Category Archives: Bingham Center

Archive of Documentary Arts, Bingham Center, Featured, Franklin Research Center, From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library

Healing and Truth-Telling: Aishah Shahidah Simmons papers

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Post contributed by Ren Bickel, Technical Services Archivist for the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture

The Rubenstein Library is pleased to announce that the Aishah Shahidah Simmons papers are now open for research. Simmons is a Black feminist lesbian Buddhist practitioner, dharma teacher, and award-winning writer-filmmaker. Through three decades of cultural work, Simmons has created films which address Black lesbian identity, and sexual violence in Black communities, including her feature-length, award-winning NO! The Rape Documentary (2006). National Book and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, says of NO!, “If the Black community in the Americas and in the world would heal itself, it must complete the work this film begins.”

Simmons’s Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology, love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse, brings together diasporic Black child sexual abuse survivors and advocates who, through first-person transformative storytelling, explore child sexual abuse within Black families and communities. Feminist activist and author Gloria Steinem says of love WITH accountability: “With this brave and healing anthology of truth-telling about sexual abuse within Black families, Aishah Shahidah Simmons sets an example for all families.”

orange flyer advertising "A Benefit for No! REEL Sisters Combating Violence Against Black Women"The daughter of Civil Rights activists and scholars Michael Simmons and Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, and the sister of Grammy Award-winning DJ and record executive Tyree Cinque Simmons (DJ Drama), Simmons grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is married to Black lesbian trailblazer Sheila Alexander-Reid, founder of Women in the Life. Simmons founded the multi-media company AfroLez ® Productions in 1992 while participating in a scriptwriting workshop at Scribe Video Center taught by her mentor, the late award-winning author and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara. During the workshop, she wrote Silence…Broken, which she developed into a short film in 1993. The company later produced In My Father’s House (1996), among other films. NO! The Rape Documentary was funded by individual donors, community-based funders, and granting agencies such as the Ford Foundation, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, and the Valentine Foundation. The film had its world premiere at the 2006 Pan African Film & Arts Festival in Los Angeles, CA. Simmons’s films have been included in film festivals around the world and have been screened by many educational and activist organizations.

Simmons’s writings have been published in media such as USA Today, The Root, Ms. Magazine, The Feminist Wire, The New York Times, Lion’s Roar, Black Perspectives, and Left of Black, as well as in newspapers in Philadelphia and Chicago, among other cities. She has held artist-in-residence and guest faculty appointments at universities such as Williams College, Temple University, Scripps College, Spelman College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago. Since 1995, she has led over 400 workshops and dialogues in the U.S., Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. She is an Insight Meditation (vipassanā) teacher, including as Resident Teacher at Delaware Valley Insight.

The Aishah Shahidah Simmons papers were acquired as part of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, and the Archive of Documentary Arts. The collection is comprised of 39 linear feet of materials that document Simmons’s professional career, filmmaking endeavors, and personal life. Researchers will be able to explore Simmons’s writings, correspondence, working files, and an extensive collection of audiovisual materials documenting her life and work. The materials will provide insight into independent filmmaking in the 1990s and 2000s through an intersectional Black feminist lesbian lens and preserve the personal stories of many Black women survivors of sexual violence who courageously chose to speak their truth.

Technical Services Archivist Ren Bickel prepared the collection for research use. Reflecting on Simmons’ papers, she notes, “This collection documents Simmons’s deep commitment to a Black feminist approach to survivor-centered cultural work, especially in her years-long quest to make NO! The Rape Documentary. Researchers will find an array of information about the practical aspects of creating independent documentary films, from securing funding and managing logistics, to writing, filming, and editing. The stories Simmons gathered of Black women survivors’ experiences are powerful and affecting. I’m so excited to see what researchers will discover and how they’ll incorporate the materials into their own writings and projects.”

We are excited to make this singular collection available to students, scholars, and other researchers.

“Placing my papers at Duke marks an important moment in my life and work. As a Black feminist lesbian survivor-healer whose cultural works, writings, and images are survivor-centered and rooted in non-carceral accountability, reaching communities globally, I am grateful that this work will be held with intention across the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, and the Archive of Documentary Arts, accessible to generations who can learn from this work as ground to stand on and build beyond what I could imagine.” – Aishah Shahidah Simmons

 

Header image: Portrait of Aishah Shahidah Simmons by Studio TSHAY

Bingham Center, Featured, RL Scholars

Profiles in Research: Daniel Belasco on Irene Peslikis

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Post contributed by Daniel Belasco. Belasco is an art historian, the Executive Director of the Al Held Foundation, and the author of numerous essays and reviews on women artists and feminism, including the book Women Artists in Midcentury America: A History in Ten Exhibitions (Reaktion, 2024). Belasco received a 2025-2026 Mary Lily Research Travel Grant from the Sallie Bingham Center.

Artist, educator, and feminist organizer Irene Peslikis (1943 – 2002) is probably best known as the Marxist Girl depicted in Alice Neel’s 1972 oil painting of the same title.  One arm raised, revealing her unshaved armpit, Peslikis sprawls on a purple upholstered chair, a moment of repose in her swirl of activity. Fortunately, the Rubenstein Library had the foresight and wherewithal to appreciate her significant, if largely unsung, contributions at the intersections of art and feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s.

I was keen to travel to Duke to delve deeply in her papers, chock full of notebooks, correspondence, ephemera, and documentation of her paintings, prints, and drawings, to support my research for my book on the emergence of the feminist art movement in the 1960s. I was especially eager to study manuscript versions of some of her political cartoons about abortion rights. What blew me away was a trove of other drawings and cartoons satirizing the intersections of culture, militarism, and masculinity. While most of these targeted the American war in Vietnam, one sketch caught my eye, and has stayed with me as a profound statement of the distortion of history and aesthetics to serve political opportunism and profiteering.

Geometric patterns in black ink on grid paper. There are four numbered patterns, with the fourth taking the shape of the swastika
Irene Peslikis Papers, Box 32, folder “drawings pencil and pen”

The drawing begins on the left side as a basic geometric meander, much like the interlocking forms one sees on a classical Greek frieze or border décor. Then, in three steps, Peslikis subtly twists the lines and manipulates the angles so that the decorative beauty wraps around itself to form a swastika. As the daughter of Greek immigrants to the U.S., Peslikis read and wrote Greek and felt outrage at her homeland’s slippage into fascism after the military junta of 1967. The drawing is signed but not titled. Elsewhere in her archive, I found a slide of a more polished version of the drawing on plain, unlined paper. The title, “A Brief History of Modern Greece,” drives home the point, transforming the original sketched idea into an effective political cartoon. Though I am not aware of her publishing or otherwise circulating this image, it exemplifies the power of pictures that artists like Peslikis harnessed to advocate for women’s and worker’s rights in a public arena.

The same set of four geometric patterns as in the previous image, but on plain paper and labelled "A Brief History of Modern Greece"
Irene Peslikis Papers, box 36, folder: slides 4

Peslikis, as a fervent participant in the women’s liberation movement, rejected the traditional values of her upbringing to embrace the bold new future of sex and race equality, abortion rights, and the elimination of male supremacy. The elegance and concision of her drawing reveals, to me, a clear mind freed from old habits and internalized oppression. Her use of graph paper, and numbered iterations of the image lends the work a didactic, instructional quality. Ultimately, Peslikis’s incisive drawing introduced me to her fascinating process of unlearning, as much a statement of political critique, an insight I only was able to make after spending time in her archive.

 

Art historian Daniel Belasco is the Executive Director of the Al Held Foundation and the author of numerous essays and reviews on women artists and feminism, including the book Women Artists in Midcentury America: A History in Ten Exhibitions (Reaktion, 2024). Belasco received a 2025-2026 Mary Lily Research Travel Grant from the Sallie Bingham Center.

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

Announcing our 2026-2027 Travel Grant Recipients

The Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026-2027 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!

Doris Duke Archives

Stephanie Opperman, Faculty, Georgia College and State University, “Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith and the Legacy of Jazz Clubs in 1940s Mexico City”

Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Collections

Elon Clark History of Medicine Travel Grants
Sarah Ahmed, Graduate Student, McGill University, “Madness and Methodism: Weslyan Sick Societies and the Treatment of Madness in the British Atlantic World, 1741-1818”

Lea Eisenstein, Graduate Student, Princeton University, “Coming Out: The Private and Public History of Hysterectomy in America”

Olivia Maddox, Graduate Student, University of California, San Diego, “Maternal Revolutions: A Cultural History of Motherhood in Modern China”

John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture

Jennifer Blaylock, Faculty, Rowan University, “Ghanavision: Ayi Kwei Armaha’s Work in Television in the 1960s”

Peyton White, Graduate Student, University of Texas, “Rastafari, Sovereignty, and Black Religious Nationalism in 20th Century Jamaica”

Halima Haruna, Graduate Student, Northeastern University, “An Intellectual History of African American Women’s Disability Politics, 1900s–1920”

Christina Thomas, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of South Carolina, “Digitizing Freedom Summer: An Interactive Map”

Corbin Covington, Graduate Student, Northwestern University, “Black Historiography and Psychoanalytic Theory”

Mickell Carter, Graduate Student, Brown University, “Black Men’s Style During the Black Power Movement”

Sydney Smith, Graduate Student, Rutgers University, “Reading for the Revolution: Black Bookstores and the Radical Tradition of Self-Education”

Harry H. Harkins, Jr. T’73 Travel Grants

Cassandra Gillig, Graduate Student, Northwestern University, “Learning Lesbian Sex”

Connall MacLennan, Graduate Student, University College London, “The Church and the Formation of Queer Identity, Community, and Politics in the State of Georgia, 1945-2015”

Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History

John Furr Fellowship for JWT Research
Henry Jacob, Graduate Student, Yale University, “Tourism in Flight: JWT, Pan-Am, and the Making of U.S. Power in the Americas”

Mario Uolla, Graduate Student, Northwestern University, “JWT’s T-Plan and the Origins of Consumer Centricity”

Alvin A. Achenbaum Travel Grants
Jennifer Scanlon, Faculty, Bowdoin College, “We Try Harder: Paula Green, Inc.”

Francesca Polletta, Faculty, University of California, Irvine, “Advertising to the New Woman, 1970-1975”

Ijeoma Kola, Faculty, University of Notre Dame, “Kitchen Chemists: Black Women, Medical Neglect, and the Science of the Natural Hair Movement”

Jonathan Marrow, Graduate Student, Cambridge University, “The Development of American Holocaust Tourism, 1945-2000”

Stephen Sonnenfeld, independent Researcher, “The Meaning Makers: A History of the American Advertising Agency”

Human Rights Archive

Jessica Day-Lucore, Graduate Student, Indiana University Bloomington, “The Human Rights Violators Club: The Uruguayan Dictatorship, the United States, and the Regulatory Regimes of the Late Cold War, 1973-1985”

Vivian Hernandez, Graduate Student, University of California Los Angeles, “’Nos interasa a todas’: Voluntary Motherhood and the Reproductive Rights Movement in Late Twentieth-Century to Early Twenty-First Century Mexico”

Ian Glazmer-Schillinger, Graduate Student, Syracuse University, “Web of Hate: White Power Goes Online, 1983-1999”

Eva Baylin, Graduate Student, Vanderbilt University, “Gender and the Radical Right: A Cultural History from the Margins to the Center of American Politics, 1965–2014”

Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture

Mary Lily Research Travel Grants
Amaluana Brock, Graduate Student, Auburn University, “1990s Young Women Zines as Feminist Identity Building”

Hsiao-Yun Chu, Faculty, San Francisco State University, “Exquisite Boredom: Ladies Fancy Workbooks and the Birth of Leisure Crafts, 1850–1910″

Maddy Coy, Faculty, University of Florida, “Feminist Knowledge, Violence Against Women, and Public Policy”

Hannah Dudley-Shotwell, Faculty, Longwood University, and Justina Licata, Faculty, Indiana University East, “A History of Abortion Funds in the U.S., 1960s–Present”

Halina Haruma, Graduate Student, Northeastern University, “An Intellectual History of African American Women’s Disability Politics, 1900s–1920″

Ijeoma Kola, Faculty, University of Notre Dame, “Kitchen Chemists: Black Women, Medical Neglect, and the Science of the Natural Hair Movement”

Felicity Palma, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Brown University, “Eurydice in the Underworld”

Hope Tucker, Faculty, University of Iowa, “Feminist Bookstores in the South: A Film”

Lisa Walters, Faculty, University of Queensland, “Forgotten Histories: Renaissance Women and the Science of Atomism”

Jessie Wilkerson, Faculty, University of Tennessee – Knoxville, “In Sisterhood, In Struggle: A History of Feminist Possibilites in the American South”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Research Travel Grants
Rachel Haines, Graduate Student, University of Virginia, “Close Reading as Queer Reading: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ‘kind of formalism’”

Jennifer Hamilton, Faculty, University of New England, Australia, “Exploring the Relationship Between Queer Theory, Buddhism, and Textile Art in Sedgwick’s Body of Work”

Samuel Rutherford, Faculty, University of Glasgow, “Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Transmasculinity and the History of Queer Ideas”

Suzanne Scanlon, Faculty, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, “In Time, a novel”

 

Bingham Center, Events, Featured, Readings and Talks

Save the Date: “Freeing Joan Little: Gender, Incarceration, and Struggles for Justice”

Date: Thursday, January 29th, 2026
Time: 5:00 – 6:30pm
Location: Smith Warehouse, Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall, Bay 4; 114 S Buchanan Blvd, Durham, NC

In 1974, a twenty-year-old Black woman named Joan Little found herself facing the death penalty for killing a white guard who had tried to rape her in an eastern North Carolina prison. The folks who campaigned on Little’s behalf understood the webs of sexual violence, state violence, and racialized carcerality that ensnared her, and they linked her trial to other sites of existential concern for Black women’s—and everyone’s—liberation. Her August 1975 acquittal spoke to the power of their critique and the reach of their organizing. 2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of this landmark case that still offers lessons in the struggle for justice. Join historian Christina Greene, Ph.D. ’96, and death penalty lawyer Shelagh Kenney to discuss what Joan Little tells us about gender, incarceration, and state violence then and now.

Christina Greene is professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment; Shelagh Kenney, is Interim Director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. Adriane Lentz-Smith, Associate Professor of History and African & African American Studies at Duke University, will introduce and moderate the discussion.

In addition to the panel, an exhibition of items related to Joan Little, including one of her handwritten, illustrated poems, will be on display in Perkins Library during the month of January 2026.

Header image:  “Abolish Women’s Prisons” photograph of protestors outside of the NC Correctional Institution for Women, The News and Observer – Raleigh Times, November 1974. Nancy Blood Papers, Box 3, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Archive of Documentary Arts, Bingham Center, Do Your Research, Featured, Franklin Research Center, Hartman Center, History of Medicine, Human Rights Archive, Travel Grants

Research Travel Grants Open for 2026 – 2027

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is now accepting applications for the 2026 – 2027 Research Travel Grant Programs, offering awards of up to $1,500 to support research projects associated with the following collecting Centers, subject areas, and collection holdings:

  • Archive of Documentary Arts General Grant
  • Archive of Documentary Arts Sidney Gamble Travel Grant
  • Doris Duke Foundation Travel Grant
  • Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Travel Grant
  • Harry H. Harkins, Jr. T’73 Travel Grant
  • History of Medicine Collections
  • Human Rights Archive
  • John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History
  • 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 resources 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 14, 2026, 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 of staff involved with the travel grant program. This information session will be recorded and posted online afterwards. You can register for the session here.

Timeline

The deadline for application will be Friday, February 27, at 8:00 PM EST. Decisions will be announced by the end of April 2026 for travel during May 2026 – June 2027. Awards are paid as reimbursements for personal expenses after completion of the research visit(s).

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

Defending Intellectual Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bingham Center, Featured, From Our Collections

In Memoriam: Sallie Bingham, 1937-2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcing our 2025-2026 Travel Grant Recipients

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

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

Doris Duke Archives

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

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

Elon Clark History of Medicine Travel Grants

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

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

John Hope Franklin Research Center

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History

John Furr Fellowship for JWT Research

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

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

Alvin A. Achenbaum Travel Grants

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

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

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

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

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

Mary Lily Travel Grant

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Travel Grant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fung’s card to Sedgwick. Courtesy of David Seitz

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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.