A few months ago, UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student Adam Domby spent a morning at the RBMSCL studying several of our manuscripts collections, including a heretofore unidentified North Carolina farm woman’s diary. “You know,” he said as he prepared to leave, “I think I could figure out who wrote that diary.”
Read the full story in the most recent issue of the Duke University Libraries Magazine!
Lines of Life
Various as roads, the lines life takes—
Twisting like the boundaries of lakes.
What we lack here, some god can there increase
With harmonies, amends, enduring peace.
—After Hölderlin
Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections. “Lines of Life” by Reynolds Price. Photo from the Reynolds Price Papers, 1927-2006 and undated, bulk 1956-2006.
Date: 13 January – 3 April 2011
Location and Time: Perkins Library Gallery during library hours
Contact Information: Mary Samouelian, 919-660-5912 or mary.samouelian(at)duke.edu
Who was Doris Duke? Her public persona was that of the glamorous, yet eccentric, heiress who named her butler the executor of her estate, but privately she was determined not to be defined by social expectations or her vast wealth.
The materials on display in “Philanthropist, Environmentalist, Collector: Doris Duke and Her Estates” reveal a much different and more complex story of James Buchanan Duke’s only child. On the surface these artifacts are seemingly unassuming—inventories of furniture, a security ledger, and architectural drawings are amongst the objects in the exhibit—but in fact they paint a picture of an adventurous, intelligent and independent woman, who in many ways was considered ahead of her time. Throughout her life, Doris Duke continued her family’s quiet but innovative pattern of philanthropy, eagerly advocated for the protection of the environment, and pursued her lifelong passion as both a collector and patron of Islamic art.
During your next visit to Perkins-Bostock Library, be sure to stop by the Perkins Library Gallery to see the exhibit on display. Also featured in this exhibit are Doris Duke’s home movies and an interactive map of a journey she made to the Middle East in 1938. If you can’t visit in person, you can enjoy the online exhibit!
Also, please join curators Mary Samouelian and Molly Bragg for a gallery talk and screening of Doris Duke’s home movies on Thursday, February 24th from 4:00-5:00 PM in the Rare Book Room. Stay tuned to The Devil’s Tale for more details about this event!
Update: Listen to Duke Today’s podcast featuring the exhibit curators!
Post contributed by Mary Samouelian, Doris Duke Collection Archivist.
As this semester winds down, don’t just hit the books. Make one!
For the conclusion of this semester’s Book + Art festival, undergraduate students from Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are invited to participate in a juried exhibition of student artists’ books, to be held at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hanes Art Center. Works selected for the exhibition will be displayed in the John and June Allcott Undergraduate Gallery at UNC’s Hanes Art Center. From the works selected for exhibition, one will be awarded best-in-show honors.
Rules
You’ll find instructions on submitting your work at the student exhibition’s website.
Or, if you’re in need of some inspiration, visit the Duke University Libraries’ YouTube channel to see students from Merrill Shatzman’s “Book Art: Text as Image” class discussing artists’ books from the Bingham Center‘s collection.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wutd4Prn20s]
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| Photo by Mark Zupan. |
Good news, researchers! The RBMSCL is now accepting applications for our 2011-2012 travel grants.
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 John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History will award up to $1,000 per recipient to fund travel and other expenses related to visiting the RBMSCL. The grants are open to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, independent scholars, artists, and activists living outside a 100-mile radius from Durham, NC with research projects that would benefit from access to the centers’ collections.
More details—and the grant application—may be found on our grants website. Applications must be postmarked or e-mailed no later than 5:00 PM EST on January 31, 2011. Recipients will be announced in March 2011.
We’re also excited to announce that the RBMSCL will be offering three new grants this year for scholars interested in using our German Studies and Judaica collections. Additional information about applying for one of these three grants will be available on our grants website soon. These new grants will have a later deadline.
On Friday, the RBMSCL celebrated with students and parents at one of our favorite events of the year: the Middlesworth Award and Durden Prize Reception.
Given annually, the Middlesworth Awards recognize the authors of the best undergraduate and graduate student papers based on research in the collections of the RBMSCL. Funding for the awards has been generously provided by Chester P. Middlesworth (A.B., 1949) of Statesville, NC.
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| 2010 Middlesworth Award winners Adrienne Niederriter, Bonnie Scott, and Hannah Craddock. |
Undergraduate student winner Adrienne R. Niederriter plumbed the depths of the Hartman Center’s Ad*Access image database for her paper, “Speak Softly and Carry a Lipstick: Government Influence on Female Sexuality through Cosmetics during World War II.”
Undergraduate student winner Hannah C. Craddock received her award for her senior honors thesis, “‘A New Self-Respect and a New Consciousness of Power’: White Nurses, Black Soldiers, and the Danger of World War I.” Craddock’s study focused upon the Ann Henshaw Gardiner Papers and the Samuel Loomis Hypes Papers.
Graduate student winner Bonnie Scott’s paper began at the heart of Duke’s West Campus, as she compared sermons preached in the Duke Chapel to those preached by North Carolina minister Kenneth M. Johnson during the Civil Rights Movement.
Their papers will now become part of the RBMSCL’s collections.
We know that great papers are being researched and written this semester as well. If you are a Duke student, submit your paper and we might be toasting you next fall! Details about submitting your paper can be found here.
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| Click to enlarge. |
On Friday, library staff members and UNC SILS students gathered for an impromptu gallery talk for our new exhibit, “Book + Art: Artists’ books from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture,” led by curators Christine Wells and Kelly Wooten and exhibits coordinator Meg Brown. For more pictures from the gallery talk, visit the Bingham Center’s Flickr photostream.
And remember: book artist and photographer Bea Nettles will be speaking tomorrow at 5:30 PM in the Rare Book Room as part of this fall’s Book + Art series of events!
Date: Friday, 29 October 2010
Time: 6:30 PM
Location: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Contact Information: Kirston Johnson, 919-681-7963 or kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu
Join the Archive of Documentary Arts for an evening with documentary filmmaker James Longley. Known for his intimate and poetic portraits of individuals and families caught in the political turmoil of Iraq, the Gaza Strip, and Pakistan, Longley was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2009. His Oscar-nominated film, Iraq in Fragments, won the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Grand Jury Prize in 2006. Arts advocate, author, and accomplished television interviewer Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel will facilitate the discussion.
This event inaugurates the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Visiting Filmmaker Series, established by Duke University with generous funding from the Diamonstein-Spielvogel endowment fund. The series will feature artists whose work addresses significant contemporary topics of social, political, economic, and cultural urgency. Filmmakers chosen to participate will have a recognized body of work and show promise of future contributions to documentary filmmaking. Visiting filmmakers will be invited to Duke for a two-day residency.
The Diamonstein-Spielvogel series is unique in its exclusive attention to documentary filmmakers with a global perspective. By giving Duke faculty and their students an opportunity to explore the films of socially-engaged filmmakers and discuss the work with them, this new series hopes to inspire and encourage the next generation of young documentarians.
The series is co-sponsored by the RBMSCL, the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image, and the Center for Documentary Studies.
Screen / Society will screen several of Mr. Longley’s films in the weeks leading up to his visit. Check the Screen/Society Fall 2010 schedule for additional details and contact information:
Iraq in Fragments **TONIGHT!**
Date: Wednesday, 13 October 2010
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Griffith Film Theater, Bryan Center, Duke University
Sari’s Mother and Gaza Strip
Date: Wednesday, 20 October 2010
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Griffith Film Theater, Bryan Center, Duke University
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| Virginia Dare Advertising Card. From the Advertising Ephemera Collection. |
Today The Devil’s Tale turns one year old, and it seems only fitting to pause for a moment and celebrate. (It’s also National Dessert Month, so we will be celebrating with a cake here in the RBMSCL.)
Where else would you hear about extracting sunbeams from cucumbers or hear the real back story of the Duke-Alabama football rivalry? Blog followers were the first to hear that Duke had acquired the papers of South Carolina author Dorothy Allison, Nobel-laureate economist Paul Samuelson, and jazz master Frank Foster. Together we marked holidays large and small with selections from our collections, from Thanksgiving to Free Comic Book Day, proving that there’s something in our collections for every occasion (and almost every research interest).
Thank you to everyone who has posted a comment or passed on a post to a friend. We invite you to become a Devil’s Tale follower so we can keep you up-to-date on upcoming events and exhibits and all the latest news. Happy birthday, Devil’s Tale! (And three cheers for our intrepid blog editor Amy McDonald!)
Post contributed by Naomi Nelson, Director of the RBMSCL.
(Intrepid editor’s note: And thanks to everyone at the RBMSCL for their daily help with the care and feeding of The Devil’s Tale!)
Today, we’re starting a new feature: mini-essays from friends of the RBMSCL on the collections they’ve used and treasured. Below, Sharon Holland’s mini-essay about Dorothy Allison was inspired by the RBMSCL’s recent acquisition of Dorothy Allison’s papers.
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| Photo courtesy of Sharon Holland. |
I first encountered Dorothy Allison’s major work, Bastard Out of Carolina, on an overnight train (the Orient Express, no less) from Vienna to Paris. I wasn’t prepared for what would eventually happen in the book and when I got to the fateful scene in the car outside the hospital, I impulsively threw the book out of the window—it is still in a field somewhere along the train line. My reaction is a testament to the importance of the scene of violation that Allison wanted to construct for the reader—it was real, and sudden and devastating. I purchased the book upon my return to the United States and it has been one of my favorites since. Acquiring her papers is a serious accomplishment for Duke. Thank you for preserving the work and ultimately the memory of one of the most important feminist authors of the 20-21st century.
Post contributed by Sharon Holland, Associate Professor, English and African and African American Studies, Duke University.
Interested in contributing a mini-essay? E-mail me at amy.mcdonald(at)duke.edu!
