restrictions. Both his wife and son had to come to the United States on temporary visas. The family lived together for a number of years and two other sons were born.

In 1953 Der Wo, suffering from heart disease, died of a sudden heart attack, and his wife and older son were forced to take over the operation of the restaurant.

In 1954 Federal Immigration and Naturalization authorities contacted the family about possible deportation because of the lapsed visa status of both Der Wo’s wife and older son.  Lougee wrote about the family’s immigration situation and gathered local support. With the assistance of Congressman Carl Durham, a  private bill was introduced and approved by Congress and signed by President Eisenhower to allow the family to stay together in Durham.

With the help of her son and the restaurant staff,  Mrs Der Wo operated the restaurant successfully throughout the 1950s despite her limited English language skills.

In a mid-1950s feature story, Frank  Dea Toy, cook at the Oriental, was featured. Dea Toy claimed, to newspaperman Lougee’s astonishment, that after living in Durham for over twenty years he had never been to any sort of ball game nor had he attend more than one movie a year. Radio and television were, he said, too “noisy.” The isolation of the Chinese workers was further illustrated by Lougee’s reporting on a 1944 fatal hit and run accident that killed an Oriental employee who was walking in Durham with two Chinese colleagues. The death was never solved.

Frank Dea Toy, From the Durham Herald Co. Newspaper Photograph Collection #P0105, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

By the early1960’s a shift in the primary shopping areas from downtown Durham to the suburbs north and south of Durham’s city center was well underway and the lunch and dinner trade at the Oriental were likely a fraction of what they had been. Urban renewal was in the planning stages and the face of Durham was changing.

Civil rights protest was also rising, and in May 1963 the Oriental was a site at which Black students, primarily from North Carolina Central University (then College), staged a late afternoon peaceful sit-in. Sit-in leaders asked to be served on behalf of their 60 followers and were refused by management. Some students left, but 48 waited for the police to charge them with unlawful trespass. All were charged and released without bond.

By 1964 the formal process of downtown Durham redevelopment using Federal funds was underway. The passenger train station in downtown Durham was closed and one of the two major downtown hotels closed as well. No doubt redevelopment was a part of the decline of the Oriental.  Mrs. Der closed the Oriental in 1966. The building itself was not demolished until the early 1970s. The ultimate causes of the closure of the restaurant may have been the aging of the staff and owner, but other factors may have included the aging infrastructure and the changes in the surrounding business climate. In the face of public accommodation laws, urban renewal programs, the Durham Freeway, and the end of official segregation, the Oriental did not survive.

Many thanks to my colleagues, Yunyi Wang and Luo Zhou, and to Prof. Calvin Cheung-Miaw for their editorial assistance.

Select Bibliography/  Further Reading:

 

Bow, Leslie. Partly Colored : Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South. New York: New York : New York University Press, 2010.

Carter, Susan B. “Celestial Suppers: The Political Economy of America’s Chop Suey Craze, 1900-1930.” Asia-Pacific Economic and Business History Conference, 2009. Unpublished but available online, https://apebhconference.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/carter1.pdf

Chen, Yong. “The Rise of Chinese Food in the United States.” Oxford University Press, 2017.

Chen, Yong. “Chop Suey, USA : The Story of Chinese Food in America.” New York: New York : Columbia University Press, 2014.

Coe, Andrew. Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States. New York: New York : Oxford University Press, 2009.

Desai, Jigna
, and Joshi, Khyati Y. , eds.  Asian Americans in Dixie : Race and Migration in the South. Urbana: Urbana : University of Illinois Press,  2013.

Edwards, Christopher. “Homeland Comfort in an Alien Land: The Role of the Huiguan in Exclusion Era Los Angeles.” The Toro Historical Review 6.1, 2019.

Hinnershitz, Stephanie. A Different Shade of Justice : Asian American Civil Rights in the South. Chapel Hill: Chapel Hill : The University of Carolina Press, 2017.

Holaday, J. Chris, and Patrick Cullom. Classic Restaurants of Durham. Charleston, SC: Charleston, SC : American Palate, a Division of The History Press, 2020.

Jung, John. Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants. Cypress, Calif.: Yin and Yang Press, 2010.

McGrath, Raymond and Frost, A.C. Glass in Architecture and Decoration. London: The Architectural Press, 1937.

Mendelson, Anne. Chow Chop Suey : Food and the Chinese American Journey. New York: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016.

Mohl, Raymond A., 
Van Sant, John E.  and 
Chizuru Saeki, eds.     Far East, Down South : Asians in the American South.  Tuscaloosa: Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press, 2016.

 

 

 

 

Treat Your Pretty Little Self to a Mystery Date with a Book


Are you stuck in a reading rut? Has that stack of books you’ve been meaning to read suddenly lost all appeal?

This Valentine’s Day, check out our Mystery Date with a Book display next to the Perkins Library Service Desk, now through February 16.

Our librarians have hand-picked some of their all-time favorite literary crushes. Trust us. Librarians are the professional matchmakers of the book world. They’ve picked out some titles guaranteed to improve your circulation, if you know what we mean.

Each book comes wrapped in paper with a come-hither teaser to pique your interest. Will you get fiction or nonfiction? Short stories or travelogue? Memoir or thriller? You won’t know until you “get between the covers,” nudge, nudge. Aw, yeah.

So go ahead, take home a one-night stand for your nightstand. Who knows? You might just fall in love with a new favorite writer!

Lilly Collection Spotlight: Native Voices – Active Voices

Native Voices – Active Voices

Lilly Library’s exhibit Native Americans in North Carolina: the Path from the Past to the Present focuses on Library resources about Native American history in our state. If our resources pique your interest, a deeper look into Lilly’s collections unearths the creative breadth of indigenous peoples throughout North America. Books on Native American art, novels by Native Americans, memoirs of native experiences, as well as films and documentaries are available on display in the Lilly lobby.  A few of the more than fifty  Native Voices Active Voices titles in the spotlight are featured below:

Books

Moonshot: the Indigenous Comics Collection

Moonshot: the Indigenous comics collection
This collection of comic book stories showcase the rich heritage and identity of indigenous storytelling. From traditional stories to exciting new visions of the future, this series presents some of the finest comic book and graphic novel work on the continent.

Adjusting the Lens
Powerful case studies address the ways that the historical photographic record of Indigenous peoples was shaped by colonial practices, and explore how this legacy is being confronted by Indigenous art activism and contemporary renegotiations of the past. Contributors to this collection analyze the photographic practices and heritage of communities from North America, Europe, and Australia

The Longest Trail

The Longest Trail: Writings on American Indian History, Culture, and Politics
Author Alvin Josephy Jr.’s groundbreaking, popular books and essays advocated for a fair historical assessment of Native Americans, and set the course for modern Native American studies.
This collection, which includes magazine articles, speeches, a white paper, and introductions and chapters of books, gives a generous and reasoned view of five hundred years of Indian history in North America from first settlements in the East to the long trek of the Nez Perce Indians in the Northwest.

Film

Winter in the Blood

Winter in the Blood
“Virgil First Raise wakes in a ditch on the hardscrabble plains of Montana. He stumbles home to his ranch on the reservation only to learn that his wife, Agnes, has left him. Worse, she’s stolen his beloved rifle. Virgil sets out to find her, beginning an odyssey of inebriated intrigues with a mysterious “Airplane Man,” a beautiful barmaid, and two dangerous men in suits. This quixotic, modern-day vision quest moves Virgil ever closer to oblivion–until he discovers a long-hidden truth about his identity. But is it too late?”

Dance Me Outside
When the Kidabanessee Reservation in northern Ontario is shocked by a brutal murder of one of the residents, four teenagers find their friendships put to the ultimate test. The struggle to become men and women becomes entangled with a fight for justice as they find their friendships and romances maturing into something unexpected.

Mankiller

Mankiller : Activist, Feminist, Cherokee Chief
Wilma Mankiller is someone who humbly defied the odds to fight injustice and give a voice to the voiceless. She overcame rampant sexism and personal challenges to emerge as the Cherokee Nation’s first female Principal Chief in 1985. This documentary examines the legacy of the formidable Wilma Mankiller.

The Lilly Library Collection Spotlight Native Voices shines through February. Interested in the full list of titles? Check them out in Lilly’s Book and Films in Spotlight

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!

What to Read this Month: January 2022

Welcome back! As we’re beginning to settle into a new semester, we at the library wanted to recommend yet another set of titles from our Overdrive and New & Noteworthy collections. These collections are excellent places to look if you’re trying to find a new read, and these five books represent only a tiny fraction of all that you’ll find there. So by all means, if any of the below highlights don’t grab your attention, click either of the above links. You’ll be sure to find something!


Intimacies: A Novel: Kitamura, Katie: 9780399576164: Amazon.com: BooksIntimacies by Katie Kitamura. This novel, Kitamura’s fourth, tells the story of an unnamed woman who travels from the US to The Hague shortly after the death of her father. There, she works as an interpreter for the International Criminal Court, developing a strange yet compelling dynamic with an accused war criminal in her professional life and a series of confusing relationships with some of the city’s inhabitants in her personal life. She forms an unsatisfying romantic attachment with Adriaan, a man midway through a divorce, as well as a complicated friendship with art historian Eline and her brother, Anton. The titular intimacies refer to these inscrutable relationships, as well as the intimacy inherent in the protagonist’s work as an interpreter. Ultimately, though often puzzling and mysterious, the novel deftly tackles a bevy of complex themes, ranging from interpersonal relationships to neocolonialism. You can read reviews here and here.


The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been  Unequal--and How to Set Them Right: Harris, Adam: 9780062976482:  Amazon.com: BooksThe State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal–and How to Set Them Right by Adam Harris. In this book, Atlantic staff writer Harris takes an incisive look at the resource-related disparities that often exist between historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and predominantly white institutions, focusing particularly on the policy decisions–historical and current–that underpin them. Harris reveals that so many HBCUs were essentially set up to fail from their inception, with federal and state governments working to maintain segregation in American higher education while also deliberately underfunding predominantly Black institutions. These issues of chronic underfunding persist to this day, leaving many HBCUs egregiously lacking in resources. In chronicling this history, Harris also provides compelling portraits of the many Black scholars across generations who have worked to rectify these imbalances, and also weighs the benefits of many potential solutions to this systemic problem. You can read a review here and listen to an interview with Harris here.


Velvet Was the Night: Moreno-Garcia, Silvia: 9780593356821: Amazon.com:  BooksVelvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This noir adventure, set in the midst of the Mexican Dirty War, centers on Maite, a young Mexico City secretary who unexpectedly stumbles into intrigue after her neighbor Leonora goes missing. Though an enthusiast of wild and romantic stories, Maite herself is not a natural investigator, and she only embarks on the case because she had been cat-sitting for Leonora and wants to get paid for her efforts. The reader learns very early on that Maite is not the only one looking for Leonora; so is Elvis, a 21-year-old member of a paramilitary group targeting leftist university students and journalists throughout the city. Moreno-Garcia tells the story from both of their perspectives, and things ultimately come to a head when Maite and Elvis finally cross paths. You can read reviews here and here.


Doomed Romance: Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in  Nineteenth-Century America: Heyrman, Christine Leigh: 9780525655572:  Amazon.com: BooksDoomed Romance: Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century America by Christine Leigh Heyrman. In this book, Heyrman documents a unique episode in the history of American evangelicalism, telling the story of Martha Parker. A young woman in 1820s New England, Parker ignited a series of tensions between prominent members of the local evangelical community, despite harboring an earnest desire to serve as a Christian missionary abroad. Fatefully Parker, in pursuit of her dream, broke her engagement to her influential second cousin, Thomas Tenney, to accept the proposal of missionary Elnathan Gridley. Heyrman chronicles Tenney’s subsequent efforts to ruin Parker’s name, including enlisting the help of another one of her former suitors and inciting an investigation into her character by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Ultimately, Tenney’s handiwork leads to the dissolution of Parker’s new engagement, and she eventually agrees to set aside her missionary ambitions and marry him. In relaying this sordid tale, Heyrman makes several cogent connections to the history of gender relations in evangelicalism, connecting this seemingly isolated event to much larger, more systemic problems within the movement. You can read reviews here and here.


Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith: 9780812993325 |  PenguinRandomHouse.com: BooksBuild Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith. In this debut novel, Kupersmith fashions a mysterious and supernatural tale anchored in the experiences and eventual disappearance of Winnie, a young American woman who travels to Saigon in 2010 in order to teach English and better understand her Vietnamese roots. Winnie’s time in Saigon is exceedingly difficult for her; her general unhappiness is exacerbated by her inability to form meaningful connections with those around her, and her work suffers. Eventually, she forms a relationship, predicated more on mutual survival than romance, with Long, who works at the same school as she does. It is Long who initially discovers that Winnie is missing, and the subsequent events in the novel adopt a grotesque and often fantastical path, one that connects Winnie’s story to the stories of seeming strangers in Saigon, spanning the days and years leading up to and following her disappearance. You can read reviews here and here.

Native Americans in North Carolina: the Path from the Past to the Present

Native Americans in North Carolina:
the Path from the Past to the Present

The research and suggested resources presented in the article Imagining Duke’s Campus in 1000 AD inspire the Lilly Library exhibit: Native Americans in North Carolina: the Path from the Past to the Present. Tangible artifacts and reference material highlighting the history of Native Americans in North Carolina  carry us together on a journey over time to the campus experience of today. The exhibit presents historical evidence predating European contact, records and accounts of the university’s Native American student experience, and a look at the extent of Native American tribal reach in present day North Carolina.

North Carolina: The Arrival of Europeans

Book cover
A New Voyage to Carolina, John Lawson (1709)

When the first Europeans arrived in what they called Carolina, the 16th century surveyor John White depicted in detail the established villages and individuals living on the land near Roanoke. A century later John Lawson catalogued the peoples and bounty of the land he traveled. His account A New Voyage to Carolina (produced in 1709) revealed the diversity of nature especially flora and of the nations of Native Americans. An original edition of Lawson’s book is found in the Rubenstein Library collection but does not circulate.
For Duke community members with NetIDs who wish  to examine Lawson’s work, reprints and online versions are readily available.

Duke: The Arrival of Joseph S. Maytubby

Maytubby
Joseph S. Maytubby (Image from Duke University Archives)

The relationship between Duke and its Native American constituents goes back further in history than one might expect. In 1892, Trinity College (the predecessor to Duke University) saw the arrival of Joseph S. Maytubby on its campus in Durham. Maytubby, a member of the Chickasaw tribe became the first Native American to receive a degree from Trinity College. An excellent student, he served as president of the Hesperian Literary Society, was involved with the Trinity Archive literary magazine, played football, and, as a capstone to his stellar academic career, his oratory skills won the Wiley Gray Medal competition for the 1896 commencement.

Duke Magazine Retro: Native Americans at Trinity in the Nineteenth Century provides more insight into university history and Mr. Maytubby’s experience.

Today: the Path Continues

In present day, the Duke Native American Student Alliance serves as a resource and advocates on behalf of Native American Students on campus. Read its mission statement to learn more. One element of NASA’s stated mission is to advance the awareness of Native American culture throughout campus and the state.

Map of NC Tribal Communities – source: North Carolina Dept. of Administration

It is not generally known that North Carolina has the largest Native American population east of the Mississippi River. North Carolina is home to eight tribes recognized tribes by the state, including the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation – the only federally recognized Native American community in North Carolina.   This exhibit offers a glimpse into the complicated and often uncomfortable history of the Native American tale.

The Lilly Library exhibit Native Americans in North Carolina: the Path from the Past to the Present is on display until March 1, 2022.
Curated by Librarians Greta Boers and Carson Holloway. Artifacts on display are from the collections of Carson Holloway and Greta Boers.

5 Titles: Pioneering Women in STEM

The 5 Titles series highlights books, music, and films in the library’s collection featuring topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and/or highlighting the work of authors from diverse backgrounds. Each post is intended to provide a brief sampling of titles rather than a comprehensive overview of the topic. This month, the five titles have been selected by RIS intern Mikayla Brooks.

The science, technology, education, mathematics (STEM) field is full of breakthroughs and notorious accomplishments; big names like Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Stephen Hawking immediately come to mind. The gentlemen have contributed notable achievements in the field and have had a lasting impact on history. But scientific history is about the women who also made incredible advances in STEM. Some of the names you might know and some you might not. But nevertheless, their contributions and advancements aided in understanding our world and making it a better place to live.

The 5 Titles are selected from Duke University Libraries; they reflect the stories of these women, their personal lives, and their struggles. These women had society’s expectations thrust upon them, in addition to overcoming personal, professional, and mental strife to do the work they did. The selected titles recognize five women, Rosalind Franklin, Hedy Lamarr, Kathrine Johnson, Jane Goodall, and Lise Meitner for their pioneering research and lasting contributions.


Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA: Maddox, Brenda: 9780060184070: Amazon.com: BooksRosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox (2002). Rosalind Franklin, called “our dark lady” by her colleagues, was all but airbrushed out of the picture. During her 27 months’ work at King’s College London, she was able to capture photographs of crystallized DNA. These photographs, shared with Watson and Crick without her permission, helped piece together the puzzle of the double-helix. Maddox’s book takes a critical look at the triumphs and tribulations in Rosalind Franklin’s life. “She paints a portrait of a complex, contradictory, fiercely passionate, and passionately fierce woman whose proper place in scientific history is still debated.”


Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World: Rhodes, Richard: 9780307742957: Amazon.com: BooksHedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World by Richard Rhodes (2011). Hedy Lamarr was born in 1913 to a Jewish family in Vienna as Hedwig Kiesler. Her natural beauty became apparent as a teenager and she soon started to appeared in German films. The first of her six husbands, a wealthy arms merchant, “was a man who entertained German and Austrian weapons developers. No one in their social circle was able to appreciate that Lamarr could keep up and contribute in “their conversations about submarine torpedoes and remote-control devices.” When her husband tried to make her give up acting, she divorced him. Kiesler moved to Hollywood, became Hedy Lamarr, and was soon a beautiful starlet in films. “But, Hedy Lamarr was always much more than just a Hollywood starlet.” The Austrian-American actress was also a tech-head, taking inspiration from the self-playing ‘player piano’ to create various inventions, like the frequency-hopping technology that became a precursor to the secure wi-fi, GPS and Bluetooth now used by billions of people around the world. Richard Rhodes’s biography, Hedy’s Folly, gives this side of her story its due, as previous works published have barely any (in some cases almost no) accounts of her work as an inventor.


My Remarkable Journey: A Memoir: Johnson, Katherine, Hylick, Joylette, Moore, Katherine: 9780062897664: Amazon.com: BooksMy Remarkable Journey: A Memoir by Katherine Johnson with Joylette Hylick, Katherine Moore, and Lisa Frazier Page (2021). Katherine Johnson was turned into an international star by the book (and then movie) Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly. Her story — rising from anonymity and discrimination to become a research mathematician whose precise calculations helped many vital projects, including John Glenn’s 1962 orbit of Earth — has inspired many. My Remarkable Journey was written with her daughters Joylette Hylick and Katherine Moore and completed after Johnson’s death. The memoir offers a more personal perspective with Johnson discussing some of the disparities between her life and what we saw on screen. “This book focuses on Johnson’s personal life, including many experiences that reveal insight into the United States’ tumultuous race relations in the 20th century. My Remarkable Journey showcases examples of relentless determination in the face of adversity that linger with the reader, showing what truly makes Johnson’s journey remarkable.”


Amazon.com: Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man eBook : Peterson, Dale: Kindle StoreJane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man by Dale Peterson (2006). “The iconic image is imprinted in our minds – the willowy young British woman with the blonde ponytail. She’s standing in the forest with a wild chimpanzee sitting by her side, a hairy hand tentatively reaching out to touch her khaki shorts.” Jane Goodall is a figure we all know and love; her notoriety and image has been splashed across magazines and articles alike. The draw of Goodall’s status does not lie in her being a movie star, politician, or influencer, but by working hard at issues she believes in. “In Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man, Dale Peterson provides an exhaustive chronology of her life to date.” This biography illustrates the complicated and fascinating woman in equal measures with the pioneering researcher. Dale Peterson created a work that provides a remarkable account of what a person can accomplish through courage and self-sacrifice — a reminder of what can be accomplished with commitment.


Amazon.com: Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (Volume 11): 9780520208605: Sime, Ruth Lewin: BooksLise Meitner: A Life in Physics by Ruth Lewin Sime (1996). Lise Meitner and other scientific trailblazers were able to unlock the science of existence at the very make-up of the physical level; their understanding of the atom and achievements made remain astonishing. All scientific pioneers must deal with obstacles, but for Lise Meitner, there were added personal factors. “As a woman in the early twentieth century, she struggled to be taken seriously as a scientist. In her later years, when categorized as a “non-Aryan,” she would become keenly aware that as humanity drew nearer to an understanding of the building blocks of our world, we were ever more imperiled by our capacity for destruction.” Ruth Sime presents an account of Lise Meitner’s life and scientific career from her formative years to the implications of war and the Third Reich on her personal and professional life. With expertise and finesse, Sime explains the value of Meitner’s research, and writes about the publicized and private aspects of Lise Meitner’s life and the ongoing work she did.


5 Titles is directed by the Research & Instructional Services (RIS) Department at Duke University Libraries.

“The Water Defenders” Wins 2021 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America

The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed (Beacon Press, 2021), by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, is the winner of the 2021 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.

This is the thirteenth year of this prestigious award. The award is supported by the Duke Human Rights Center@the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Human Rights Archive at the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscripts Library.

The Water Defenders tells the story of courageous El Salvadorans who fought together to combat the exploitation of their country’s natural resources. As the writers note, while this story is about El Salvador, as importantly, it is “also about how global corporations—be they Big Gold or Big Pharma or Big Tobacco or Big Oil or Big Banks—move into poorer communities in countries all over the world.”

Broad and Cavanagh will accept the award and talk about their work at a virtual event on Tuesday, February 22, at 5:00 pm EST.

Robin Kirk, chair of the selection committee and co-director of the Duke Human Rights Center, noted that the book is both timely and representative of long-standing conflict around natural resources in Latin America. “Since Europeans first began exploiting the region’s wealth, native populations have fought back,” Kirk said. “But rarely have we been so well and intricately guided on how these fights take shape in villages and towns that rarely make the news. It is there, to paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, that human rights takes shape and gains real power to make positive change.”

The judges were unanimous in their praise. Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist at Duke’s Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, noted:

Broad and Cavanagh address how international global capital, particularly Big Mining, connects climate change and human rights in its pursuit of profit extraction at the cost of local communities. The authors tell this story by focusing in on a singular set of communities in El Salvador and the individual lives impacted by these vast processes. I liked how the authors historically situated the current fight for clean land and water as an extension of the long human rights struggles in Central America, and how those struggles created a very capable indigenous human rights movement. I was particularly drawn to the autochthonous nature of the activism that confronted the insurgent mining interests. The book underscores the agency of these activists, their intelligence and sophisticated understanding of the issues confronting their communities, as well as their agile deployment of human rights strategies to defend their communities.

Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, a senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch and a former Méndez winner, noted that “This is an inspiring story about how people with limited resources were able to organize and protect their community. It’s well told, and highly relevant to current events, including protest movements over mining and environmental harm throughout the region.”

For Prof. Kirsten Weld, also a former Méndez winner and professor of history at Harvard University, the story was important and “told with brio, very readable and inspiring. It engages the politics of extractivism in a way that resonates beyond the Salvadoran case.”

When notified of the award, Broad and Cavanagh stated, “We are deeply honored by this Award which we accept in the names of the hundreds of environmental defenders who are murdered each year around the world for fighting for the most basic of human rights. So too are we honored by the fact that the Award is named for the venerable human right champion, Juan Méndez. May the victories of the Salvadoran water defenders inspire us all to rethink the possible.”

First awarded in 2008, the Méndez Human Rights Book Award honors the best current non-fiction book published in English on human rights, democracy, and social justice in contemporary Latin America. The books are evaluated by a panel of expert judges drawn from academia, journalism, human rights, and public policy circles.

See the Méndez Book Award website for more information and previous award winners.

Exhibit Opening: “Land of Lapis lazuli and Gold:  Afghanistan in the Collections at Duke University Library”

The opening reception for “Land of Lapis lazuli and Gold:  Afghanistan in the Collections at Duke University Library” is scheduled to take place in front of the International & Area Studies exhibit case, on the second floor of Bostock Library, on Duke’s West Campus, on Thursday, 3 February 2022, at 2-4pm.

This public exhibit is an attempt to offer a different perspective on Afghanistan’s history through the holdings from Duke University Libraries. While the sobriquet the “graveyard of empires” has recently gained primacy in discussions about Afghanistan, the reality is vastly different.  Over its long history, this mountainous south-central Asian country has actually been the cradle of a number of great empires, such as the Ghaznavid (Afghanistan), Timurid (Iran), and Mughal (India).

The country literally sits atop one of the world’s largest reserves of various metals and minerals, including gold and lapis lazuli.  Many of Afghanistan’s most important cities were once significant spaces for commerce as well as intellectual exchange, particularly along the fabled Silk Roads.

Culturally, Afghanistan has been the home for some notable persons such as Rumi, the 13th-century Persian Sufi mystic, who is still one of the most widely read poets in the world.  Moreover, while Afghanistan has become a predominantly Muslim country, there has always been a plurality of religious thought, from Buddhism to Christianity to Judaism as well as Zoroastrianism.

“Land of Lapis lazuli and Gold:  Afghanistan in the Collections at Duke University Library” is curated by the interim librarians for South and Southeast Asia from the library’s International & Area Studies Department and dedicated to the South Asian studies specialists who have helped to build Duke’s collection on Afghanistan.

This public exhibit will run from December 1, 2021 – December 31, 2022.

 

Imagining Duke’s Campus in 1000 AD

John “Blackfeather” Jeffries blesses 25-acres of new land acquired by the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. Photograph used with permission by Ted Richardson, TEDRICHARDSONMEDIA.COM

This post is part of a series intended to introduce first-year students to the diverse history of Duke and Durham. These posts are brief introductions, but include more detailed resources for further reading and exploration.

Many formal gatherings in the Americas begin with acknowledgement and prayer for the indigenous people of the past, and to honor those among us now.   Other examples of respect are the Duke Forest Land Acknowledgement Statement  and the Eno River Association’s Land Acknowledgement which bow  to the  Yésah, “the people”,  the collection of tribes who have lived on the North Carolina and Virginia Piedmonts.   As you find your way to class, you may wonder who was walking over Duke’s campus 1200 years ago.  Where are their descendants?

North Carolina has the highest number of Native Americans east of the Mississippi. A map reconstructing ancient languages of the Southeast identifies three clusters:  Iroquois, Siouan, and Muskhogean.  Two range across the state. To the west are the Iroquois linguistic family, the present-day Eastern Band of Cherokee.    In the Piedmont, southern, and the eastern parts of the State are the remaining tribes of the Siouan (Tutelo) linguistic family: Coharie, Haliwa-Saponi, Sappony, Waccamaw, Meherrin, Lumbee, and Occaneechi.

How far back can we go in order to imagine the people who lived here? Much of what we know draws on archaeological evidence from the Haw River Drainage area, Yadkin River, and Roanoke Rapids. The Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina includes a list of contextual excavations going back to 10,000 BC in the Piedmont—where you are now–  with descriptions of culture and life for every age, starting with the Clovis culture of the Pleistocene.  The Ancient North Carolinians website includes a pre-Colonial section for the Central Piedmont.

More recent accounts, summarized in NCPedia, describe the Occaneechi and Sappony nations as documented by Europeans starting in the 17th century.  There are also accounts of the more ancient Shakori and Eno tribes of the Piedmont, and the Tuscarora  towards the east.  Two centuries later, Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 began the forced removal of the Cherokee from Georgia in the Trail of Tears.  A band of 300-400 escaped to the mountains in western North Carolina, and eventually bought what is now the Qualla reservation.  It  is from there that Duke’s first Native American students arrived in 1881 to attend Trinity College and the Cherokee Industrial School.

Contemporary native communities closest to Duke include the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, in Orange and Alamance Counties to the west of Durham, and the Sappony to the north in Person County.   The website for UNC’s Native American Center provides contact information for each nation, pointing to newspapers, councils and leaders,  as well as a map of the 8 tribal nations recognized by the State of North Carolina.  There are four urban Indian organizations, including the Triangle Native American Association.  Closer to home is the Duke University Native American Student Alliance chartered in 1992.

This isn’t enough to understand what’s beneath your feet, or to recognize who might be walking beside you. In the mixture of oral traditions, documentation, and historical interpretations, what are the real stories?  You can visit the excavations closest to Duke in Hillsborough, with evidence from the late Woodland Period from 1000 to 1600 AD.   They include a reconstruction of an Occaneechi Village from 300 years ago. Watch the calendar for Pow Wows in North Carolina,  find out what to expect and become familiar with the appropriate etiquette if it’s your first one.  There are many ways to honor and celebrate Native Americans at Duke.

Tribal Seals of the 8 North Carolina Tribes
Seals of the 8 North Carolina Tribes

To get a start on learning more:

 Adams, David W. 2020.  Education for extinction: American Indians and the boarding school experience, 1875-1928. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas

Chaffin, Nora Campbell. 1950. Trinity College, 1839-1892: the beginnings of Duke University. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Coe, Joffre Lanning. 2006. The formative cultures of the Carolina Piedmont. Raleigh, N.C.: Office of Archives and History, North Carolina Dept. of Cultural Resources.

Gillispie, Valerie. 2018. “Retro: Native Americans at Trinity in the Nineteenth Century,” Duke Magazine (February  7).

Ingram, Jill Elizabeth. 2008.  Man in the middle : the boarding school education of Will West Long. MA Thesis, Western Carolina University.

Lawson, John. 1709. A new voyage to Carolina London: [s.n.].   You can also request to see the first edition  in the David M. Rubenstein Library.

Ward, H. Trawick, and R. P. Stephen Davis. 1999. Time before history: the archaeology of North Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

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.

Congratulations to Our Research and Writing Award Winners!

We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2020-2021 library writing and research awards. Every year the Duke University Libraries run a series of essay contests recognizing the original research and writing of Duke students and encouraging the use of library resources. Congratulations to this year’s winners!

Lowell Aptman Prize

Recognizing excellence in undergraduate research using sources from the Libraries’ general collections.

  • Honors Thesis Winner: Caroline Petronis for “Blurring Contagion in the Information Age: How COVID-19 Troubles the Boundaries of the Biomedical and Socioinformatic,” nominated by Dr. Nima Bassiri.
  • First/ Second Year Winner: Eric Zhou for “History of Decriminalization of Capoeira in the 1930s,” nominated by Dr. Sarah Town.  

Chester P. Middlesworth Award

Recognizing excellence of analysis, research, and writing in the use of primary sources and rare materials held by the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

  • Undergraduate Winner: Mary Helen Wood for “‘The Very Reality of God:’ Jimmy Creech, The United Methodist Church, and the Fight for LGBTQ+ Acceptance in North Carolina,” nominated by Dr. Nancy MacLean.
  • Graduate: Jacqueline Allain for “Maria Griffin, et al.: Slavery’s Intimate World,” nominated by Dr. Trudi Abel.

Ole R. Holsti Prize

Recognizing excellence in undergraduate research using primary sources for political science or public policy.

  • Chitra Balakrishnan tor “Creating Response Networks to Address Victims of Incel Activity.”
  • Savannah Norman for “Assessing the Evaluation Methods of the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s Latin American Compact Projects.”

Rudolph William Rosati Creative Writing Award

Recognizing outstanding undergraduate creative writing.

What to Read this Month: December 2021

As the semester begins to wind down, we at the library hope you’ll have some time to rest and potentially cross some books off your list! If you’re looking for new books to add to your reading list, look no further. One of these five titles, from our New & Noteworthy and Overdrive collections, just might do the trick! If not, though, don’t worry; new titles are being added to these collections all the time, so you’re guaranteed to find something that catches your eye. Have a happy and restful winter break!


The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story: Hannah-Jones, Nikole, The New York Times Magazine, Roper, Caitlin, Silverman, Ilena, Silverstein, Jake: 9780593230572: Amazon.com: BooksThe 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones. In the two years since Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project first appeared in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, it has become a household name, praised by numerous historians for its compelling and thorough reframing of the United States’ origin story while also igniting a vitriolic backlash among rightwing figures both within the US and beyond. This first book edition of the project includes the content of its original New York Times appearance while also expanding upon its aims with the inclusion of more details, notes, and seven additional essays. Although the Project was always sweeping and comprehensive in its examination of several centuries of American history, this edition builds on that, resulting in the fullest and most vivid iteration of the Project to date. You can read reviews here and here.


Amazon.com: Alec: A Novel: 9780374102609: Canzio, William di: BooksAlec by William di Canzio. Di Canzio’s novel is both a reworking and a continuation of E. M. Forster’s Maurice, which was originally written in the 1910s but remained unpublished until 1971 owing largely to the happy ending Forster provides to his gay protagonist, Maurice Hall. In this original novel, Maurice, a member of the English upper-class, ultimately finds himself able to forge a successful romantic relationship with the gamekeeper Alec Scudder, despite the rampant homophobia and classism permeating English society during this period. Di Canzio expands on Forster’s story in two major ways: first, he retells the events of Maurice from Alec’s point-of-view, which differs significantly from Maurice’s, and secondly, he confronts Forster’s original ending with the realities of World War I: in this telling, Maurice and Alec’s relationship is threatened when the two, now soldiers, are stationed apart from each other across Europe. With the addition of Alec’s perspective and these new events, di Canzio’s novel is an excellent complement to Forster’s. You can read reviews here and here.


Amazon.com: How Beautiful We Were: A Novel: 9780593132425: Mbue, Imbolo: BooksHow Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue. Mbue’s second novel, which was recently named by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year, focuses on Kosawa, a village in an unnamed West African country that has long been beset with troubles inflicted by Pexton, a massive American oil corporation. The year is 1980, and although Pexton has repeatedly attempted to placate Kosawa’s residents with periodic, unproductive visits by their representatives, it remains obvious that their operations in the area have caused the egregious levels of pollution and illness to which they are subjected. Things come to a head when, over the course of the corporation’s latest visit, the residents decide to take the Pexton delegates hostage, spurred on by Konga, who is known as the local madman. Witnessing these events is a young girl, Thula, on whom the novel eventually focuses. As Thula grows, she becomes determined to seek justice for her community, and her journey eventually takes her to the US, where she gains undergraduate and graduate degrees. Upon her eventual return to Kosawa, she seeks to mobilize her peers into fighting Pexton and the dictatorship leading her country, facing numerous barriers along the way. You can read reviews here and here.


Amazon.com: Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath eBook : Clark, Heather L. : Kindle StoreRed Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark. Clark’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated biography of Sylvia Plath recounts her life and legacy with both details and a level of care that have hitherto not been seen in the many previous accounts of the poet’s life. A lot of the work she undertakes in relaying the events of her life involves dismantling the mythologization surrounding Plath and her death, offering a fresh reexamination of her poetry, her mental health, and the numerous figures that influenced her, ranging from her parents to mentors to friends. All of these details contribute to one of the most exhaustive portraits of Plath published to date, one that appears astonishingly unscathed by the longstanding, often prurient public fascination with her personal life and death, making it an exceedingly satisfying and sensitive read. You can read reviews here and here.


Chouette: Oshetsky, Claire: 9780063066670: Amazon.com: BooksChouette by Claire Oshetsky. Oshetsky’s debut novel tells the otherworldly story of Tiny, a cellist living with her reliable–if somewhat boring–husband, who inexplicably has an affair with a female owl and even more inexplicably becomes pregnant with a hybrid owl-human baby, the eponymous Chouette. Despite the child’s obvious strangeness, which isolates Tiny from others in her life and evokes dire warnings from nearly every doctor who sees her, her mother immediately loves her unconditionally. She is fully supportive of Chouette and seeks not to change her, even as she is forced to give up her career and even as Chouette’s undeniably owl-like behavior completely upends all normalcy in her life. She faces a tough battle in this determination as her husband seeks exactly the opposite, pursuing “cures” for Chouette at every turn. In tracing Tiny’s pregnancy, Chouette’s early childhood, and her later independence, Oshetsky, who is herself autistic and a mother, offers a unique meditation on the nature of neurodivergence, pregnancy, and motherhood, the fantastic elements of her story providing a unique lens through which to view and understand these massive topics. You can read reviews here and here.

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.

 

 

 

Your End-of-Semester Library Toolkit, Fall 2021

You’ve almost made it! Here are some resources to help you power through the end of the semester and beyond.

End-of-Semester Library Events

  • The Paper Station – Thursday, Dec. 2nd from 7-9 PM near the Perkins service desk. Get drop-in help from writing studio consultants and librarians. De-stress by creating your own zine or bookmark!
  • Study Break at Lilly – Monday, Dec. 6th from 3-4:30 PM on the Lilly front steps. Take a break from studying and drop by Lilly for snacks, popcorn, and cider!

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. 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

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.

Just Launched: Uyghur Human Rights web archive

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of its collaborative Uyghur Human Rights web archive, preserving web resources documenting the displacement and repression of Uyghurs, Uzbeks, Tatars, and Kyrgyz peoples in East Turkestan/Xinjiang, in the People’s Republic of China.

Like other web archives, the Uyghur Human Rights collection seeks to preserve vulnerable information that may disappear from the live web and capture the ways in which selected websites have evolved over time.

The creators of these websites include but are not limited to:

  • Charitable trusts and associations
  • Educational institutions
  • Financial institutions
  • Government agencies
  • Individuals
  • News agencies
  • Non-governmental organizations
  • Political parties.

While the focus of the archive is East Turkestan/Xinjiang, the selected resources come from many countries and regions, e.g., North Africa, Middle East, Central Asia, and East Asia, and are in a variety of languages.

A collection-level catalog record for the Uyghur Human Rights collection is available in WorldCat, an online union catalog created and maintained collectively by member institutions. By uploading the catalog record for this web archive to largest and most comprehensive database of bibliographic and ownership information currently available will make the Uyghur Human Rights collection both findable and accessible to researchers from around the world.

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Web Collecting Program, of which Duke University Libraries are a proud member, is a collaborative collection development effort to build curated, thematic collections of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research.  The Web Collecting Program is an initiative of the Confederation’s Collection Development Group, under the direction of the Web Collecting Advisory Committee.

If you have questions about the Uyghur Human Rights web archive, please reach out to ivyplusweb@library.columbia.edu

Take Our Survey. You Could Win a $50 Amazon Gift Card!

We’re interested in feedback about your experience using Perkins & Bostock, Rubenstein Library study spaces, von der Heyden study spaces, and Lilly Library this fall. Please complete this SHORT (2-min!) survey, and be entered in a drawing for a $50 Amazon gift card.

Your responses are confidential and will help us improve library services and spaces. Thanks in advance for your valuable input!

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.

 

 

“Leonard: Political Prisoner” Wins 2021 Human Rights Audio Documentary Award

Post by Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist, and Caitlin Margaret Kelly, Curator Archive of Documentary Arts

A podcast about a Native American activist convicted of a double-murder he might not have committed is the winner of the 2021 Human Rights Audio Documentary Award sponsored by Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Leonard: Political Prisoner tells the story of Leonard Peltier, who in 1977 was sentenced to consecutive life sentences for killing two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Through a mix of archival audio, interviews, and narration, the podcast revisits the facts and irregularities of the case against Peltier, who has spent the last 44 years in federal prison. Told in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the world-wide calls for racial justice it inspired, Peltier’s account of his mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. government and American legal system takes on a new light.

Leonard: Political Prisoner was produced and hosted by Rory Owen Delaney and Andrew Fuller of Man Bites Dog Films, with Kevin McKiernan serving as consulting producer.

Responding to news of the award, the producers said, “When we set out to create this documentary podcast series, the ultimate goal was to create the quintessential, permanent, spoken-word account of the case of Leonard Peltier within the historical context of the ongoing fight that Native Americans have and continue to endure in the United States today. The preservation and access that Duke University’s Rubenstein Library will provide is an essential resource in keeping this audio time-capsule for generations to come, so that the human rights issues of indigenous peoples are never forgotten.”

Leonard is more than a true crime podcast. It deploys the language of audio storytelling to indict centuries of broken treaties, stolen land, and a racist legal system that denies Native Americans their legal and human rights. The podcast foregrounds Native American voices and follows them down related storylines, like how Mount Rushmore is perceived as an insult and desecration of the Lakota Black Hills, or how the Custer Courthouse Riot of 1973 was led by activists of the American Indian Movement. Delaney and Fuller create a rich archival world of contemporary and archived interviews, news footage, and other sonic artifacts that goes beyond the question of Peltier’s guilt and asks listeners to consider the broader crimes against humanity committed against Native Americans.

The theme of this year’s inaugural Human Rights Audio Award was language and human rights. Leonard engages language as part of their storytelling strategy. For example, Delaney and Fuller discuss why they opted to use the term “Indian” versus Native American.  They also review the history of tribal names such as the Sioux, explaining how such names can be used to foster a sense of self-identity or as a tool of repression. Peltier, through the voice of actor Peter Coyote, explains how as a child at an Indian Boarding School he was forbidden from speaking his own language, “You could say that the first infraction in my criminal career was speaking my own language, there’s an act of violence for you.” Weaving together historical research, oral histories, and contemporary voices, Leonard utilizes the strengths of the podcast medium to present complex histories and their aftermath.

The Human Rights Audio Documentary Award is sponsored by the Human Rights Archive and the Archive of Documentary Arts at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The award seeks to support outstanding documentary artists exploring human rights and social justice and expand the audio holdings in the Archive for long-term preservation and access. Winners receive $2,500 and are invited to present their work at Duke University, where a team of archivists will preserve their work.

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Library has a strong commitment to human rights and the documentary arts through collecting and making available works by creators from around the world. Its collections document the impact that organizations and individuals have to motivate the thinking of others and influence private and government policies.

Celebrating Thirty Years of Duke’s East Asian Collections

This blog post was compiled from contributions by current (Luo Zhou, Miree Ku, Matthew Hayes) and past (Kristina Troost) East Asian Studies Librarians at Duke University.

From November 16, 2021 to April 14, 2022, Duke University Library will host an exhibit “Celebrating Thirty Years of East Asian Collections” in the Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery. The physical exhibit will be accompanied by a virtual counterpart, which will be published on the library’s Exhibits page. The exhibit opening will take place on Friday afternoon, November 19, with a special event organized by the Duke University Asian/Pacific Studies Institute and the Duke University Libraries.

“Celebrating Thirty Years of East Asian Collections” in the Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library

This exhibit is part of a commemoration of the founding of Duke’s East Asian Collection in 1990.  Collecting on East Asia in both Perkins and Rubenstein libraries predates the founding of the East Asian Collection, but it became a distinct focus in 1990 with the hiring of the first Japanese Studies Librarian, Kristina Troost, and then, in 1996, a Chinese Studies Librarian and finally in 2007, a Korean Studies Librarian.  The collection in Perkins has gradually grown from 20,000 to over 200,000 volumes in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s collection for East Asia also predates the founding of the East Asian Collection.  It has built on some areas of strength (e.g. history of medicine), but as the program has grown in recent years, it has added some new areas such as historical maps and Zen in America.  Materials from the seventeenth century to the present illuminate the cultures and societies in East Asia.  Some items, such as the personal papers of missionaries, businessmen, and diplomats, shed light on westerners’ understanding of East Asian cultures; more recent acquisitions (e.g. documentary photography, postcards, and other visual material) produced by East Asians themselves have been equally valuable for our understanding of this region.

Japanese collection

Ogata, Gekkō 尾形月耕, The Manners and Customs of Ladies (Fujin Fūzokuzukushi, 婦人風俗尽) (Tokyo, [1898]). Source: Edward James Parrish Papers.

Duke has the largest Japanese collection south of the Library of Congress in DC. Its strengths reflect the program’s focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has strong collections in modern art history, Buddhism, women’s and labor history, Japan’s colonial history, modern literature, manga and anime.  Some themes cross disciplines such as the colonial experience, disaster, including earthquakes, and LGBTQ issues.

The historical collection in Duke’s rare book and manuscript library includes reports from missionaries, early British diplomats to Japan, East India company papers, diaries and letters from merchants and seamen, as well as items in such collections as the Stereographic card and postcard collections and materials related to advertising in the Hartman Center.

The Rubenstein library also has strong collections in military history and the history of medicine.  For Japan, it has the papers of General Robert L. Eichelberger (1886-1961), who commanded all ground occupation troops in Japan (1945-1948). The sword in this exhibit was given to Eichelberger during the Occupation.

Titlepage of Johann Adam Kulmus’ Kaitai shinsho 解體新書 (1774). Source: Historical Anatomies on the Web (National Library of Medicine)

In addition to such standard Tokugawa medical texts as Kaitai shinsho (解體新書), Duke has 63 Edo-era medical manuscript volumes of medical lectures transcribed by students, which are included in this exhibit;  the papers of a Methodist missionary, Mary McMillan, which detail her services to the hibakusha (被爆者), the survivors of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as her peace activism; and a collection of materials related to the effects of the atomic bombing.  This includes the papers of Hachiya Michihiko and Dr. Warner Wells, surgical consultant to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, as well as the Leon S. Adler papers, which document the destruction of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Okinawa. The collection of photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki belonged to Dr. Wells.

Duke has also collected missionary papers and materials related to religion because of the Divinity School.  Duke holds the papers of Isaac Leroy Shaver (1893-1984), a Methodist clergyman and missionary to Japan from the 1920s to the 1960s.  But this interest in religion is also going in new directions; in response to programmatic changes in the department of Religious Studies, the special collections library has begun to build a strong collection on Zen in America, acquiring the Philip Kapleau papers and some documentary recordings of D.T. Suzuki, as well as the Reginald Horace Blyth and Norman Waddell papers.

In keeping with Rubenstein’s focus on visual materials, Duke has built a strong collection in photography, acquiring many iconic works.  In recent years, Duke has acquired several photographic collections, notably those taken by Sidney Gamble (c. 1917-1932), William Shockley (c. 1987-1905), Carl Mydans (c. 1941-1952) and Kusakabe Kimbei (c. 1885-1890), as well as Japanese photography of China during WWII.  It has also acquired other visual materials such as postcards and sugoroku (双六) game boards and materials relating to the Japanese student movement in the 1960s (Anpo tōsō 安保闘争), examples of which are included in the upcoming exhibit.

Chinese collection

“Knife Sharpener” from S. V. Constant, Calls, sounds and merchandise of the Peking street peddlers (1936).

Duke’s Chinese collection can trace back to the donation of the tobacco industrialist and philanthropist James Augustus Thomas (1862-1940), who left his papers, a collection of books mostly on China in English, some photographs and other artifacts – such as Chinese vases, robes, furniture, and even lotus shoes for bound feet – to the Duke libraries. The Chinese collection at Duke began to grow rapidly as a result of the expansion of Chinese studies program at Duke in the mid-1990s.  Duke began collecting Chinese materials that UNC was not collecting in depth, especially popular culture and contemporary social science. As the program has grown and changed, Duke has been acquiring materials in visual culture. Photograph collections, notably those taken by Sidney Gamble (c. 1917-1932), William Shockley (c. 1987-1905) and Lucy Calhoun (1886-1973), as well as photographic albums produced by the Japanese in 1920s and 1930s China, have all been acquired in the past two decades. Duke also has a small teaching collection of pre-modern Chinese medicine.

Manmo Ruins of old Summer Palace. Manmō inga shū.滿蒙印画輯 ([Dalian, China]: [between 1924 and 1944?])

More recently, the collection has focused on materials about the first thirty years of People’s Republic of China. Duke acquired the “Memory Project,” a collection of oral histories from survivors of the Great Famine that devastated rural China between 1958 and 1962, by documentary filmmaker, Wu Wenguang, and his team. The Chinese studies librarian has collected 350 titles anti-American pictorial books and Radio Free Asia’s Journal to the Soul complete program. Many of these are housed in The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library and some have been digitized and published including the Gamble Photographs and the Memory Project collection.

Korean collection

“A Ride on a ‘Jiggy’” from Missionary photograph album (Seoul, Korea, 1921)

Korean studies at Duke is the only program and collection on this East Asian region in the entire Southeastern United States.  In 1994, the Carl Wesley Judy Korean Library Fund was established with the purpose of the acquisition of and/or access to Korean materials. Rev. Carl Wesley Judy, who graduated from the Divinity School of Duke University in 1943, made great contributions to medical missionary work in Korea through his entire life.  He was joined in this endeavor by his wife, Margaret Brannan Judy, and his parent-in-law, Rev. Lyman Coy Brannan, who also dedicated his entire life for the missionary work in Korea from 1910. The upcoming Rubenstein Library exhibit intends to show unique items related with American missionaries’ works in Korea during the colonial period. Just like the past 100 years of devotion and passion of missionaries who served for Korea, Duke’s Korean program and collection will continue to grow with the passion and deep commitment to our future Korean Studies researchers and students.

Korean village street scene. Colonial Korean Postcard collection (1893-2010s)

Duke’s East Asian collection is curated by subject librarians from the International and Area Studies department.  For more information about the collection that forms the basis of the  upcoming exhibit in the Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery, please contact Luo Zhou, Chinese Studies Librarian, Miree Ku, Korean Studies Librarian, and Matthew Hayes, Ph.D., Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies Librarian.

What Does It Mean When a Librarian Says…?

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Twemoji12_1f914 by Twitter is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Post contributed by field experience student Sydney Adams. 

Sometimes it may seem like librarians are speaking another language. That’s normal, especially for undergraduate students new to academic research. Librarians use a lot of jargon! Here are some quick definitions for the next time you wonder “What is my librarian talking about?”

 

Call number – The unique combination of letters and numbers that you can use to find a book in Duke’s collection (ex: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is PR6068.O93 H375 2007). Duke uses the Library of Congress Classification Scheme which works well for large research libraries. This blog from the Divinity Library explains how to read Library of Congress call numbers. Ask at the front desk if you have trouble locating a book!

 

Database—An online collection organized by topic of articles, data, or citations that you can search for information related to class projects and more. Search for databases by title or subject on the Duke Libraries website. We have more than 1000!

 

Interlibrary Loan—A service that allows you to borrow materials from another library if we do not have them at Duke. You should never pay for an article while you’re here!

 

Scholarly Source—A source that elevates the quality of your research paper or project. Scholarly sources are written and reviewed by experts in your field of study and are usually published in academic journals, but they can also include published books, conference proceedings, and reports.

 

Special Collections—Collections of items, digital or physical, that are especially rare or unique. At Duke, our special collections are housed in Rubenstein Library. Learn more about Rubenstein’s collections and exhibits online. 

 

Stacks—The area where the library’s books and other materials are stored. At Lilly and Perkins & Bostock, we have “open stacks” where you can search for materials yourself. The stacks are labeled in yellow on our floor maps.

 

Subject SpecialistsLibrarians who serve specific schools, departments, and programs. Have a research question? Reach out to the subject specialist for your area of study!

5 Titles: Military Women

The 5 Titles series highlights books, music, and films in the library’s collection featuring topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and/or highlighting the work of authors from diverse backgrounds. Each post is intended to provide a brief sampling of titles rather than a comprehensive overview of the topic. This month, the five titles have been selected by RIS intern Emily Arnsberg.

Women have served in the military in various capacities for over 200 years. However, women in the United States were not given the option to serve as full-fledged military personnel until 1948, when President Truman signed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act into law, officially allowing women to serve as full, permanent members of all branches of the Armed Forces. Even though women could serve as military members in all branches, they were still not allowed to serve in combat. It was not until 2013 that then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced the ban on women in combat would be lifted entirely, and that female service members would be allowed to serve in ground combat roles. “In 2015, hundreds of thousands of jobs were opened to women, and ensured that as long as female service members completed the necessary training and requirements, they could now serve in almost any role in the U.S. military.” Though the U.S. military has taken strides to move towards a more equitable future, worldwide, women are up against roadblocks, harsh laws and cultural stereotypes that prevent them from playing a more active role in today’s military.

With the recent military withdrawal in Afghanistan, and with Veteran’s Day coming up (November 11th), we wanted to not only highlight the tremendous impact of women in the United States military, but those also fighting for military equality in other nations, specifically in places like Afghanistan and Syria. The following five titles illustrate various women fighting to gain an equal footing among their male soldier counterparts, from becoming a Special Operations warrior during the conflict in Afghanistan to an Afghan pilot searching for her place among the Afghan Air Force.


Amazon.com: Ashley's War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield eBook : Lemmon, Gayle Tzemach: Kindle StoreAshley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon (2015). Lemmon’s work chronicles the story of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command pilot program, called Cultural Support Teams (CSTs), which allowed elite women soldiers the chance to fight alongside Green Berets and Army Rangers in Afghanistan. The program, which began in 2010, was the first program to put women in special operations. It brought together a hand-picked group of women from the Army and National Guard, including 1st Lt. Ashley White, the first CST member killed in action. The job of these elite women was to “be the softer side of the harshest side of war;” to work with one of the largest populations in Afghan culture that was previously out of reach to male military members: Afghan women.

Ashley’s War illustrates a different perspective of combat – women on the battlefield. While women were “technically” banned from serving in combat positions, these CST members accompanied Special Operations forces into the heart of battle, on night raids, and in the middle of gunfire. The author conveys an underlying tension among the CST members as they prepare for nightly missions. Will the male soldiers embrace the CST members as one of their own teammates? Is it possible for men and women to coexist in battle? This book challenges your previous assumptions of war, as you witness it through the fresh eyes of women who have never experienced combat. These courageous soldiers play a critical role in advancing the conversation about women in combat, a discussion that is still under debate and talked about in the current military landscape. Ashley’s War is currently being developed into a major motion picture at Universal Studios with Reese Witherspoon and Bruna Papandrea producing.


Open Skies: My Life as Afghanistan's First Female Pilot, Rahmani, Niloofar, Sikes, Adam, eBook - Amazon.comOpen Skies: My Life as Afghanistan’s First Female Pilot by Niloofar Rahmani and Adam Sikes (2021). This timely book illustrates another perspective of women in the military, through the eyes of an Afghan woman struggling to serve her country. Rahmani tells her story as the first female-fixed wing Air Force aviator in Afghanistan’s history and the first female pilot in the Afghan Air Force since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. She weaves her “personal history into a broader review of Afghanistan’s past, detailing the years of war her family experienced. Her father was conscripted by the Soviets; the family fled the Taliban and fled in exile; then, after her return, the American invasion brought both concern and cautious optimism.” Rahmani skillfully describes the perils of life for Afghan women as they are forced to live within an oppressive, hostile, and dismissive culture. Her work shines light on another perspective that is rarely delved into depth, the experience of women in Afghanistan. It also highlights the many roadblocks and stereotypes of women in the military, especially for a woman fighting against harsh rules and limits in modern-day Afghanistan.


Amazon.com: Soldier Girls: The Battles of Three Women at Home and at War: 9781451668117: Thorpe, Helen: BooksSoldier Girls: The Battles of Three Women at Home and at War by Helen Thorpe (2014). Thorpe’s narrative, spanning 12 years, follows three women from enlistment in the Indiana National Guard, through deployment, and back home again. These three women thought that in joining the National Guard their attendance and work would be minimal, occasionally attending training. In exchange, they would be given the best chances available for them to better themselves: by attending college, having a steady paycheck, and engaging in something bigger than themselves. However, in the aftermath of 9/11, these women found themselves in combat zones in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Similar to Ashley’s War, Thorpe illustrates the impact of war and how it changes women, a subject that is often focused on the male perspective. This book also details an important aspect of American history, discussing the cultural failings, resilience, and progress of the American way of life. In its chapters about the women’s return to civilian life, Thorpe illuminates the realities of being female and poor in this country. As one passage illustrates, being in a Target triggers an emotional moment for one of the women, as looking for toilet paper seems so superfluous and wasteful. Thorpe spent four years interviewing these three women; what she learned offers a moving portrait of both of the toll that wartime military life takes and the realities of civilian life when returning from war.


Amazon.com: Unbecoming: A Memoir of Disobedience: 9781501162541: Bhagwati, Anuradha: BooksUnbecoming: A Memoir of Disobedience by Anuradha Bhagwati (2019). Bhagwati’s memoir offers a distinctive lens on her service in the Marines, tackling various issues such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, sexual violence, misogyny, and racism, among many others. Born an obedient daughter of Indian immigrants, Unbecoming tells the story of Bhagwati enlisting in the Marines after graduating Yale, to her later creation of the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN). Unlike the other books in this blog post, Bhagwati takes a deep dive into the politics of supporting women in the military. She takes her fight to Congress, illustrating her triumphs and struggles in dealing with politicians, including Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and California representative Jackie Speier. Her candid memoir shows her view of misogyny and gender segregation in the military, and her fight to make an impact on the gender equality issues of our time.


The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice: Lemmon, Gayle Tzemach: 9780525560685: Amazon.com: BooksThe Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon (2021). Lemmon’s most recent title delves into the conflict in Syria and the battle against the Islamic State (ISIS). An all-female protection unit of Syrian Kurdish Fighters, known as the YPJ, fast became the face of the war against ISIS and gained a reputation as fierce and effective fighters. Through the stories of four female soldiers, Lemmon paints a picture of their combat against ISIS and their fight for women’s equality in the battle for the city of Kobani. Aided by U.S. intelligence and airstrikes, these women and the many other Women’s Protection Units helped to retake the city from ISIS. Lemmon, using the stories of these four women as a backdrop, elucidates the complex history of the region and the fight for equality among women who are performing the same tasks beside their male counterparts. Recently, this title was optioned by HiddenLight Productions as a future film adaption.


5 Titles is directed by the Research & Instructional Services (RIS) Department at Duke University Libraries.

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.

Native American Heritage: What’s Streaming at Duke Libraries

For Native American History Month, one of Duke Libraries’ streaming video platforms,  Docuseek, is highlighting a number of films about and made by Indigenous Peoples.  Docuseek presents an excellent collection of documentary films about Native Americans,  including National Film Board of Canada’s First Nations films, Women Make Movies, and distributors Bullfrog Films and Icarus Films.

These selections trace Indigenous activism, movement-building, politics, art, culture, language, astronomy, restorative-justice systems, and the fight to protect water and sacred lands.

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As Nutayuneaan (dir. Anne Makepeace, 2011)

 

As Nutayuneaan (We Still Live Here) 
Tells the amazing story of the return of the Wampanoag language, a language that was silenced for more than a century.
(Bullfrog Films; streaming with Duke netid/password)

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Conscience Point (dir. Treva Wurmfeld, 2021)


Conscience Point
Unearths a deep clash of values between the Shinnecock Indian Nation and their elite Hamptons neighbors, who have made sacred land their playground. (Women Make Movies; streaming with Duke netid/password)

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Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (dir. Alanis Obomsawin, 2015)

 

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance
Examines the historic confrontation between the Mohawks, Québec police, and the Canadian army that propelled Native issues into the international spotlight and into the Canadian conscience.
(National Film Board of Canada; streaming with Duke netid/password)

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The Mystery of Chaco Canyon, dir. Anna Sofaer, 2015)

The Mystery of Chaco Canyon
Unveils the ancient astronomy of southwestern Pueblo Indians.
(Bullfrog Films; streaming with Duke netid/password)

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Skydancer (dir. Katja Esson, 2021)

Skydancer
Academy Award-nominated director Katja Esson explores the colorful and at times tragic history of the Mohawk skywalkers, men who leave their families on the reservation to travel to NYC to work construction jobs.
(Women Make Movies; streaming with Duke netid/password)

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Standing on Sacred Ground (dir. Christopher McLeod, 2015)

Standing on Sacred Ground
In this four-part documentary series from the producer of In the Light of Reverence, native people share ecological wisdom and spiritual reverence while battling a utilitarian view of land in the form of government megaprojects, consumer culture, and resource extraction as well as competing religions and climate change.
(Bullfrog Films; streaming with Duke netid/password)

Native Cinema Showcase 2021

If these titles whet your appetite for more great movies, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian’s Native Cinema Showcase is coming up later this month. An annual celebration of the best in Native film, this year’s showcase is online  and runs from November 12-18, 2021. And Women Make Movies is screening online a selection of films by and about Native American women from November 19-30th; sign up here to receive more info.

What to Read this Month: October 2021

As the leaves are finally changing and the temperatures are finally resembling those of autumn, you might find yourself looking for a new book to read with your PSL or otherwise seasonally appropriate hot beverage. Well, look no further! Here’s a quick sampling of some recently added titles in our Overdrive and New & Noteworthy collections. Remember, we are always adding new titles to both of these collections, so be sure to frequently check back with each of them!


The Wrong End of the Telescope: Alameddine, Rabih: 9780802157805: Amazon.com: BooksThe Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine. Alameddine’s sixth novel tells the story of Mina Simpson, a middle-aged Lebanese-American physician who volunteers to treat migrants on the Greek island of Lesbos in the midst of a refugee crisis. The experience is very emotionally taxing for Mina, in no small part because her patients and their lives remind her so much of her painful childhood growing up in Beirut, clashing with the conservative culture in which she was raised—along with her abusive parents—before eventually attending Harvard, becoming a doctor in Chicago, undergoing gender transitioning, and adopting her current name. While dealing with these connections, she serves as a vivid narrator of all the people she encounters, painting detailed portraits of her patients to an unnamed Lebanese writer, and wryly criticizing the Western journalists and others who have come to Lesbos to gawk at the crisis as it unfolds. Indeed, the novel offers a thorough examination of Western attitudes toward the Middle East and the refugee crisis in particular, as Mina and the writer contemplate how her stories might be received in the United States. You can read reviews here and here.


Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence: Hill, Anita: 9780593298299: Amazon.com: BooksBelieving: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence by Anita Hill. In this book, Brandeis law professor Anita Hill discusses the current state of gender-based violence in the contemporary United States, describing its general pervasiveness and inextricable connection to other forms of bigotry, including racism and transphobia. Reflecting on her own allegations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and her subsequent testimony against him during his confirmation hearings thirty years ago, Hill remarks upon how little the myriad difficulties facing people alleging gender-based violence against those in power have changed, comparing her experience with that of Christine Blasey Ford, who alleged sexual assault by, and testified against, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, as well as that of Tara Reade, who alleged that now-President Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. In describing all these events, as well as several others, Hill focuses primarily on the numerous barriers facing those who experience gender-based violence, as well as the way this violence affects everyone all of ages, races, and social classes. With its informative—though often difficult—details, Hill’s book is a compelling read. You can read reviews here and here.


My Monticello: Fiction: Johnson, Jocelyn Nicole: 9781250807151: Amazon.com: BooksMy Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson. In this debut collection, Johnson tells numerous stories, most of which feature Black characters in contemporary Virginia (Johnson’s home state) reckoning with experiences of racism and their own racial identities, with the heavy history and culture of the state serving as a kind of omnipresent backdrop. The titular novella of the collection, which takes up the most space in the book and also arrives at the very end of the collection, sets itself in a near-future Charlottesville undergoing organized racial violence perpetrated by white supremacist militias (with Johnson’s imagery heavily alluding to the events of the 2017 Unite the Right rally that took place in the city). In this story, UVA student Da’Naisha leads a group of fleeing Black and brown Charlottesville residents (including her own grandmother) to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation located just outside the city; having previously interned there, Da’Naisha knows it to be a potentially effective hideout. As the characters hide there, they are continuously confronted with the links between the plantation’s history and their current circumstances as refugees from racial violence. For Da’Naisha, this link is particularly acute, as she reveals to her grandmother that they are both descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. You can read reviews here and here.


Americanon by Jess McHugh: 9781524746636 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: BooksAmericanon: An Unexpected U.S. History in Thirteen Bestselling Books by Jess McHugh. In this nonfiction debut, journalist McHugh traces the history of common cultural values and ideas of success in American society by examining thirteen bestselling books, all of which serve as instructional texts of some kind (with many resembling modern-day self-help books, despite preceding the advent of the formal genre). Ranging from The Old Farmer’s Almanac to Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, McHugh offers up a comprehensive overview of each title, explaining the varying cultural contexts and publication histories surrounding them. In so doing, she creates a fascinating work on the ways commonplace American values have changed—and not changed—over the past three centuries, and also offers a thorough examination of whose voices and values have been (and currently are) the most present and privileged in the popular market of didactic books. You can read reviews here and here.


Arsenic and Adobo (A Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mystery Book 1) - Kindle edition  by Manansala, Mia P.. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @  Amazon.com.Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala. Manansala’s debut, the first entry in a new mystery series, tells the story of Lila Macapagal, a young woman who has moved back to her Illinois hometown following the emotionally-wrought breakup of her engagement. While she intends simply to assist her aunt in the running of her Filipino restaurant, Tita Rosie’s Kitchen, things quickly take a turn when her embittered ex-boyfriend from high school, restaurant reviewer Derek Winter, abruptly dies in the middle of a meal there. While these circumstances are enough to cast suspicion on Lila, making matters worse is the fact that Derek was dining with his stepfather, the restaurant’s landlord with whom Lila’s aunt had been having financial difficulties. Lila is quickly pinned as the primary suspect in Derek’s apparent murder, leaving her no recourse but to try to clear her name, which she does with the assistance of her friend Adeena and Adeena’s brother Amir, an attorney who also serves as Lila’s love interest. Though this mystery deals with a number of dark elements, the tone remains generally light throughout, and the events of the novel are brightened by Manansala’s detailed descriptions of food and the many ways it figures into the lives of the book’s characters. You can read reviews here and here.

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