All posts by Kate Collins

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”

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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!

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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

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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.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Politics of Performance, (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1 May 1999).

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. A Dialogue on Love, (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 9 Jun. 2000).

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies, (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, Oct. 1993) doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381860.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Weather in Proust, ed. Jonathan Goldberg, (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, Dec. 2011) doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394921.

 

Bingham Center, Featured, From Our Collections, RL Scholars

Profiles in Research: Paula Ramos on Kate Millett and Clarissa Sligh

Contributed by Paula Ramos, Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History at the Federal University of São Paulo.

In August 2024, I visited the Bingham Center at the Rubenstein Library, as a recipient of a 2024-2025 Mary Lily Research Travel Grant, where I had the privilege of researching the papers of Kate Millett and Clarissa Sligh, American artists, activists, and writers. My interest in their documents emerged while I was developing a research project for my Postdoctoral studies in Art History at the Federal University of São Paulo. The project explores how some artists challenged confinements rooted in colonial and patriarchal structures that normalize power mechanisms, such as mass incarceration of Black people, the pathologization of the female gender, and the symbolic, cultural, and epistemological constraints imposed intersectionally by issues of race, sexuality, class, and gender.

For fourteen years, Kate Millett was preoccupied with the story of Sylvia Likens, a sixteen-year-old white girl found dead in a basement in Indianapolis after suffering abuse and torture at the hands of her caregiver and the caregiver’s children in 1965. Millett was moved to closely follow the trial of those involved in Likens’s murder, resulting in years of research and the compilation of newspaper and magazine clippings. In addition to the installation The Trial of Sylvia Likens (1978), created from enlarged newspaper clippings on wooden panels and clothed mannequins to recreate the courtroom scene, Millett wrote The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice (1979). The book expands the notion of violence tied to the female gender by tracing Millett’s identification with the young Sylvia Likens:

“You have been with me ever since, an incubus, a nightmare, my own nightmare, the nightmare of adolescence, of growing up a female child, of becoming a woman in a world set against us, a world we have lost and where we are everywhere reminded of our defeat.”

The Loony Bin Trip by Kate Millett, Simon and Schuster, 1991.

As I continued to investigate her personal archives, I began to explore similarities between this story and the confinement Millett experienced during her three involuntary hospitalizations in psychiatric institutions — a fact she would only reveal publicly many years later, in her book The Loony Bin Trip (1990), which took over five years to be published, partly due to the controversial nature of its subject matter.

Gleason, Katherine. “To the bin and back.” Clipping (n.d.) from the Kate Millett Papers, Box W4.

In an article by Katharine Gleason, “To the Bin and Back,” published on the book’s release, Millett describes how she was taken by her sister, her husband, and her ex-lover to be hospitalized against her will for the first time in 1973. Millett emphasizes the political and ideological factors surrounding her hospitalization. Her sister disapproved of her efforts to free a Trinidadian civil rights activist accused of murder, as she said: “I returned to Berkeley full of this — it was the biggest civil rights assignment I had ever had. To stop a lynching, to prevent a hanging… It was not, however, all-absorbing to my friends.”

Just as Millett sought to free herself from the stigmatized labels of female madness, which misinterpreted the radicalization of women’s struggles and lead to psychiatric hospitalizations, she also wanted to liberate the case of Likens from the narrow constraints of the police-judicial narrative. Not surprisingly, in the box of correspondence from people who had read the book, a man from Indianapolis expressed disgust, justifying his indignation by the fact that Millett refuses to report the case objectively: “Instead of reading an account of what took place by someone who had researched the subject as the book jacket indicated, I was instead hit with a barrage of disjointed, unconnected and at times perverted reactions to the entire situation.” In contrast, I read dozens of other letters from women moved by the book, congratulating Millett for her courage in sharing her personal testimony in The Basement. Among them, I was struck by a letter from a student who read the book in a course on domestic violence, who concluded: “Most of the men in class could not go as far in looking at the implications of the book. Most were empathetic, but really not able to identify with the themes (at least as we interpreted them) in the book.”

Letter from Nancy Oppenlander to Kate Millett in a letterhead paper from Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. February 23, 1981. From the Kate Millett Papers, Box BMT3.

This brief analysis of the reception of Millett’s work led me, while writing this text, to explore the various attempts by Clarissa Sligh to publish her book Wrongly Bodied (2009). The book documents the long process of gender transition from female to male of Sligh’s friend Jake, who requested to be photographed by her in 1997, while exploring the visibility of issues that were often kept secret due to societal judgment.

L: Jake reflected in mirror, April 13, 1997. R: Jake with Clarissa Sligh, November 8, 1997. Both from: Sligh, Clarissa. Wrongly Bodied: Documenting Transition from Female to Male. Philadelphia: Leeway Foundation, 2009.

Upon finding the folder of correspondence with publishers, I was shocked to discover that around twelve publishers had returned the book, praising the importance of the subject but lamenting the impossibility of its publication, with comments such as: “It’s impressive and important, but, sadly, I don’t think we are the right place for it;” “It does not fit comfortably into our current publishing program;” or “A book on this subject would not fit our list at the present time.” Sligh also produced a hand-made artists’ book version, Wrongly Bodied Two, published through Women’s Studio Workshop in 2004.

Just like Millett identified with Likens, Sligh identifies with Jake — or at least establishes connections between her own life and her subject, despite the differences between them (a Black artist photographing a white trans man). This identification is grounded in the perception of societal standards of passability, which determine which bodies fit into or are excluded from society. Sligh, in the introduction of the book, says: “To comprehend an identity change of this magnitude, I turned to my family background in the history of the slavery in this country.”

In the book, the artist draws a parallel with the story of Ellen Craft, “a light skin female slave who, in 1848, disguised herself as an invalid Southern gentleman, and the master of her husband is inserted into the narrative. She crossed the Mason Dixon line by successfully crossing the boundaries of black to white, slave to owner, woman to man, and wife to master.” Sligh concludes her argument in a document about the potential readership for Wrongly Bodied in response to the demands of many publishers: “The concept of ‘transgender’ impacts the currently contested debates about whether gender, race, and class are natural, constructions, or performance.” In the realm of literary and artistic acceptance, creative constraints are numerous, yet both Millett and Sligh challenge these barriers, expanding the limited spaces available to themselves and their peers.

Exhibits, Featured, Students and Interns

Sharing Congolese Voices

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Post contributed by Grace Zayobi, Exhibitions Intern

When I started my internship with exhibitions, I expected some difficult topics. History is complex and the way people represent history is even more complex. So, constructing exhibits based on these topics is no laughing matter. But my first assignment being something so close to home was unexpected.

Even though I was born here and grew up in the US, my mother immigrated here in 1990s from the Democratic Republic Congo (DRC) While my opinions can’t hold as much weight as someone who was born and raised in the DRC, I grew up in a mixture of Congolese and American culture in a multi-generational household where there were Congolese immigrants coming in and out. I’ve seen how their lives are affected by what is happening in the DRC and I want to be able to carry their voices so their stories can eventually be heard.

So, imagine my surprise when my first task was to support the exhibition Joseph Conrad’s Polish-Ukrainian “Graveyard”: Memory, Mourning, and Anti-Colonial Resistance in his 19th-Century Family Photo Album. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) might not be a name well known in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) but to a lot of Congolese-Americans he is somewhat familiar. He wrote The Heart of Darkness but that’s not what the exhibit is about. This exhibit is about his own tragedy: he faced being stripped of his rights, losing his parents, and being forced from his home. You can feel his apathy for humanity when reading his book, and maybe this exhibit will truly contextualize why he feels that way.

This post isn’t about Joseph Conrad, it’s about the people in Joseph Conrad’s book The Heart of Darkness; although Belgium or the Congo are never named in the book, that is what the book is about. As much as Conrad suffered, it seemed he still saw Congolese as inferior people. I read his book and felt like he saw the Congolese as unworthy of humanity, but their colonizers were just as unworthy as he felt the Congolese were. I still think the book holds anti-colonial viewpoints that may have been controversial at the time but all I can see is a man who thought of my people as less than human.

The Congo is the quintessential colonial massacre story. But rather than telling actual stories of the people, the Congo is often used as a metaphor.  When King Leopold II of Belgium took over in the year 1885 it helped spark the “Scramble for Africa,” a time period where European countries brought parts of Africa under their control. His cruelty led to a humanitarian crisis which activists protested until he relinquished his control in 1908.  One of the first nations to back Leopold’s control of Congo was America, and a lot of other countries followed suit and supported Leopold’s private colony. The destabilization caused by outside governments interfering, the stripping of resources, and violent conflicts with neighboring countries can all be traced back to the Belgian occupation. It has left the Congo in ruins; we should see it has one of Africa’s first colonial tragedies.

Although the protests and interest in the Congo seemingly decreased, the humanitarian crisis continues to be relevant today. A lot of people consider Congo hard to talk about because there are no easy answers, no easy way to protest, no simple ways to make a difference.

Just reading this blog post is listening to Congolese voices. What else can you do? Methods of protests are highly debated. So just starting your education is important. Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost is a great place to start reading. Hochschild talks about the impacts of Leopold’s rule and the formation of the group that fought against his ownership of DRC.

But Congolese stories written by Congolese people must be highlighted too. While all these recommendations may not be about the crisis in Congo, they are all written by Congolese people. And they are all affected by that tragedy, and you can see elements of that in their writing. Some books include:

  • How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child by Sandra Uwiringiyimana and Abigail Pesta. With assistance from Pesta, Uwiringiyimana writes about her experience surviving the Second Congo War, and her life in America has a refugee.
  • JJ Bola is the Kinshasa-born British author of Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined. As well as writing about gender in society he is also a fiction author and a poet that touches on his time as a refugee.
  • Tram 83 is the debut novel of Fiston Mwanza Mujila. Originally, he wrote in French, but his book has been translated and several languages and spread internationally. Tram 83 is about a group that tries to profit off of their unnamed mining town in Congo. Though the novel is fiction, it carries critiques about colonialism and capitalism that are relevant to the real-life Congo. Mujila’s capabilities have earned him the role of a professor of African literature in Graz, Austria where he lives now.
  • Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc. : Bismarck’s Testament is a satirical novel about a young Congolese man who turns his life into a game in hopes of making enough money to leave his small village. This novel is both funny and tragic, it ruthlessly shows how the Scramble for Africa effects African lives to this day.

Working on the Joseph Conrad exhibit was a chance for me to learn more about him in the same way this blog post is a chance for you to learn more about people like me. All I can hope that you take away from this is to give Congo a chance to be cared about.

Grace Zayobi, with a layout of the exhibit
Bingham Center, Featured, Meet the Staff, RL Scholars, Travel Grants

“You Had to Be There:” Charis Books and More’s 50-Year History as the South’s Oldest Independent Feminist Bookstore

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.

A Black woman is seated at a small table, signing a book. Three Black women wait in line to have their books signed.
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.

Bingham Center, Featured, Meet the Staff, Radio Haiti, RL Scholars, Travel Grants

Profiles in Research: Tessel Veneboer on Women Against Sex

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.

Poster with speckled black background and “The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism” in slanted text at top. A list of questions asks: Who are the sexual liberals? What are they doing to feminism? The conference program includes Gloria Steinem, Kathleen Barry, Susan Brownmiller. Phyllis Chesler, Andrea Dworkin, Shere Hite, Catharine MacKinnon, Robin Morgan, and others.
“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, Bingham Center, Featured, Franklin Research Center, Gender and Sexuality History Collections, Hartman Center, History of Medicine, Human Rights Archive, Travel Grants

Research Travel Grant Applications Open for 2025-2026

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The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is now accepting applications for the 2025-2026 Research Travel Grant Program, offering awards of up to $1500 to support research projects associated with the following Centers, subject areas, and collection holdings:

  • Archive of Documentary Arts General Grants
  • 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).

 

Featured, From Our Collections, Human Rights Archive, New at the Rubenstein Library

An Invitation to the Parker Anderson Collection of Conspiracy Theory Research

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 The Arizona 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.