News

Selected stories from the Beinecke Library, YaleNews, and external media outlets (the latter noted by source in parentheses after title of article).

  • Encore (Daily Nutmeg)

    April 1, 2022

    On a recent Saturday in the newly reopened Beinecke Library, Brava! Women Make American Theater was finally getting its time in the spotlight. Directed by curator Melissa Barton, the exhibition presents “scenes” of women’s contributions to US theater from 1787 to 2007, “highlight[ing] how stage performance often mirrored, but also frequently challenged and changed, understandings of women’s roles and of women’s rights in larger U.S. society,” while inviting “viewers to pose and consider questions about what is at stake for gender and performance at various moments.” Brava! is cleverly arranged so viewers can begin anywhere

  • Eight writers awarded Yale’s Windham-Campbell Prizes

    March 29, 2022

    The prize recipients are in fiction, Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe) and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (Zimbabwe); in non-fiction, Margo Jefferson (United States) and Emmanuel Iduma (Nigeria); in drama, Winsome Pinnock (United Kingdom) and Sharon Bridgforth (United States); and in poetry, Wong May (Ireland/Singapore/China) and Zaffar Kunial (United Kingdom).

  • “Tough but a lot of fun” ... new biography of Florine Stettheimer (AGO Insider)

    March 16, 2022

    I was at Beinecke Library reading letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and found one addressed to someone named Florine Stettheimer describing a funny incident with O'Keeffe's husband, Alfred Stieglitz, falling down in the bathroom. So I went to investigate who Stettheimer was and saw that Beinecke owned five of her paintings and also had her diaries and letters. I fell in love with the paintings which are funny and witty and no one had done a full exhibition of her work since Marcel Duchamp organized her Retrospective at MOMA in 1946. I decided to make her the topic of my Ph.D. which was published by Yale University Press.

  • Brava! at the Beinecke shines spotlight on women in theater

    February 28, 2022

    ansberry is one of a cast of dozens of women featured in “Brava! Women Make American Theater,” an exhibition on view at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library through July 22. Drawing on archival materials from the Beinecke’s collections, the show shines a spotlight on women’s contributions to the American stage, sharing the stories of playwrights, producers, directors, actors, costume designers, choreographers, stage managers, and other professionals involved in making theater. It begins in 1787 with “The Contrast” — the first play professionally produced in the United States — and continues through to the present day.

  • Jonathan Edwards and slavery: An interview with Edwards Center Director Kenneth Minkema

    February 23, 2022

    Kenneth Minkema is Executive Editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards and Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center (link is external) at YDS. The Center supports inquiry into the life, writings, and legacy of the iconic 18th-century theologian (and Yale alumnus) by providing resources that encourage critical appraisal of his historical importance and contemporary relevance. Earlier this academic year, Minkema joined Yale University’s efforts to uncover and account for the university’s historical involvement in slavery and racism.

  • Students present research detailing Yale’s history with slavery (Yale Daily News)

    February 4, 2022

    On Monday, three students from the “Slavery, Race and Yale” fall seminar shared historical findings about the University’s ties to slavery. The students spoke virtually at a Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library event entitled “Yale & Slavery Research — Student Perspectives.” Taught by Professors Edward Rugemer and Crystal Feimster with teaching fellow Teanu Reid, the “Slavery, Race and Yale” seminar developed from the Yale and Slavery Research Project and its mission to explore and detail Yale’s history with racial slavery from its inception in 1701 through the late-19th century. Miguel Ceballo-Countryman ’23, Patrick Hayes ’24 and Mackenzie Hawkins ’22 each dis

  • Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies continues expansion (Yale Daily News)

    February 2, 2022

    “I was thrilled to join other WGSS faculty at Yale given our university’s resources (especially archives at the Beinecke), the reputation of its student population at both the graduate and the undergraduate levels, the interdisciplinary reach of my field-defining colleagues and the strong leadership of my chair, Rod Ferguson,” Herring wrote in an email to the News. “My first semester of teaching last fall — a first-year seminar on LGBTQ Spaces and Places and an upper-level seminar on LGBTQ Life Spans — provided me with two of the best pedagogical experiences of my career.”

  • Yale expands its support for New Haven Promise

    January 18, 2022

    Tubyez Cropper, a New Haven Promise scholar who graduated from New Haven’s Achievement First Amistad Academy in 2014 and from Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania in 2018, held several New Haven Promise summer internships as an undergraduate. He now holds a permanent Yale position as the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s project manager — admin, tech, and communications. Those internships, Cropper said, prepared him well for his current role.

  • Yale events explore legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s quest for justice

    January 14, 2022

    The Yale community this week is celebrating the work and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. in a range of all-virtual events, including a conversation about the role of race, place, and spirituality in achieving environmental justice; a poetry slam; storytelling; a dance performance; and a conversation for young people about mental wellness in families of color.

  • Leading Bookseller’s Private Collection Goes Up for Sale (New York Times)

    January 13, 2022

    His sophomore year, he discovered a 16th-century Indigenous map of the Valley of Mexico at a furniture sale in Detroit. He bought it for $800, then arranged to sell it — at the time, one of three or four Aztec manuscripts from the period known to survive — to Yale’s Beinecke Library for a price equal to the remainder of his tuition. (It was one of the rare times he underpriced something, a curator later quipped.)

  • Remembering Kenya Flash: “Brilliance, generosity, and vast knowledge”

    January 9, 2022

    Kenya Siana Flash, librarian for Political Science, Global Information, and Government Information at Marx Science and Social Science Library, was known at Yale as an exceptional and beloved social sciences librarian, colleague, teacher, and community member. She died on Dec. 24 at the age of 41, after a short illness.

  • Santa’s mirth and merriment resound in the Beinecke archives

    December 20, 2021

    The Yale University Library houses the papers, books, and ephemera of hundreds of people who have left an indelible mark on our culture and society. These include beloved writers and artists, visionary scholars, and history-shaping politicians and diplomats. Yet, there is one major cultural figure — a magical, immortal, and portly individual who has brought joy to billions of children over generations — whose papers have thus far eluded Yale as well as every other university or research center worldwide: Santa Claus.

  • Goldsby named Donnelley Professor of African American Studies and English

    December 9, 2021

    Goldsby’s digital scholarship has been a model for scholars across and beyond the humanities, and has changed how researchers and archivists approach the study of Black American culture. Most recently, her work as the co-principal investigator of the Black Bibliography Project, a collaboration with colleagues at Rutgers University and archivists at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, has made understudied works by Black authors available and accessible to new audiences through digital finding aids and new guidelines and standards for cataloguing Black literature.