Category Archives: Events

Bingham Center, Events, From Our Collections, Readings and Talks

Zine Mania, Round One: Cristy Road

Date: Monday, 16 November, 2009
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: Duke Women’s Center Lower Lounge
Contact Information: Kelly Wooten, 919-660-5967 or kelly.wooten(at)duke.edu

Cristy RoadYou know those issues of Greenzine you have stacked on your bookshelf? Now you’ll finally have your chance to meet writer and illustrator Cristy Road as she visits Duke’s Women’s Center for a reading and discussion.

Road, a Cuban-American from Miami, Florida, has been illustrating ideas, people, and places ever since she learned how to hold a crayon. Blending the inevitable existence of social principles, cultural identity, sexual identity, mental inadequacies, and dirty thoughts, she testifies to the beauty of the imperfect. Today, Road has moved from zines to illustrated novels, although her visual diagram of lifestyles and beliefs remain in tune with the zine’s portrayal of living honestly and unconventionally.

Stop by the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture during reading room hours to see issue #14 of Greenzine, one of some 4000 zines (and counting!) preserved in the center’s zine collection.

(Artwork courtesy of Cristy Road: “Hope Beyond Despair” from Greenzine 14, 2004)

Bingham Center, Events, From Our Collections, Workshops

Zine Mania, Round Two: Zine Making Workshop

Date: Thursday, 19 November, 2009
Time: 3:30 PM
Location: Duke Women’s Center Lower Lounge
Contact Information: Kelly Wooten, 919-660-5967 or kelly.wooten(at)duke.edu

Bring your inner riot grrrl to Duke’s Women’s Center and get ready to cut and paste with the staff of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture. You’ll learn all about the Bingham Center’s massive zine collection, as well as how to make your very own zine.

Archive of Documentary Arts, Events, Exhibits, From Our Collections

“The Bathers”: Exhibit Opening and Reception

Date: Thursday, 12 November 2009
Time: 5:30 PM
Location: Rare Book Room
Contact Information: Karen Glynn, 919-660-5968 or karen.glynn(at)duke.edu

Budapest, Hungary, 2006
Budapest, Hungary, 2006

Photographer Jennette Williams, winner of the 2008 Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography, will speak about her recent work, which centers on women in the ancient communal bathhouses of Budapest and Istanbul. A selection of these photographs have been gathered for “The Bathers: Photographs by Jennette Williams,” currently on view in the Special Collections Gallery through 13 December, 2009. Her book, The Bathers, will be published this month by Duke University Press in association with the Center for Documentary Studies.

These stunning platinum prints of women bathers—which draw on gestures and poses found in iconic paintings of nude women, such as those of Cézanne and Ingres—take us inside spaces intimate and public, austere and sensuous. Over a period of eight years, Williams photographed, without sentimentality or objectification, women daring enough to stand naked before her camera. Young and old, these women inhabit and display their bodies with comfort and ease.

Williams is a photography instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She has a master’s degree from Yale University and has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Copies of The Bathers will be available for purchase and signing at the event. The quad in front of Duke Chapel has been reserved for parking. Additional parking is available in the parking deck behind the Bryan Center (view campus map).

Archive of Documentary Arts, Events, Films, From Our Collections, Human Rights Archive

Rights! Camera! Action!: No Umbrella and Please Vote for Me

Date: Tuesday, 3 November, 2009
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Rare Book Room
Contact Information: Patrick Stawski, 919-660-5823 or patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu, or Kirston Johnson, 919-681-7963 or kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu

Celebrate Election Day at the second installment of Rights! Camera! Action! This monthly film series, which is sponsored by the Archive for Human Rights, the Archive of Documentary Arts, the Duke Human Rights Center, and the Franklin Humanities Institute, features documentaries on human rights themes that were award winners at the annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The films are archived at the RBMSCL, where they form part of a rich and expanding collection of human rights materials.

No Umbrella (26 minutes) shows Fannie Lewis in action on November 2, 2004 as she struggles to manage a polling station in a predominantly African American precinct in Cleveland, Ohio. Facing record numbers at the polls, Ms. Lewis spends her day on a cell phone begging for the machines and the technical support Ward 7 needs to handle the throngs of frustrated voters. This documentary won the Jury Award for Best Short at the 2006 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

Please Vote for Me (58 minutes) is a portrait of a society and a town in through a school, its children and its families. In Wuhan, China, a 3rd grade class at Evergreen Primary School has their first encounter with democracy by holding an election to select a Class Monitor. Eight-year-olds compete against each other for the coveted position, abetted and egged on by teachers and doting parents.

Kerry L. Haynie of Duke’s Department of Political Science and Ralph Litzinger of Duke’s Department of Cultural Anthropology will lead discussion following the films.

Events, From Our Collections, Human Rights Archive, Readings and Talks

Witnessing Iran: 1979 and 2009

Date: Wednesday, 4 November, 2009
Time: 4:30 PM
Location: Perkins Library 217
Contact Information: Ilene Nelson, 919-660-5816 or ilene.nelson(at)duke.edu

On the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the Iran Hostage Crisis, the RBMSCL will host a discussion of the changing role of the eyewitness account in the creation of historical narrative—with Iran as the context.

Mark Bowden, author of Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam, will talk about the interviews he conducted with hostages and hostage-takers in the 1979 crisis, as well as the information he obtained from military officials about 1980’s failed rescue attempt.

Negar Mottahedeh, associate professor in Duke’s Program in Literature, will speak about social networks and new media in the reporting of current events in Iran. Professor Mottahedeh posts frequently on Twitter about developments in Iran (follow her here).

The discussion will be moderated by Bruce Kuniholm, dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy and a member of both the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Policy Planning Staff during the Carter administration.

Library staff have prepared a LibGuide in conjunction with this event. Of particular interest, the RBMSCL holds the interviews Mark Bowden conducted (collection guide here), as well as the interviews that author and Duke alum Tim Wells conducted with 36 of the the 1979 hostages (collection guide here).

Bingham Center, Events, Symposia and Conferences

What Does It Mean to Be an Educated Woman?

Date: Friday-Saturday, 30-31 October, 2009
Time and Location: please see schedule
Contact Information: cwhc(at)duke.edu

What does it mean to be an educated woman? Find out at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture’s 4th Biennial Symposium, held in honor of the 40-year career of Bingham Center co-founder and Duke University professor Jean Fox O’Barr.

Three conversational sessions focused on scholarship, pedagogy, and activism will explore this central question. Speakers will include Dr. O’Barr’s colleagues and former students, as well as librarians whose work relates to women’s education.

Friday evening’s keynote address (4:00 PM; White Lecture Hall, Duke University East Campus) will be given by Dr. Lisa Yun Lee, the Director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago and the creator of the Jean Fox O’Barr Professorship at Duke University. Dr. Lee will explore the parallels between her studies as a feminist scholar at Duke and her work as the museum’s director.

As with the Bingham Center’s previous symposia, the theme emanates from a collection strength. The center’s holdings—described in this research guide—include printed materials and manuscripts including the papers of professional educators, schoolgirl diaries, and records of women’s schools and women’s educational organizations.

Information on registration, travel, and the symposium schedule can all be found online.

Post contributed by Rachel Ingold, Bingham Center Intern and Conservation Technician

Events, Jazz Archive, Readings and Talks

Jazz Conversations with John Brown and Vincent Gardner

Date: Thursday, 22 October, 2009
Time: 12:00 PM
Location: Rare Book Room
Contact Information: Jeremy Smith, 919-660-5839 or jas5(at)notes.duke.edu

Join us as the Jazz Archive hosts this fall’s second installment of John Brown’s “Jazz Conversations.” Brown, Associate Professor of the Practice of Music and Director of the Duke Jazz Program, will discuss jazz history and contemporary developments in jazz with Vincent Gardner of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Guests are invited to bring their own lunches—but dessert and drinks are on us!

Events, Human Rights Archive, Readings and Talks

Ambassador Heraldo Muñoz at the RBMSCL

Date: Thursday, 15 October, 2009
Time: 5:00 PM
Location: Rare Book Room
Contact Information: Patrick Stawski, 919-660-5823 or patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu

Ambassador Muñoz will read from and sign The Dictator’s Shadow: Life under Augusto Pinochet. The winner of the second annual WOLA-Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, this poignant and wide-ranging memoir recounts how Chileans brought the former dictator to account for his crimes. Ariel Dorfman, the Walter Hines Page Chair of Literature and Latin American Studies and a long-time friend of the ambassador, will give the introduction. Duke University’s Gothic Bookshop will sell copies of the book. This event is co-sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Ambassador Muñoz was Deputy Foreign Minister of Chile from 2000 to 2002 and Minister Secretary General from 2002 to 2003 at La Moneda Presidential Palace before assuming his present post as Chile’s ambassador to the United Nations. He was imprisoned and exiled by the Pinochet regime for his political views.