Contributed by Dartricia Rollins, Visiting Librarian for Oral History at Emory University, Rose Library, and former Assistant Director of Charis Books and More.
With support from the Mary Lily Research Travel Grant program, I visited the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, and the Rubenstein Library, to spend time researching the Charis Books and More and Charis Circle collection. This allowed me to extend the digital campaign I started with my co-worker Saisha Gupta in 2023, “You Had to Be There,” into the Charis 50th celebration campaign in 2024, “take root among the stars.”
In early 2023, Saisha and I had the idea to highlight Charis’s history as “women’s history” for Women’s History Month in March. This required the quick and dedicated work of the archivists in the Rubenstein Library to locate and digitize dozens of Charis photos. In that process one photo stood out to us most: Octavia E. Butler, the author of many speculative fiction novels, most famously The Parable of the Sower.
Octavia Butler signs copies of her book Blood Child and Other Stories for eager readers at a table in Charis Books and More, Atlanta, GA, c. 1995. From the Charis Books and More and Charis Circle records, Rubenstein Library.
One thing to know about one of Charis’s current co-owners, Sara Look, is that Sara has the longest history with Charis, is meticulous, and likes to be accurate! So, when we tried to narrow down the dates for when Butler visited Charis, this became a year-long question.
I promise I am going somewhere with this.
This is what we knew for sure: Sara had in her possession a copy of Kindred: The 25th Anniversary edition, signed to Charis and we had photographic evidence of Butler being present in the store, but no date on the photo. Even after a phone call to co-founder Linda Bryant no one could remember the year, let alone the exact date of when the photo was taken. So, we decided that it was in the early 2000s based on the signed book.
When Sara and I visited the archives at the end of August 2024, our goal was to find photos of the many people who have contributed their love and talents to Charis over the years. We wanted to reflect on the almost 50 years of programming that has made Charis one of the most important queer and feminist cultural institutions in the South, and we wanted to share these memories and images back with not only the staff but the community in the form of postcards as keepsakes at our 50th celebration in November 2024.
What we found was that and so much more! As we pored over the hundreds of program flyers we found one that dated Octavia E. Butler’s first visit in 1995 in celebration of her book Blood Child and Other Stories! Discovering the 1995 Blood Child program flyer was exciting because it answered our question about Butler’s first visit to Charis and reinforced our decision to use the quote from Parable of the Sower as our 50th anniversary theme. But it also amplified the story we wanted to tell about our 50th theme: “take root among the stars,” a quote which comes from Butler’s prescient novel Parable of the Sower.
“We chose this invocation from Butler because it dares us to change the world. It dares us to struggle through scarcity and collapse, to build community with the tools available to us, and to imagine a future that is only possible with our people alongside us” (From Charis Turns 50).
My visit to the archive reminded me that our past is very much connected to our future and that it is always a good time to riffle through old documents as we fortify ourselves for our tomorrow. This photo is now part of the Charis lore and, “you [really just] had to be there” to get it.
Post contributed by Tessel Veneboer, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Literary Studies, Ghent University.
Veneboer received a Mary Lily Research Travel Grant, 2023-2024. This piece is excerpted and adapted from Veneboer’s longer piece “Bad Sex,” published in Extra Intra Reader 3: Swallowed Like a Whole, which was edited by Rosie Haward, Clémence Lollia Hilaire and Harriet Foyster, (Gerrit Rietveld Academie & Sandberg Instituut, 2024).
As part of my doctoral research, I spent four weeks at Duke University studying the Kathy Acker Papers and other collections at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture. I work on the relationship between sex and literary form. In particular, the question of the optimism-pessimism divide among feminists about the givenness of the sexual imagery under patriarchy: the pornographic imagination. After sharing my interests with Kelly Wooten, archivist at the Sallie Bingham Center, she suggested I look at the archives of several anti-pornography activists including Dorothy “Cookie” Teer. This diversion from the Acker papers went on to consume much of my research time as I became more and more absorbed in the anti-pornography materials.
Flipping through newspaper clippings, personal correspondence, logistics for conferences and teach-ins, drafts of lectures and manifestos in the Teer Papers, I began to see that disagreements among feminists over the role of pornography, sexual violence, and censorship are not only part of a dispute about what feminists want or should want from sex, but contain perhaps a more fundamental disagreement: the definition of “sex” itself. Is sexuality simply an activity that should and can be reimagined by feminists or should we analyse sex as part of human nature, that is: as subjectivity itself? And if the latter, can there be any authenticity of sexual desire for women in a patriarchal society?
Among the anti-porn materials in the archive, I found an extensively annotated draft of a paper titled ”Sex Resistance in Heterosexual Arrangements.” A manifesto of sorts, the paper was authored by the Southern Women’s Writing Collective, alternatively known as Women Against Sex (WAS). The WAS group was closely affiliated with Women Against Pornography (WAP) who were active in New York City, under the wings of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon. The WAS group met WAP in 1987 at the “Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism” conference at New York University, where WAS presented their manifesto for the first time.
“The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism: A Full Day Conference” poster (1987), Dorothy “Cookie” Teer Papers, Rubenstein Library.
The advertising poster of the conference asks: “Who are the sexual liberals? What are they doing to feminism? Why do they defend pornography? What do they mean by ‘freedom’?” In the manifesto, the WAS members make a case against the pro-sex attitude that aims to rethink and reclaim female sexuality by emphasising the multiplicity of pleasures. To simply change the representation of sexuality does not resolve the association of sex with subordination for the WAS group. For them, sex-positive feminism follows a patriarchial logic that naturalises sexuality as an animalistic force and thus can keep women “under the spell” of sexuality. Women Against Sex asks: what if we resist compulsory sexuality?
The conference materials in the archive contain many drafts and internal disagreements over the WAS manifesto, but the rationale is clear: the only function of sex is the subordination of women and therefore “the practice of sexuality” must be resisted. This “sex resistance” movement aligns with Valerie Solanas’s proposal in the S.C.U.M. manifesto to create an “unwork force” of women who will take on jobs in order not to work at the job, to work slowly, or to get fired. To engage in ‘”sex resistance” is to refuse the idea that woman is, before all else, a sexual being who must realise the potential to enjoy sex. In the manifesto WAS proposes two alternatives: feminist celibacy and “deconstructive lesbianism.” They emphasize the difference between religious celibacy–the “vow”–and celibacy as politicized by feminist thought:
She resists on three fronts: she resists all male-constructed sexual needs, she resists the misnaming of her act as prudery and she especially resists the patriarchy’s attempt to make its work of subordinating women easier by consensually constructing her desire in its own oppressive image.[i]
WAS adds that, historically, women have long been practising deconstructive lesbianism and radical celibacy. For example, when a woman temporarily abstains from sex after sexual assault or when women live together without being sexually involved. This sex resistance paper thus argues that feminist celibacy is not new but that this type of abstinence has not been politicised as sabotage.
In a letter to Women Against Pornography, a WAS member explains that the disturbing nature of sex–-what they call woman’s “self-annihilation” as the social paradigm of our sexuality–-is in fact the definition of sex: if it doesn’t subordinate women it’s not sex. This claim is strangely close to queer theorist Leo Bersani’s proposal in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) that sexuality destabilizes any coherent sense of self as the boundaries between self and other are disturbed. Both Dworkin and Bersani refuse to romanticise sex and, as such, denaturalise sex.
The argument for radical celibacy in the “Sex resistance in heterosexual arrangements” article was ambivalently received at the 1987 conference hosted by Women Against Pornography in New York City. WAP member Dorchen Leidholdt, for example, writes to WAS that she fears the sex resistance proposal would undermine the credibility of the anti-pornography movement as a whole. Andrea Dworkin, however, was intrigued by the politicized celibacy which she found “more radical” than her own proposal to ban all pornography. Only without compulsory heterosexuality, it would be possible to restore, make whole again, what Dworkin calls the ”compromised metaphysical privacy” of woman.
[i] Southern Women’s Writing Collective (Women Against Sex), ‘Sex Resistance in Heterosexual Arrangements’, Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, New York & London, Teachers College Press, 1990.
Archive of Documentary Arts Sidney Gamble Travel Grants
Doris Duke Foundation Research Travel Grants
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Travel Grants
History of Medicine Collections
Human Rights Archive
John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History
Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture (Mary Lily Research Grants)
Anyone whose research would be supported by sources from the Rubenstein Library’s research centers is eligible to apply. We encourage applications from students at any level of education; faculty and teachers; visual and performing artists; writers; filmmakers; public historians; and independent researchers.
For assistance determining the eligibility of your project, please contact AskRL@duke.edu with the subject line “Travel Grants.”
Eligibility
Applicants must reside beyond a 100-mile radius of Durham, N.C., and may not be current Duke students or employees.
Information Session
An online information session will be held Wednesday, January 15, 2025, 2-3 pm EST. This program will review application requirements, offer tips for creating a successful application, and include an opportunity for attendees to ask questions. This program will be recorded and posted online afterwards. Register for the session here.
Timeline
The deadline for applications will be Friday, February 28, 2025, at 6:00 pm EST.
Decisions will be announced by the end of April 2025 for travel during May 2025-June 2026. Awards are paid as reimbursement after completion of the research visit(s).
Post contributed by Will Runyan, Ph.D., Meyer Human Rights Archive Intern
Pamphlet supporting the 1992 presidential bid of Bo Gritz and containing conspiratorial claims related to the status of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton as members of Yale’s secret society, Skull and Bones
In the March 22, 1992 issue of the Detroit Free Press, political correspondent Hugh McDiarmid reported on “the biggest, most enthusiastic—and yes, wackiest—presidential rally that I have witnessed in Michigan this year,” which he went on to describe as “a passionately patriotic—if disconnected and, at times, historically inaccurate—journey through conspiracy land.” The candidate on stage was not Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush, Democratic challenger Bill Clinton, or even Ross Perot, the Texas businessman whose independent bid would attract 18.9% of the popular vote. Rather, it was Lt. Col. James “Bo” Gritz, a retired US Army Special Forces officer decorated for his service in Vietnam who ran as the 1992 presidential candidate for the right-wing Populist Party. As McDiarmid notes, Gritz’s candidacy represented a shift from the overtly racist and antisemitic rhetoric of the Populist Party’s 1988 presidential candidate, David Duke. Though Gritz’s two-and-a-half-hour speech in Michigan was not entirely free of slurs, his appeal to a packed community college auditorium rested on suspicions that the US government had been overrun by “unproved and unprovable plots (by international bankers, globalists, Tri-Lateral commission members, etc.) to take over the world,” as McDiarmid skeptically puts it.
Bo Gritz won just 0.1% of the 1992 popular vote, seemingly good evidence that his fringe campaign was precisely that. Yet in the context of the Parker Anderson collection of conspiracy theory research, Gritz’s campaign appears as one of many marginal forces driving the growth of a vibrant conspiratorial ecosystem. Throughout the 1990s, disparate figures, organizations, and fixations increasingly found alignment in a conspiracist worldview predicated on the rise of a tyrannical New World Order orchestrated by shadowy elites with the consent of top US officials. At the same time, this outlook gained increasing visibility and influence in the cultural and political discourse of the United States, spawning infinite variations in subsequent decades from 9/11 conspiracies to QAnon and falsehoods about the ongoing FEMA response to hurricanes Helene and Milton.
Originally published in 1992 by retired Pheonix police officer Jack McLamb, an affiliate of Bo Gritz, this document encourages police officers and members of the armed forces to resist the implementation of New World Order plots by the federal government. Its message is akin to that of today’s Oath Keepers and related militias.
The idea that emergent forms of international cooperation or global governance could endanger the rights and freedoms of average US citizens has circulated in many forms since the end of World War I, often linked to antisemitic tropes, Red Scare fears, or pervasive beliefs about secret societies. The Parker Anderson collection includes small amounts of material dating from the 1960s and 1970s that point to antecedents of the New World Order discourse that exploded in the 1990s, as well as a larger set of materials that offer glimpses of its further evolution in the past two decades—some as recent as May 2024. But the collection’s center of gravity is the period from 1987 to 2001.
To the extent that Parker Anderson, a lifelong Arizona resident and author of works on local history, was an engaged reader of local and state news from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s, exposure to conspiracist views may have been part and parcel of a morning routine—whether through reports on regional militia activity in TheArizona Republic or columns and letters to the editor expressing fears and suspicions about the New World Order in The Prescott Daily Courier. If the clippings from these and other newspapers included in the collection evoke the collector’s incidental brushes with conspiracism, a larger volume of newspaper articles obtained through electronic databases represents a concerted effort to document varied aspects of conspiracist discourse. These, in turn, provide essential context for the collection’s core, composed of conspiracist literature and promotional materials in varied formats: books, booklets, serials, pamphlets, audio and video recordings of speeches and interviews, documentary films, and mailers and catalogs from a variety of publishers and distributors of these materials.
Lecture on tape distributed by John Maffei’s Catholic Counterpoint, one of several extremist Catholic publishers represented in the Parker Anderson collection
Taken together, this body of publications represents a distinctive resource for thinking about conspiracy networks. In addition to highlighting an array of individuals and organizations involved in crafting and disseminating conspiracist content at varying scales, operating in over twenty states and Washington, DC, the collection calls attention to their variable deployment of shared vocabularies in the service of constitutionalist, libertarian, evangelical, Catholic, white supremacist, and antisemitic arguments. Clusters of materials focused on events that served as conspiracy catalysts (the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992, the Waco siege in 1993, and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995) and on the prolific genre of conspiracy theories about Bill and Hillary Clinton richly document the evolution and convergence of ideas across distinct sources.
Antisemitic booklet from the early 1980s. Later New World Order conspiracy literature inherited the ideas boldly announced on the cover, expressed both in explicitly antisemitic terms and indirectly with references to international financial institutions.
Documentation focused on a range of organizations and individuals offers another valuable means of navigating a cacophony of New World Order conspiracies. The organization best represented in the collection is the right-wing political advocacy group Liberty Lobby, which played an outsized role in bringing conspiracist views into the mainstream through publication of the populist and anti-establishment weekly newspaper The Spotlight, sponsorship of the radio talk show Radio Free America, and distribution of books in the same vein. Among the best represented individuals is Bo Gritz, whose conspiracist trajectory extends well beyond the 1992 presidential race. Each entity draws elements of the larger collection together in a distinct way. In the case of Liberty Lobby, materials produced and distributed by the organization seamlessly integrate the most disparate conspiratorial strands, among them stolen elections, miracle cures for cancer, Holocaust denial, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the idea of FEMA as vehicle of authoritarianism. In the case of Bo Gritz, strands of conspiracism seem to grow together through an idiosyncratic life path progressing from private missions into Vietnam and Laos in the 1980s, motivated by the belief that abandoned POWs were held there, to attempts to mediate between federal authorities and white supremacist militia figures in the 1990s.
While the Parker Anderson collection captures only the early evolution of conspiracist discourse in the internet age through a variety of web publications, and subsequent developments linked to social media are largely absent, those unfamiliar with the “conspiracy land” of the 1990s may be surprised to find its degree of continuity with claims and perceptions surrounding the 2016, 2020, and 2024 US presidential elections. Anyone seeking to understand the roots of the conspiratorial present will find that the collection offers a wealth of strange, often unpleasant, but essential reading.
Article discussing Bo Gritz’s efforts to mediate between federal law enforcement and the Montana Freemen which also includes a sketch of his biography.
Post contributed by Matilde Manara, Postdoc Fellow at Institut Lethica, Université de Strasbourg, France. Manara received an Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Research Travel Grant, 2023-2024.
I approached the materials held in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Papers as part of a larger project on feminist models of writing, behavior, and knowledge to be found in Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du TempsPerdu. I am particularly interested in understanding how readers can acknowledge a literary model such as A La Recherche, recognizing its importance in their life and/or art, without necessarily embracing its esthetic, moral, or epistemological foundations (and even by openly rejecting them). Along with Sedgwick’s Works in Fiber, Paper and Proust (2005), I delved into Chantal Akerman’s La Captive (2000), Jacqueline Rose’s Albertine (2001) and Anne Carson’s The Albertine Workout (2014). An important part of this research deals with questions raised by Sedgwick herself in her writings on Proust. In the final chapter of Epistemology of the Closet, she notably writes:
I was reading Proust for the first time during just the short stretch of years during which it occurred to me to have ambitions that were not exclusively under the aspect of eternity: to want to publish visibly, know people, make a go it, get a run for my money. Oddly, of course, it was reading Proust that made me want these adventures and think I could find them. The interminable meditation on the vanity of human wishes was a galvanizing failure for at least one reader: it was, if anything, the very sense of the transparency and predictability worldly ambitions that gave me the nerve and skill to have worldly ambitions of my own. Like, I believe, most young women, I never had a shred of identification with JuIien Sorel or the nineteenth-century French male plot of conquering the capital – until after the years of Proust-reading; then both the hero’s airy ambition and his concomitant uncritical adoption of a master text became intelligible and engaging traits (Sedgwick 1990, 241).
In preparing my visit to Duke, I had planned to explore this potential identification by dividing the materials I expected to consult into two categories: those related to Sedgwick’s academic work (syllabi from the seminars she held on Proust from around 1998 up to 2009, notes and drafts for Epistemology of the Closet and The Weather in Proust, scattered articles, and records of conferences) on the one hand, and those related to her artistic work (textile art, artists’ books, pieces from her 2005 exhibition, Works in Fiber, Paper and Proust) on the other. The days spent at Duke made me realize how much my plan was naive, even somewhat paradoxical, for these two practices are deeply intertwined and connected to each other in the same “fractal” way she suggests Proust’s novel should be read (Sedgwick 2011, 90-93).
Proust Box notebook with notes on paper dolls, hexaflexagons (first pages), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Papers, Box 40.
Proust Box notebook with notes on paper dolls, hexaflexagons (first pages), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Papers, Box 40.
I was most struck by two aspects of the materials I had the chance to consult in the archive. First, to see how Proust’s novel, in both its material dimension (the printed paper) and its virtual dimension (the hypertextual lattice we discover when not following a linear progression), becomes itself the object of a découture (witnessed by pages and pages of copied, printed and collaged quotations organized by Sedgwick under thematic headings such as Weather, Interior-outside, Albertine, Happiness, Anxiety, etc.), thus allowing the book’s complex architecture to emerge, while at the same time making it possible to detach from it, or even build it anew. Second, to observe how these shredded fragments feed into Sedgwick’s vast and increasingly central reflection on immanence (drawn on Proust as much as on Buddhism or the philosophy of Plotinus) to such an extent that the underlined pages of the many (including some multilingual) versions of A la recherche she uses over the years bear testimony to this gradual convergence, revealing how transformative reading the novel could have been for her.
My time at Rubenstein library has certainly given me the opportunity to enrich my project, helping me to better understand how Sedgwick reads, writes and seals in Proust – and not on, as she meant by the title of her exhibition at Harvard in 2005, “Works in Fiber, Paper, and Proust.” But it has also, and most importantly, touched me on a personal level, made my Proustian reader self fully and enthusiastically agree with her when she notices that:
It is harder to say in what this truth-effect of Proust consists. AII the paradoxes of a more traditionally conceived vraisemblance are especially active here: molecularly, there are relatively few individual propositions in or arising from the book that it would make sense to consider true; and even at the molar level, propositions or “values” or “attitudes” (erotic or political pessimism, for instance) that could be extracted from Proust do not necessarily seem true to me, to whom, nonetheless, “Proust” seems so “true”. Plainly, classically, it can be said that the coherence and credibility of the work, its vraisemblance in the usual senses, depend on an internal structuration of materials and codes that can only as relation, as structure, be interdigitated with or tested against the relational structures of a “reality” that surrounds and interleaves and thus mutually constitutes it. The truth-effect I am describing goes beyond questions of the work’s coherence and credibility, however. It has to do with the use of the literary work, its (to sound censorious) expropriability by its readers, its (to sound, in a different vocabulary, celebratory) potential for empowering them. For, unmistakably, the autobiographical parable I have just encapsulated as “the years of Proust-reading” represents both a prolonged instance of textual abuse and a story of empowerment. (Sedgwick 1990, 241).
Contributed by Adam Kocurek, PhD Candidate, History, The City University of New York Graduate Center.
With the assistance of a Harry H. Harkins, Jr. T’73, Travel Grant, I visited the Rubenstein Library in the summer of 2023 to carry out research for my dissertation, a history of LGBTQ+ faculty activism and community building in American higher education from the late 1960s through the late 1990s. During my visit, I explored several collections, ranging from institutional records to the personal papers of LGBTQ+ faculty members.
GLSG Newsletter
During my visit, I engaged with many magnificent sources that will feature in my dissertation. One such source from the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Papers, is volume 2 issue 4 of the Gay and Lesbian Study Group of the American Musicological Society “GLSG Newsletter,” published in March 1992. As a Ph.D. candidate at The CUNY Graduate Center, an institution at which Sedgwick worked and made important scholarly contributions, I found it to be an almost surreal and emotional experience going through her collection at Duke University. While Sedgwick was employed at Duke, she spearheaded LGBTQ+ issues at the university, serving as consultant on the University Coordinating Committee for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Studies, as well as being an active member of the Modern Language Association’s Gay and Lesbian Caucus. Through her scholarly and activist networks, she amassed ephemera from around the country, providing amazing insights into the state of LGBTQ+ faculty’s political and social organizing during the 1980s and 1990s.
The GLSG Newsletter provides a fascinating snapshot of a transitionary period in the history of LGBTQ+ faculty organizing for their rights and recognition within higher education. In the wake of the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, lesbian and gay academics formed the Gay Academic Union (GAU) in 1973, the first group of out academics who strove to transform academia into an industry more accepting of LGBTQ+ scholarship and workers. The GAU grew to be a multidisciplinary national network, though within four years, it began to fragment and ultimately dissolve due to a number of factors, including sexism within the organization that alienated lesbian members, chronic funding and outreach issues, and the challenges of maintaining a nation-wide vision for LGBTQ+ faculty organizing. While initially fueled by the energy of the Gay Liberation movement, by the late 1970s, many of the organization’s most radical members had splintered away. By the 1980s, its president, Jonathan Dunn-Rankin, was struggling to bring GAU’s chapters together. While Gay Academic Unions persisted into the 1990s, they were no longer part of a national radical movement, and instead isolated often into specific campus chapters.
By the 1980s and 1990s, discipline-specific LGBTQ+ faculty organizations began to proliferate across the United States, such as the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (SOLGA) which formed in 1979, and the GL/Q Caucus for the Modern Languages (GLQCML). The Gay & Lesbian Study Group (GLSG) of the American Musicological Society, established in 1991, is part of this legacy, and its newsletters provide insights into its vision for LGBTQ+ issues in higher education.
Letter to the editor in GLSG
The March 1992 GLSG newsletter states that their objectives include “promoting communication among lesbian & gay music scholars, increasing awareness of issues in sexuality and music in the academic community, and establishing a forum for the presentation of lesbian & gay music studies,” as well as “to provide an environment in which to examine the process of coming out in academia, and to contribute to a positive political climate for gay & lesbian affirmative action and curricula.” While professional development and networking were key prerogatives for the GLSG, with letters to the editor frequently soliciting help with research and studies, it is very clear that this organization also serves a social function. The GLSG held meetings during the AMS conventions to encourage LGBTQ+ faculty and students to engage with one another. These letters reveal repeated acknowledgment of the importance of forging community, not only for individual professional advancement or to contribute to the vitality of lesbian and gay studies, but to combat loneliness and isolation experienced by LGBTQ+ academics and to share the progressive changes others were working towards at their home campuses. One such contributor, Patrick Brannon from the University of Northern Iowa, writes, “It’s always good to connect with people from afar – eases the isolation that we here in the Midwest feel from time to time… Some of us have been working on passage of a human rights amendment to the University of Northern Iowa’s charter that will provide protection based on sexual orientation.” Similarly to LGBTQ+ faculty organizations rooted in other disciplines, the GLSG attended to a variety of professional, personal, and intellectual needs faced by LGBTQ+ academics in the early 1990s.
News item in GLSG borrowed from the Center for Lesbian & Gay Studies at CUNY.
Something that I find fascinating and have loved exploring with my dissertation is the degree to which these organizations often operated, at least initially, on a very ad hoc basis, openly experimental with their aims and organizing strategies. Many of these groups formed because of the intrepid bravery of a handful of LGBTQ+ faculty who, working without funds and institutional support, were nonetheless able to cater to the needs of LGBTQ+ faculty in their scholarly disciplines. They relied heavily on parallel organizations to provide helpful models and actionable strategies to reach their goals. In this newsletter, under its “News” section, the writers of the GLSG state, “We hope the Center for Lesbian & Gay Studies at CUNY won’t mind if we steal one of their news items, but it was just too good,” later adding, “The same Center for Lesbian & Gay Studies at CUNY, commonly known as CLAGS, has inspired graduate students to request and even push for classes in lesbian & gay studies… This is an interesting model: graduate students requesting and negotiating for classes in gay & lesbian musicology might also be successful elsewhere.”
The early 1990s was a tumultuous period in the history of LGBTQ+ activism. Driven by the desperate conditions of the AIDS crisis, in the wake of earlier organizations like the GAU, LGBTQ+ academics strove for recognition of LGBTQ+ studies as worthy of scholarly validation, for their right to equal treatment and protection from discrimination within the academy, and for community outside of campus boundaries. The GLSG newsletter is an artifact that perfectly captures this dynamic moment in LGBTQ+ history and the history of higher education.
Sarah Bernstein is our 2023-2024 Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Intern.
Tell us a little about yourself.
My name is Sarah and I am currently a student in the dual degree program, pursuing both a M. A. in public history at North Carolina State University and a M. S. in library science at the UNC School of Information and Library Science. My background is in the sociology and history of medicine, studying unorthodox and fringe medicine in the United States and England to gain insight into the creation of medical legitimacy and establishment of medical authority. I currently research the ethics of human remains on display in medical collections, museums, and related contexts.
What do you find interesting about working in libraries, especially our History of Medicine Collections?
As someone who studies the history of medicine, I was thrilled for an opportunity to work closely with the History of Medicine Collections at the Rubenstein Library! The idea of being able to hold, teach with, and introduce others to the manuscripts, materials, and artifacts that I have read about and researched was incredibly exciting.
I changed from a history career track to libraries and archives because I was interested in making history come alive and more accessible to people and the public. As a history student, I have always enjoyed research and working with archival materials, and working in libraries and archives felt like the natural next step. The fact that working in libraries enables me to be around a variety of materials, both those related to my interests and especially those that I would not have sought out myself, is a bonus.
What is a memorable experience from your internship?
Title page of Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica
My first time pulling and handling the first edition De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius was especially memorable. This title is considered a major advance in the history of anatomy and reflects a deep connection between medicine and art. The illustrations in the book are not only impressive because of their anatomical accuracy, but also because of the minute details which were produced by the artists and printers involved. It was incredibly cool to be in the same room as such a historically significant object that I had learned about in my previous coursework.
The entire experience of curating an exhibition for the Trent History of Medicine Room has also been memorable, and I will never be able to look at a display, exhibition, or museum the same way again. It has been an invaluable learning opportunity to work with Rachel Ingold, curator of the History of Medicine Collections, Meg Brown, the head of Exhibitions Services and E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundations Exhibits Librarian, and Yoon Kim, Senior Library Exhibition Technician, on the exhibition and they all were incredibly helpful as I navigated tasks like creating a cohesive narrative for the items to writing exhibition text.
Here is one of my favorites from the collection: an art nouveau bookplate for Dr. Emil Simonson that was designed by the illustrator and printmaker Ephraim Moses Lilien. The bookplate includes a woman who holds a bowl with vapor rising from it, leaning on a staff with one snake wrapped around (likely an allusion to the Staff of Aesculapius, Greek god of medicine). Lilien incorporated Hebrew above and below the image in the border. The top text is Psalm 137:5 while the bottom reiterates that it is Dr. Emil Simonson’s property using his Jewish name, Aliyahu ben Aire Zimon.
Although I chose a rectangular black and white bookplate for this post, the collection includes numerous sizes, shapes, colors, and styles. The medical bookplate collection contains over 450 medically related bookplates and I have had such a great time going through the binders and seeing the various styles that are represented and how the same symbols of medicine and death are portrayed in both similar and different ways.
The Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2024-2025 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!
Archive of Documentary Arts
Elizabeth Barahona, Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University, “Black and Latino Coalition Building in Durham, North Carolina 1980-2010.” (Joint award with the Human Rights Archive)
Diana Ruiz, Faculty, University of Washington, Seattle, “Apprehension through Representation: Image Capture of the US-Mexico Border.” (Joint award with the Human Rights Archive)
Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture
Mary Lily Research Travel Grants
Taylor Doherty, Ph.D. candidate, University of Arizona, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, “Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Anti-Imperialist Lesbian Feminist ‘Longed-for but Unrealized World.’”
Thalia Ertman, Ph.D. candidate, University of California, Los Angeles Department of History, “U.S. Feminist Anti-Nuclear Activism and Women’s Bodies, 1970s-1990s.”
Samuel Huber, Faculty, Yale University, Department of English. “A World We Can Bear: Kate Millett’s Life in Feminism.”
Alan Mitchell, Ph.D. candidate, Cambridge University, Faculty of Art History and Architecture, “Redefining Phoebe Anna Traquair through the lenses of historicism and intersectionality.”
Emily Nelms Chastain, Ph.D. candidate, Boston University, School of Theology, “The Clergywoman Question: The International Association of Women Preachers and Ecclesial Suffrage in American Methodism.”
Ana Parejo Vadillo, Faculty, School of Creative Arts, Cultures and Communications, Birkbeck, University of London, “Bound: The Queer Poetry of Michael Field.”
Carol Quirke, Faculty, American Studies, SUNY Old Westbury, “Feminism’s ‘Official Photographer:’ Bettye Lane, News Photography and Contemporary Feminism, 1969-2000.”
Paula Ramos, Independent Researcher, “Spatiality and gender: spatial circumstances of the creative process of feminist artists in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Dartricia Rollins, Graduate Student, University of Alabama, School of Library and Information Studies, “‘You Had to Be There:’ Charis’ 50-Year History as the South’s Oldest Independent Feminist Bookstore.”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Research Travel Grants
Ipek Sahinler, Ph.D. candidate, University of Texas Austin, “A Portrait of Young Women as Proto-Queer Thinkers: Eve Sedgwick vis-à-vis Gloria Anzaldúa.”
David Seitz, Faculty, Harvey Mudd College, “‘No Less Realistic’ but with ‘Different Ambitions’: Reparative Reading, Human Geography, and a Return to Sedgwick.
Doris Duke Foundation Travel Grants
Olivia Armandroff, Ph.D. candidate, University of Southern California, “Volcanic Matter: Land Formation and Artistic Creation.”
Cameron Bushnell, Faculty, Clemson University, Department of English. “‘The Invisible Orient’ in Orientalism Otherwise: Women Write the Orient.”
John Hope Franklin Center for African and African American History and Culture
Thomas Blakeslee, Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University, History Department, “Domestic Disturbances: The Resistant Masculinity of Black Fatherhood from Anti-Slavery to Civil Rights.”
Mara Curechian , Ph.D. candidate, School of English, University of St Andrews, “Acting Like Family: Performing Kinship in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction.”
Michelle Decker, Faculty, Scripps College, English Department, George Washington Williams’s and Amanda B. Smith’s Appalachian Origins and African Explorations.”
Timothy Kumfer, Postdoctoral Fellow, Georgetown University, 2023-2024 Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Counter-Capital: Grassroots Black Power and Urban Struggles in Washington, D.C.”
Hunter Moskowitz, Ph.D. candidate, Northeastern University, “Race and Labor in the Global Textile Industry: Lowell, Concord, and Monterrey in the Early 19th Century.”
Summer Sloane-Britt, Ph.D. candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, “Visions of Liberation: Gender and Photography in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1960-1970.”
Mila Turner, Faculty, Clark Atlanta University, “Bridging Histories: Connecting the Atlanta Student Movement with College Student Activism throughout the Southeast”
Harry H. Harkins T’73 Travel Grants for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History
Kadin Henningsen, Ph.D. candidate, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Walt’s Companions.”
Julie Kliegman, Author, book-length exploration of transgender pioneers.
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History
John Furr Fellowship
Hannah Pivo, Ph.D. candidate, Columbia University, Department of Art History and Archaeology, “Charting the Future: Graphic Methods and Planning in the United States, c. 1910-60.”
Lewis Smith, Faculty, Brunel University London, Brunel Business School, Division of Marketing, “Marketing the State”: J. Walter Thompson Company and the Marketing of the Public Sector in Britain.”
Alvin Achenbaum Travel Grants
Warren Dennis, Ph.D. candidate, Boston University, “Hard Power Paths: Gender and American Energy Policy, 1960-2000.” (Joint award with History of Medicine with support from the Louis H. Roddis Endowment)
Dan Du, Faculty, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Department of History, “U.S. Tea Trade and Consumption after the American Revolution.”
Will Mari, Faculty, Louisiana State University, Manship School of Mass Communication, “Selling the computer to women media workers: gendered ads during the Cold War.”
Janine Rogers, Ph.D. candidate, University of California Los Angeles, Theater Department, “Performance, Militarization, and Materialisms: Canned Goods in Asian America”.
Foare
Jonathan MacDonald, Ph.D. candidate, Brown University, Department of American Studies, “Psychology Hits the Road: Driving Simulators, Billboards, and Hypnosis on the Highway.”
History of Medicine Collections
Warren Dennis, Ph.D. candidate, Boston University, “Hard Power Paths: Gender and American Energy Policy, 1960-2000.” (With support from the Louis H. Roddis Endowment; Joint award with the Hartman Center)
Ava Purkiss, Faculty, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, “After Anarcha: Black Women and Gynecological Medicine in the Twentieth Century.”
Baylee Staufenbiel, Ph.D. candidate, Florida State University, Department of History, “The Seven-Cell Uterus: De Spermate and the Anatomization of Cosmology.”
Brian Martin, Ph.D. candidate, University of Alabama, History Department, “Racial Theory and African American Medical Care in the U.S. Civil War.”
Human Rights Archive
“Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride” flyer, September 30, 2003, illustrates one area of coalition building in Durham, NC, as described in Elizabeth Barahona’s dissertation research proposal. From the Joan Preiss Papers, Box 27.
Elizabeth Barahona, Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University, “Black and Latino Coalition Building in Durham, North Carolina 1980-2010.” (Joint award with the Archive of Documentary Arts)
Diana Ruiz, Faculty, University of Washington, Seattle, “Apprehension through Representation: Image Capture of the US-Mexico Border.” (Joint award with the Archive of Documentary Arts)
Kylie Smith, Faculty, Emory University. School of Nursing, Department of History, “No Place for Children: Disability, Civil Rights, and Juvenile Detention in North Carolina.”
Harrison Wick, Faculty, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) Special Collections and University Archives, “Examination of Primary Sources related to Social Justice and Latin American Immigration in the Human Rights Archive.”
Photojournalist and documentarian Roderico “Rode” Yool Díaz is the winner of this year’s Digital Storytelling Award presented by the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.
Ríos Montt durante lectura de la sentencia por Genocidio, 2013.
Yool Díaz received the award for his digital project documenting the 2012-2015 genocide trials against former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. The project includes photos, video, and audio recordings of the trial proceedings, the reading of the verdict, and Ríos-Montt and his legal team reacting to the verdict.
“Time and again documentarians such as Rode remind us that impactful storytelling is contingent on being present,” said Caitlin Kelly, curator for the Rubenstein’s Archive of Documentary Arts, which co-sponsors the award. “Not just to get the shot and leave, but to hold a story with care such that one cannot put it down so easily. Rode’s work isn’t just coverage of a trial, but an unmasking of a legal performance with consequences far beyond the courtroom.”
Born and raised among Guatemala’s indigenous Maya Kaqchikel community, Roderico Yool Díaz has worked as a photojournalist for over 15 years. In Guatemala, he covers issues related to the aftermath of the internal armed conflict (1960-1996) and current economic and political pressures affecting rural campesino and indigenous communities.
As Yool Díaz notes, “This collection is part of a larger archive of five years of hearings from the genocide trial against former dictators Efraín Ríos Montt and Romeo Lucas García. While most of my photojournalistic work has focused on the survivors of the genocide, in this collection I wanted to highlight the defendants as a way of unmasking the leaders responsible for the violence suffered by hundreds of thousands during the war and genocide against the Mayan people in the 1980s.”
The project is divided into four sections: Ríos Montt appears in court for the first time (2012); Intermediate phase hearings, when the case is sent to trial (2012-2013); Genocide trial (March-May 2013); Annulment of the sentence and the second trial (2013-2018).
“Trials are such an important and integral element of the human rights movement going back to Nuremberg,” said Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist at the Rubenstein Library. “The Human Rights Archive has extensive documentation on trials from around the world, but Rode’s project reminds us that trials are not just procedural. His images capture an insurgent, emotional, historical event, one that is simultaneously public yet intimate and affectively human through and through.”
A survivor of the genocide himself, Yool Díaz was born in 1975 on a Dutch-owned coffee plantation where his family had lived and worked as sharecroppers for generations. As a small child, Yool Díaz worked picking coffee and cardamom. He and his family were forced to flee in the early 1980s due to repression by the Guatemalan military. Like thousands of others, his family suffered forced disappearances and recruitment by the Guatemalan military and paramilitary forces.
Yool Díaz spent the rest of his childhood separated from his nuclear family. He worked agricultural jobs and attended night classes. He was the first in his family to attend college, where he studied anthropology, supporting forensic teams in exhumations of mass graves from the internal armed conflict.
After the peace accords in 1996, Yool Díaz witnessed continued violence by police and military against rural indigenous communities, acts that many believed to be a thing of the past. He realized he needed to document the violence to prove that it was still happening.
“I think it is important to understand a story is not just a collection of facts or the narrative of a specific event,” said Yool Díaz. “It is a human experience and has to be treated with care. It is essential not to reproduce the extractivist cycle that for so long has been applied to indigenous people and our communities.”
Since moving to North Carolina, Yool Díaz also documents resilience through culture and activism in Latin American immigrant and indigenous communities of the South.
The Rubenstein Library Digital Storytelling Award is co-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/activists exploring human rights and social justice, while expanding the digital documentary holdings in the archive and ensuring long-term preservation and access to their work. The award seeks to encourage artists/activists that pull from the strengths of multi-modal documentary and digital deployment. Going beyond the core mission of transmitting information, these digital storytellers create deeply contextualized, multi-sensory projects that may include still image, moving image, oral histories, soundscapes, and documentary writing. Winners receive $2,500 and are invited to present their work at Duke University, where they collaborate with a team of archivists to 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. Our collections document the impact that organizations and individuals have, and the role documentary plays, to motivate the thinking of others and support action that will transform the world.
Post contributed by Roger Peña, Research Services Librarian
Stone Family Gallery on West Campus
What do a Nobel Prize, the first issue of Marvel’s Fantastic Four, a 2000-year old beer receipt, a 1925 advertisement for Heinz Ketchup and a page of the Gutenberg Bible have in common? All these items call Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library home and are currently on display in the Stone Family Gallery on West Campus.
Special collections at Duke have a long history and the university’s collections of rare books, manuscripts, and archives have grown in both size and scope since it first began collecting rare materials in the 1890s (when it was known as Trinity College). Today the Rubenstein Library holds more than 400,000 rare books and over 12,000 manuscript collections, documenting over twenty centuries of human history, culture, and society. Collections range from ancient papyri to colonial and Civil War era manuscripts, and from first editions of literary classics to social media and born-digital files. Thousands of students, visitors and researchers use the library’s resources each year, both online and in-person. The growing collections of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library have helped to make Duke University a world renowned institution of primary source research. But where did it all begin?
“Something Special” examines the history of special collections at Duke University, from the Trinity College Historical Society and the Duke endowment of 1924 to the growth and expansion of Duke Libraries into the 21st Century. “Something Special” welcomes you to explore a (small) selection of materials collected throughout the history of Duke’s special collections – on display in the Stone Family Gallery (located on the 1st floor between the Rubenstein Library and Perkins).
Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University
