News

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

  • Here at Yale: Documenting the road well-traveled

    December 3, 2021

    The concept of “travel” contains multitudes: adventurous voyages, forced migrations, documentary explorations, meditative immersions. Nancy Kuhl, curator of poetry in the Yale Collection of American Literature, and organizer of the Beinecke Library’s current special exhibit “Road Show,” manages to capture a wide range of them, through what Kuhl recently characterized as “the physical, emotional, and intellectual experiences of moving through unfamiliar places, encountering new landscapes and people, and exploring different ways of life and world views.”

  • Meet the FAS Faculty: Anna Zayaruznaya

    November 30, 2021

    What can music teach us about the past and about ourselves? Music historian Anna Zayaruznaya challenges students to “attend carefully” to things that sound strange.

  • Yale’s Beinecke Library Acquired 200+ Prints by Legendary Photographer Gordon Parks (Culture Type)

    November 20, 2021

    AN IMPORTANT REPOSITORY of images, books, and materials documenting African American history and culture, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University announced the addition of more than 200 photographs by Gordon Parks to its collection. The prints were acquired directly from The Gordon Parks Foundation and include selections from 11 of the legendary photographer’s most poignant and prized series capturing African American life.

  • Trove of Gordon Parks “Study Sets” Comes to Yale Library

    November 9, 2021

    Yale University Library’s Beinecke Library has acquired a collection of more than 200 prints by renowned American photographer Gordon Parks. The prints, acquired directly from The Gordon Parks Foundation, constitute one of the largest collections of the photographer’s work available for study in an institution.

  • Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month at Yale

    September 24, 2021

    At the Beinecke: Jon Lewis Photographs from the United Farm Workers Movement A digital collection of photographs by Jon Lewis features scenes from the farm worker movement, the work and activities of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers of America’s California Grape Strike in the 1960s.

  • Yale student presents a virtual exhibit on Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Yale Daily News)

    September 20, 2021

    rodey conceived of this idea in a seminar she took during her sophomore year, “Art of the Printed Word,” taught by Richard Rose, a printer at the Yale School of Art. In an essay assignment, she compared the 1832 Philadelphia publication of “Pride and Prejudice” with the 2010 Belknap-Harvard annotated edition. Over the next year and a half, Brodey continued to reflect on how publishers treat and present the same text in different ways. Eventually, it became the leading theme of her exhibit. Nancy Kuhl, curator of poetry in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, advised the project. Kuhl brainstormed with Brodey about how she could use the collection’s objects to illustrate her ideas and arguments in a compelling way. “Working online required changing some of our work processes but the payoff is the opportunity to share [Brodey’s] excellent exhibition with a large online audience that might never visit New Haven to see it in person,” Kuhl said. “Besides, her detailed research and thorough knowledge made our work easy.”

  • Windham-Campbell literary festival moves online with nine-episode salon

    September 14, 2021

    Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes have transformed their flagship fall literary festival into a virtual salon series showcasing the creativity of its 2021 recipients over the course of nine episodes streaming every Wednesday from Sept. 15 to Nov. 10. Each episode will highlight one of the eight prize recipients with the final episode featuring a keynote address by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo based on the theme “Why I Write.” One-time registration for all nine episodes is free and open to the public. The series will take its audience on an international literary tour of words, music, performance, and art.

  • The Classroom in Crisis (Boston Review)

    September 13, 2021

    Following Brooks’s papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the authors trace how the formalist emphasis of mid-twentieth-century New Criticism emerged less from first principles than from the realities of the classroom, where a text might be understood as a se

  • Bright Young Librarians: Eric Ensley (Fine Books)

    September 9, 2021

    I’m eternally grateful that I was able to receive a PhD in English from Yale University, where I worked all five years in the Beinecke Library alongside librarians and curators like Ray Clemens and Diane Ducharme, who taught me so much of what I know about early books.

  • Analysis unlocks secret of the Vinland Map – it’s a fake

    September 1, 2021

    The Vinland Map, once hailed as the earliest depiction of the New World, is awash in 20th-century ink. A team of conservators and conservation scientists at Yale has found compelling new evidence for this conclusion through the most thorough analysis yet performed on the infamous parchment map. Acquired by Yale in the mid-1960s, the purported 15th-century map depicts a pre-Columbian “Vinlanda Insula,” a section of North America’s coastline southwest of Greenland. While earlier studies had detected evidence of modern inks at various points on the map, the new Yale analysis examined the entire document’s elemental composition using state-of-the-art tools and techniques that were previously unavailable. The analysis revealed that a titanium compound used in inks first produced in the 1920s pervades the map’s lines and text.