All posts by Kate Collins

Featured, From Our Collections, Gender and Sexuality History Collections

In Memoriam: Allan Kirkpatrick Troxler 1947-2025

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It is with profound sadness that we share that graphic artist, mask-puppet-and-banner maker, violinist, country dance teacher, and community activist Allan Troxler passed away on October 26, 2025.

Born and raised in Greensboro, Troxler became a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War and participated in civil rights organizing and campaigns. He also worked in Boston to preserve neighborhoods threatened by urban development. Later, Troxler moved to a communal farm in rural Oregon with his partner, noted gay activist Carl Wittman. While in Oregon, Allan and Carl helped to publish RFD, a magazine for gay men living in rural America.

Returning to North Carolina in 1979, Troxler and Wittman were actively involved in arts, dance, and cultural programs throughout the region. Both devotees of English Country Dance and leaders in a national dance movement, they started Sun Assembly, its weekly dances and New Year’s celebrations in Durham weaving an egalitarian community beyond gender binaries.

Troxler and Wittman were early members of the North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Health Project, which sought to improve access to medical care and information for the gay community, particularly as it endured the spread of HIV/AIDs in the early 1980s. They were vocal activists against homophobia and the criminalization of homosexuality. Over the years they helped organize a range of community projects and protests. Wittman died of AIDS in early 1986.

Papercut broadside by Allan Troxler. Allan Troxler Papers, 1800s-2024.

Troxler’s writings, dance, artwork, and activism continued through his life. His work appeared in Southern Exposure, RFD, and local features and press. He created Camas Swale, a series of “occasional pamphlets,” along with other zines and artwork by pseudonym E. Bunny. Troxler’s work frequently expressed political views, opposing anti-gay legislation, and promoting peace and inclusivity. Much of this artwork was distributed to local friends in his community network.

Troxler was honored as an LGBT Pioneer at the Executive Mansion by Governor Roy Cooper in June 2024 along with Mandy Carter as Carolinians who “for decades led the charge for acceptance and equality.”  Troxler’s artwork and papers, along with Wittman’s, reside in the Rubenstein Library.

From Troxler’s writings: “Here we be, ears ringing as some of us grieve ancient companions just gone; others meting out pills; potions in portions! Through the window cicadas rattle their ancient benedictions: Life, death. Through the curtain Sister Heavenly Light blesses us all.”

 

Header Image: Allan Troxler. Portrait by Annie Segrest. 

Events, Featured, History of Medicine, New at the Rubenstein Library

Celebrating the Dr. Thomas Bashore Collection

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Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2025
Time: 4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Location: Rubenstein Library Room 153, Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room
Contact: Rachel Ingold (rachel.ingold@duke.edu)

The History of Medicine Collections recently received the Thomas Bashore, M.D., Collection of Artifacts. Dr. Bashore is Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the Duke University Medical School, where he specialized in treatment of cardiovascular conditions and congenital heart disease. He first began collecting historic medical artifacts, such as mechanical devices relating to electrotherapy and cardiology, and expanded his collection to include fringe medical instruments and treatments.

Please join us on Wednesday, October 29, at 4:30 p.m. to celebrate the Thomas Bashore Collection. Dr. Bashore will provide remarks.

Items from the Thomas Bashore, M.D. Collection are currently on display in the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Room and the Hubbard Case.

Bingham Center, Events, Featured, Gender and Sexuality History Collections

Defending Intellectual Freedom

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Join us for a panel considering the current state of intellectual freedom in higher education.

Date: Friday, November 7, 2025
Time: 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Location:
Reception: 1:30 p.m.-2:30 p.m. in the Janie Long Study Space (Perkins 4th floor)
Program: 2:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m. in the Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room (Rubenstein Library Room 153)
RSVP: https://duke.is/intellectual-freedom

The United Nations considers intellectual freedom to be a basic human right through Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which asserts: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Libraries in particular value intellectual freedom as part of their mission to provide and protect access to information and ideas. According to the American Library Association intellectual freedom is an integral component of a democratic society, protecting an individual’s right to access, explore, consider, and express ideas and information as the basis for a self-governing, well-informed citizenry. Yet there is an intensification of threats to intellectual freedom across the United States, with pressure on curriculum and research, book and program challenges, and censorship attempts continuing to reach unprecedented levels.

This year’s Janie K. Long Speaker Series program will focus on the impact of challenges to intellectual freedom on higher education and the steps we can take to support students, faculty, staff, and other members of our community. We will also honor Duke Alumnus Harry H. Harkins Jr, T’73 longtime supporter of LGBTQ+ library collections, scholars, and this event series.

Speakers: Robin Koshelev, Duke undergraduate researcher, Dr. Janie K. Long, Duke faculty emerita, Dr. Joseph Salem, University Librarian, Dr. Pete Sigal, Department of History; moderated by author, journalist, and Duke alumnus Steven Petrow.

Sponsored by: Duke University Libraries, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke Department of History, and the Duke Program for Scholars and Publics.

Featured, Rare Books

In Memoriam: Terry Allan Murray, 1953-2025

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Terry Murray

The Rubenstein Library mourns the loss of Terry Allan Murray, who passed away on August 7, 2025. Terry was born in Durham, where he would reside his entire life alongside his brother, Edwin. Terry was from a family with strong Duke connections. His father, Lee H. Murray, worked at Duke, and his uncle was famed football coach Wallace Wade. Terry and his brother Edwin both attended Duke in the 1970s.  

Terry and Edwin began collecting comic books as boys in the 1950s and eventually assembled one of the largest archival comics collections in the United States, including more than 57,000 comic books. In time this grew to include thousands of fanzines, comic strips, original comic art, pulp magazines, card sets, science fiction, as well as role-playing and board games. In 2002, they donated the major portion of their collection to the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and they have continued to make additions in the years since. 

Terry was a dedicated collector and brought a methodological focus to his work. Armed with reference books, reviews, and annual top 10 lists, he was intentional about his collecting. At the same time, Terry never lost sight of why comics are fun. He was as much a reader interested in authors, characters, and stories, and would often collect related materials across different genres, from comics to games to fiction. In 1999, McFarland published Terry’s Science Fiction Magazine Story Index, 1926 – 1995, the result of many years of work. In the introduction, Terry writes about how this came out of his own interests in science fiction and how he hoped that this work would serve as a tool for readers, collectors, and scholars. 

Terry, at one of the mini-cons hosted at his home in Durham

In addition to being an avid reader of comic books and science fiction, Terry was also a dedicated fan. In 1968, he and Edwin began hosting the Durham mini-cons – likely the earliest fan conventions in North Carolina. Their personal papers in the Rubenstein Library include photographs of these events held at their Durham home, as well as issues of their fanzine Vertigo. Sharing collections and bringing fans together were part of Terry’s ongoing interests. 

At the Rubenstein Library, the Edwin and Terry Murray collections remain popular with researchers and students. Recent classes that have used parts of the collection have included: “Games and Culture,” “Cold War America,” “US History in Fact and Fiction,” and “Fantasy: The Borders of Genre, Medium, and Culture.” Some of their comics are currently on display as part of the library exhibit American Indians Go Graphic, exploring comic books and graphic novels by and about Native Americans. We are grateful for our long collaboration with Terry and for the legacy that he leaves. His collections will continue to be shared and bring people together. 

Terry Murray was a loving son and a devoted brother and friend. He is survived by his brother, Edwin. 

Archive of Documentary Arts, Featured, Human Rights Archive

Podcast “Inside Kabul” Wins 2025 Rubenstein Library Human Rights Digital Storytelling Award

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The 2025 Human Rights Digital Storytelling Award, presented by the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, has been awarded to the podcast Inside Kabul.

Produced and originally broadcast by FRANCE INTER (French Public Radio) Inside Kabul was created and directed by Caroline Gillet in collaboration with Marwa and Raha. Inside Kabul tells the story of two young friends whose lives were upended when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. As they faced an increasingly dangerous present and an uncertain future, Raha and Marwa exchanged and recorded hundreds of voice notes via WhatsApp with Gillet, a noted French journalist.

These recordings became the heart of the podcast, offering a raw, intimate, and immediate documentation of displacement. As the podcast describes:

“What emerges is a raw and incredibly intimate chronicle of two young women coming of age amidst the collapse of the world they had known. While Raha has chosen to stay in Kabul and is confronted with the violence of the new regime, Marwa has left and finds herself locked up in a refugee camp in Abu Dhabi.”

According to Caroline Gillet:

“Raha and Marwa showed immense courage when they accepted to document their lives under Taliban rule and leaving into exile. Their voice diaries are a powerful testimony of how life changed both for those who chose to leave and those who had to stay after the dramatic events of August 2021. New technologies can sometimes create unexpected proximity, and many people in Europe and in the States told me how close they felt to Raha and Marwa after hearing them. I’m very thankful that through this award, more people can get to know them and the terrible suffering of Afghan women under the terrorist rule of the Taliban.”

Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist at Duke, said:

“Inside Kabul powerfully shows how audio technologies can serve to document, connect, and hope. We are intimately connected to Raha and Marwa’s stories through their voices and the sonic elements of their journey: falling rain at a refugee camp, the crinkle of a food ration wrapper, the sounds of a Taliban security checkpoint.”

Caitlin Margaret Kelly, Curator for the Archive of Documentary Arts, added:

“Being immersed in Raha and Marwa’s unedited audio diaries is to be invited into their lives in ways that bypass the usual narrative arc. In listening to the recordings, our pace is set by the two young women, and our view of unfolding events is powerfully constructed through their experiences.”

Image from Inside Kaboul animated short, by Luciano Lepinay based on works by Kubra Khademi.

In addition to the podcast, Caroline, Marwa, and Raha continue to use the audio diaries to tell their evolving story of displacement and rebuilding. A second season of the show, titled Outside Kabul, is now available in English on France Inter’s YouTube channel. In 2023, they partnered with Denis Walgenwitz to produce an animated short also titled Inside Kabul and are now working on an animated adaption of Outside Kabul.  In 2025, they collaborated with Afghan performance artist Kubra Khademi to produce One’s Own Room: Inside Kabul, an immersive installation presented at the 2025 Festival d’Avignon.

Marwa, one of the three collaborators behind Inside Kabul, said:

“I began exchanging with Caroline and recording sound notes with the hope of being a voice for the people of Afghanistan—especially for women like myself who were deprived of their freedom and rights after the Taliban took over the country in August 2021. Today, Inside Kabul is part of my identity as an advocate for our rights. It is our way of resisting—of standing against this regime and the erasure of Afghan women, and against the gender apartheid in Afghanistan. This award is deeply meaningful to me, as it ensures that our voices will be preserved and accessible to researchers who can shed light on the reality of women’s lives under the Taliban’s terrorist regime.”

The Rubenstein Library’s Human Rights Digital Storytelling Award is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Archive and the Archive of Documentary Arts. It supports outstanding documentary artists and activists exploring themes of human rights and social justice. The award aims to expand the library’s digital documentary holdings while ensuring long-term preservation and access.

The award honors projects that transcend simple information sharing. It celebrates digital storytellers who create deeply contextualized, multi-sensory works that may include still images, moving images, oral histories, soundscapes, and documentary writing.

Winners receive $3,500 and are invited to present their work at Duke University, where they collaborate with archivists to preserve their materials.

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library has a longstanding commitment to human rights and the documentary arts. Its collections represent the work of global creators and document the power of documentary to inspire action and transform the world.

Bingham Center, Featured, From Our Collections

In Memoriam: Sallie Bingham, 1937-2025

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The Rubenstein Library experienced a deep loss on August 6, 2025, when author and activist Sallie Bingham passed. Enormously thoughtful and kind, Bingham was steadfastly dedicated to the groups and causes she cared about, especially women and girls, LGBTQIA communities, artists and writers, land conservation, and special collections and cultural heritage work. A renowned author, playwright, poet, teacher, and feminist activist, Bingham was deeply committed to the power of the written word and the importance of creating organizations that address social issues and promote well-being. Her death was marked by tributes in the New York Times, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and other news outlets.

Sallie Bingham giving a talk in 2009, in the Duke Libraries. Bingham visited the Libraries often to engage with our communities. Photo credit: Eleanor Mills.

Bingham published her first short story in The New Yorker in 1959 and went on to write numerous novels, short story collections, memoirs, and plays. Her fiction often explored the inner lives of women, the weight of family legacy, and the constraints of Southern tradition. With clarity and courage, she brought attention to the power dynamics of gender and class, always centering women’s experiences. Bingham has been praised by critics for her “beautiful language,” “poetic ear” and “precise and observant eye.” In addition to her work as a writer, Bingham worked as a book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, a director of the National Book Critics Circle, and a longtime contributor to the Women’s Project & Productions theater company in New York.

In 1985, Bingham founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, a groundbreaking organization that promotes positive social change by supporting varied feminist expression in the arts. Bingham’s commitment to preserving and uplifting women’s voices also led to the creation of a women’s history archive at Duke University. In 1988 she endowed a position in what is now known as the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library to coordinate acquisitions, cataloguing, reference, and outreach activities related to materials documenting women and gender. What started out as the work of a single archivist grew into a permanently endowed center within the library, which in 1999 was formally named the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture in her honor. Since then, the Bingham Center has grown into one of the foremost repositories of its kind, dedicated to acquiring, preserving, and providing access to published and unpublished materials that reflect the public and private lives of women throughout history.

We are deeply grateful for Sallie Bingham’s generous support and gracious care, and we offer our sincere condolences to her many friends and family. As we mourn her loss, we also celebrate her remarkable life spent in service of truth, community building, and the creative spirit. We are proud to bear her name and carry on the important work she started so many years ago. In one of her last social media posts Bingham declared that “Our wisdom outlasts kingdoms and democracies and tyrannies. It is for all places, all people, and all times.”

Archive of Documentary Arts, Exhibits, Featured, Franklin Research Center, From Our Collections, Photography, Students and Interns

Curating “Movement and Memory Through the Lens of Danny Lyon”

Post contributed by Ama Kyereme, Curatorial Intern for the Archive of Documentary Arts (24-25) and curator of “Movement and Memory Through the Lens of Danny Lyon.” The exhibit is on display in the Rubenstein Library Photography Gallery through November 2, 2025.

In 1962, Danny Lyon, then a college student at university of Chicago, hitchhiked from Chicago to Cairo, Illinois, to document segregation to document segregation, and to join the Civil Rights Movement. Brought in by James Forman to work as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lyon traveled across the U.S. South documenting the conditions that initially prompted him to action. Armed with his camera, he made his way into spaces that his Black colleagues typically couldn’t go. From the Leesburg Stockade in Virginia to the Toddle House diner sit-in in Atlanta, the photographs Lyon made captured the ethos of the civil rights era. Facing hostile police and armed guards wielding bayonets, Lyon often placed himself in the middle of action to represent in photographs what he was experiencing.

Peaceful protests are foundational to the Civil Rights Movement, but violence is inextricable to the Movement’s history. That violence, both visible and invisible, is on full display in several photographs selected for this exhibition, from protests arrests to the funeral for the girls bombed in Birmingham, AL. While Lyon did not hold back from documenting the volatility of the revolution as he witnessed it, he focused his camera on capturing the Movement as it was to him and those around him. He directed the camera just as much towards moments of stillness, depicting the reality of the Movement within the image, as well as between and beyond the frame. He made evidence of organizing, protesting, rest, grief, and celebration, all equally deliberate actions towards an investment in an imagined future. Many of the images Danny created during this period became synonymous with SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement, and through their circulation were key in bringing about social and political change. The images of the young girls imprisoned in the Leesburg Stockade in Virginia were critical in making the public aware of the condition these girls were in, and ultimately led to their release. In this way, there is a cycle of action that Danny’s photographs take part in. Danny’s impulse to follow the action leads him to take photographs, and in turn he takes action through the intervention of taking a photograph. The photograph then goes on to act as a catalyst for other social and political action based on the content of the image. In addition to the iconic and spectacular images of the era, this exhibit includes images that provide a more comprehensive narrative of SNCC activism, through depictions of the South as a geographic hub, the role of women and youth, and the involvement of the church and religion as equally critical parts of the Civil Rights Movement.

Continue reading Curating “Movement and Memory Through the Lens of Danny Lyon” →

Featured, History of Medicine, Students and Interns

Meet Madeline Huh!

Every year, we enjoy hearing more from our graduate student interns who work in the Rubenstein Library. We are thrilled to have Madeline Huh, the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine intern, share more below about her experience. Thank you, Madeline for your work and contributions over the past year!

Tell us a little about yourself.

My name is Madeline Huh, and I am currently finishing up my first year in the MSLS program at UNC School of Information and Library Science in Chapel Hill. For my undergraduate, I attended Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where I studied Greek & Latin language and worked in the department of Special Collections in the library.

My study of classical languages is what introduced me to working with special collections, and more specifically rare books and early manuscripts, in the first place. I took a course in Medieval Latin my freshman year of college, and a significant part of that course was learning to transcribe early Latin manuscript fragments and get that transcription into a machine-readable format, so the library’s description of the fragments could be improved. My interest in special collections stuck after that experience. As the years have passed, I’ve developed strong interests in the history of the book, medieval Latin manuscripts, and early modern print culture. Ideally, I hope to pursue a career as a rare book librarian.

Outside of work and school, I enjoy running, reading for fun, spending time with my cat, and going to concerts!

What do you find interesting about working in libraries, especially our History of Medicine Collections?

For me, it’s wonderful to be in close contact with historical books, papers, and artifacts and to feel connected to the past in such a material way. I think there’s so much value in being able to work directly with physical materials in the library and better understand their historical context through the lens of materiality. Likewise, it’s special to be able to share this with patrons and students who come to the Rubenstein Library’s reading room and instruction sessions, especially those who are just beginning to learn about special collections research. Each person brings their own unique interests and experiences to the library, and it’s rewarding to do what I can to help people’s research blossom.

Beyond that, I am personally interested in histories of gender and sexuality, particularly in medieval and early modern Europe, which has made working in the History of Medicine Collections a great fit for me. Working here has allowed me to consider the many ways that the study of women, gender, and sexuality intersects with health and medicine–just a few of these are the development of the fields of obstetrics and gynecology, global health outcomes for women, changing definitions of “deviant” gender and sexuality, the development of contraceptive care, and medical responses to queer identity. These topics are strongly represented in the History of Medicine Collections, also often having some overlap with materials from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture. I consistently learn so much through my work here, which is a huge part of why I enjoy working in libraries.

What is a memorable experience from your internship?

Oh, there have been so many! It’s hard to choose just one.

There were a couple days where Rachel Ingold, Meghan Lyon, and I worked on creating an inventory for the Thomas Bashore Collection of artifacts. There were so many surprising and remarkable items to look at during these meetings, from a leech jar, to various bloodletting tools, to electro-therapy devices, to a physician’s sample of LSD.

small box labelled as containing LSD. It is stamped "Physician's Sample"
Physician’s Sample of LSD

We would open up a box with a vague idea of what was inside, unwrap the artifacts from tissue paper (which felt a little like unwrapping gifts, in a strange way), and then try to figure out what we were looking at more specifically. Rachel came equipped with reference books on medical instruments that were so interesting to look through as well.

I’ve deeply enjoyed getting to learn more about the artifacts in the History of Medicine Collections throughout this year. These are things you might not expect to find in a library, but they have such great teaching and research potential and are such a great compliment to the other print and archival materials in the collections. Beyond that, learning about donors and the donation process in the History of Medicine Collections has been so interesting to me.

Do you have a favorite item you’d like to share?

I especially love the items in the History of Medicine Collections that show the intersection of art and medicine. One famous example of this is the frontispiece of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica, which was so cool to see in person and regularly use during instruction. A few years ago, I read Katharine Park’s book Secrets of Women, and since then, I’ve been so fascinated with the woman depicted at the center of the Vesalius frontispiece.

One book that I wasn’t familiar with before working in the History of Medicine Collections is a 1551 edition of Hans von Gersdorff’s Feldtbuch der Wundt Artzney, which might be translated as the “Fieldbook of Surgery.” For one thing, this book features the original of the woodcut Josiah Charles Trent adopted for use as his bookplate, which depicts an amputation:

On the left is a woodcut illustration show someone having their leg amputated using a bonesaw. It's been hand colored and is in a book. On the right is a book plate with the same illustration and the name of Josiah Charles Trent, M.D.
Illustration of an amputation from Feldtbuch der Wundt ArtzneyJosiah (left) and Dr. Josiah Trent’s bookplate (right)

There are so many interesting hand-colored woodcut images in this book, such as this skeleton with a vibrant green background, which I love.

On the left is a foldout illustration from an early printed book showing a skeleton with the bones labelled. The background is painted green. On the right is a woodcut illustration of various metal medical tools.
Additional illustrations from Hans von Gersdorff’s Feldtbuch der Wundt Artzney

Early printed books like these are so interesting to me because of the way they show the connection between the artisanship of printing and the pursuit of understanding of the human body. I’m deeply grateful for experiences I’ve had during this internship, being exposed to familiar and unfamiliar materials alike and developing a knowledge of the kinds of print and archival materials that make up the History of Medicine Collections.

I’m very grateful for the experiences I’ve been able to have this year as the intern for the History of Medicine Collections!

Bingham Center, Featured, Franklin Research Center, Hartman Center, History of Medicine, Travel Grants

Announcing our 2025-2026 Travel Grant Recipients

The Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025-2026 travel grants. Our research centers annually award travel grants to students, scholars, and independent researchers through a competitive application process. We extend a warm congratulations to this year’s awardees. We look forward to meeting and working with you!

The travel grants for the Archive of Documentary Arts and Human Rights Archive have been paused for the 2025-2026 cycle.

Doris Duke Archives

Joan Marie Johnson, Northwestern University, “Doris Duke and the Business of Philanthropy”

Richard Treut, “Doris Duke’s Stewardship of Duke Farms”

Elon Clark History of Medicine Travel Grants

Jessica Brabble, Ph.D. Candidate, College of Willilam & Mary, “Her Best Crop: Eugenics, Agricultural Programming, and Child Welfare, 1900-1964”

Michael Ortiz-Castro, Lecturer, Department of History, Bentley University, “Acts of Citizenship: Belonging and Biology in the Post-Reconstruction US.”

John Hope Franklin Research Center

Irene Ahn, Faculty, American University, “Bridging Divides through Local Reparations: Examining How Communities Repair Racial Injustices”

Emmanuel Awine, Ph.D. Candidate, Johns Hopkins University, “The Socio-Political History of the Raided Communities in Northern Ghana and Southern Burkina Faso 1800-2000”

Carlee Migliorisi, M.A. Candidate, Monmouth University, “Asbury Park Uprising: Race, Riots, and Revenue”

Maria Montalvo, Faculty, Emory University, “Imagining Freedom”

Michael Ortiz, Faculty, Bentley University, “Acts of Citizenship: Belonging and Biology in the Post Reconstruction US”

Summer Perritt, Ph.D. Candidate, Rice University, “A Southern Reclamation: Understanding Black Identity and Return Migration to the American South in the Post-Civil Rights Era, 1960-2020”

McKenzie Tor, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Missouri, “The Black Temperance Movement in Nineteenth Century America”

Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History

John Furr Fellowship for JWT Research

Raffaella Law, “Global Branding, Local Tastes: Nestle and the Rise of Internet-Age Food Advertising in the 1990s”

Joseph Semkiu, “Wartime Advertising and Radio Voices: Selling Masculinity On and Off the Radio to the 1940s US Home Front”

Alvin A. Achenbaum Travel Grants

James Bowie, “The 20th-Century Development of the Logo as a Cultural Object”

Bryce Evans, “Marketing Abundance: JWT’s Creative and Strategic Approach to the Pan Am Account”

Townsend Rowland, “Supplementation, Radiation, Mutation: Food and Scientific Authority in Postwar America”

Mark Slater, “Big Tobacco and Blackness: American Advertising, Black Culture, and Cigarettes in Post-WW2 America”

Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture Travel Grant Awardees

Mary Lily Travel Grant

Daniel Belasco, Independent Researcher, Al Held Foundation, “Total Revolution: The Origins of the Feminist Art Movement, 1963-1969”

Ayumi Ishii and Kate Copeland, Independent Researchers, Pacific Northwest College of Art, “Compleat and Infallible Recipes”

Chloe Kauffman, Graduate Student, University of Maryland, College Park, “’If women are curious, women also like to speak’: Unmarried Women, Sexual Knowledge, and Female Mentorship in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Atlantic”

Lucy Kelly, Graduate Student, University of Sussex, Sussex Center for American Studies, “’I want to fight the fight. I want my rightful place’: Queer Worldmaking in the American South, 1970-2000”

Lina-Marie Murillo, Faculty, University of Iowa, Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, and History, “The Army of the Three and the Untold History of America’s Abortion Underground”

Melissa Thompson, Graduate Student, West Virginia University, “Redefining and Recreating the Meaning of Family, 1929 – 2010s”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Travel Grant

Stephanie Clare, Faculty, University of Washington, Seattle, “Eve’s Pandas: Queer Futurity and the More-Than-Human”

Julien Fischer, Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer, Stanford University, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, “Writing the Incurable: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on Love and the Impossible”

Bingham Center, Featured, From Our Collections, Gender and Sexuality History Collections, RL Scholars

The Politics of Panda Love in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Papers

Contributed by David K. Seitz, associate professor of cultural geography, Harvey Mudd College: Recipient of an Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Research Travel Grant, 2024-25, supported by the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Foundation

The intellectual and creative legacy of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is so multi-layered and wide-ranging that even such adjectives scarcely do it justice. But across the many webs and folds of experience and knowledge that Sedgwick’s work interweaves, it is difficult to miss the recurrence of a particular charismatic megafauna: the giant panda.

Pandas, art historian Jason Edwards observes, were “were crucial to Sedgwick’s late style,” appearing in several of her books, poems, and craft works from 1996 onward. But Sedgwick’s panda-love, Edwards points out, began much earlier, as an attachment formed in childhood and sustained in the exchange of countless panda cards over the course of her remarkable marriage to optometry professor Hal Sedgwick. Eve Sedgwick noticed all kinds of queer possibilities and pleasures in pandas – their ambiguous gendering, cozy contentment, shyness, roundness – and in the cross-cultural encounters convened around them, as in China’s practice of “panda diplomacy.”

I came to the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library under the auspices of the Sallie Bingham Center with a particular interest in Sedgwick’s attention to questions of race, class, and empire. Although I certainly imagined that such questions might come up in her correspondence with Richard Fung, the acclaimed Chinese-Trinidadian-Canadian queer experimental filmmaker, I had not anticipated the place of the panda in such exchanges.

Fung’s card to Sedgwick. Courtesy of David Seitz

In March 1991, Fung visited Duke under Sedgwick’s auspices, screening his 1990 film My Mother’s Place and lecturing on questions of race, gender, and sexuality in Chinese and Caribbean diasporas. There, he met Sedgwick’s student, José Esteban Muñoz, who would later analyze “My Mother’s Place” in his germinalbook Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Politics of Performance. Upon returning home to Toronto, Fung chose an apposite thank-you note for Eve Sedgwick’s hospitality: a pop-up card of two pandas in playful repose, sold to benefit the World Wildlife Fund.

The card must have delighted Eve, both in its imagery and in its three dimensionality, given her interest in the aesthetics of texture and touch. Fung’s postscript – “Which do you think is the girl panda and the boy panda? How do you know?” – subtly extended his longstanding, both serious and playful criticisms of Western stereotypes about Asian genders and sexualities, and must also have affected her. Two years later, in Tendencies, Sedgwick listed Fung among queer artists of color who “do a new kind of justice to the fractal intimacies of language, skin, migration, state.”

Fung’s panda card underscores the wisdom of Edwards’s advice against dismissing Sedgwick’s panda-love as “childish” or “peripheral” to her intellectual and creative contributions. If anything, the card offers an apt metaphor: it is the surprises that “pop up” in Sedgwick’s archive and in all archival encounters that often prove the most informative.

Further Reading:

Edwards, Jason, ed. Bathroom Songs: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet, (Santa Barbara, California: Punctum Books, 10 Nov. 2017) doi: https://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0189.1.00.

Edwards, Jason. Queer and Bookish: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as Book Artist, (Santa Barbara, California: Punctum Books, 03 Mar. 2022) doi: https://doi.org/10.53288/0328.1.00.

Fung, Richard, dir. My Mother’s Place (Toronto, Canada: V-Tape, 1990).

Hu, Jane. “Between us: A queer theorist’s devoted husband and enduring legacy.” The New Yorker, (9 Dec. 2015): https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/between-us-a-queer-theorists-devoted-husband-and-enduring-legacy.

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