Remembering Shakespeare
Wednesday, February 1 – Monday, June 4, 2012

Remembering Shakespeare tells the story of how a playwright and poet in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England came to be remembered as the world’s most venerated author. Curated by David Scott Kastan, George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale, and Kathryn James, Beinecke Library Curator, the exhibition brings together works from the holdings of Yale University’s Elizabethan Club, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale Center for British Art, and Beinecke Library, in an unprecedented display of one of North America’s finest collections on Shakespeare. Drawing on these extraordinary resources, Remembering Shakespeare offers a unique visual history of how the “Booke” of Shakespeare was made and read, written and remembered, from his lifetime through the present.

Image: Paul Robeson in the role of Othello, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1944. Photographs by Carl Van Vechten are used with permission of the Van Vechten Trust; permission of the Trust is required to publish Van Vechten photographs in any format. To learn more, contact the Curator, Yale Collection of American Literature.

This exhibition is part of Shakespeare at Yale, a multi-venued celebration for the spring of 2012 that will display the extraordinary resources that exist at the University for the study and enjoyment of Shakespeare. For more information, visit: Shakespeare at Yale.

The Beinecke Library’s collection of photographs by Alexander Lmanian (1925-1996) is now available in the Beinecke’s Digital Library. Lmanian’s photographs of Washington, D.C., document the physical impact of riots on the city following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4-8, 1968, as well as events and memorials in the city and vicinity, 1967-1968.

Lmanian was a sergeant in the United States Army in World War II, and a part-time photographer for the New Haven Register newspaper and the Associated Press. Photographs in the collection document locations and events in Washington, District of Columbia, and its vicinity, 1964-1968, as well as New Haven, Connecticut, 1968-1969. Images of New Haven document locations in the city, including overhead views of the New Haven Green, the intersection of Chapel Street and College Street, and Yale University. Many images show the interior of his room, including his model airplanes, copy photographs of his calendar, and self-portraits. Other images include figure and nude studies. Images are available online in the Beinecke’s the Digital Collections: Alexander Lmanian Collection Image Guide . A detailed description of the collection can be found online: Alexander Lmanian Photographs, GEN MSS 590.

Aeon is an online registration and requesting service designed specifically for special collections and research libraries.

Beginning on Monday, October 3, the Beinecke Library will discontinue use of all paper call slips in favor of Aeon online requesting.  Yale faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and staff will be able to access their account using their NetID.   Visiting researchers who have registered with us will be assigned a username and password at the desk.

We believe this new system will lead to greater efficiency and a higher level of service. However, as with any new technology, there may be some issues within the first few weeks that could lead to slight delays in your requests.  Thank you for your patience.

For AEON info on the Beinecke home page: http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/brblinfo/brblvisi.html

For additional information on AEON: http://www.atlas-sys.com/products/aeon/

For questions:  Moira.fitzgerald@yale.edu

“This Is My Life”: The Sonnet and the Emergence of Black Subjectivity
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 2:00 pm
Beinecke Library, Room 38

Part of a larger research project on the African American sonnet, this talk will explore the role of the sonnet form in the emergence of an individualized subjectivity in turn-of-the-century black writing. African American poetry in the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly public. Where it did not take a stand in political debates, it at least presented the kind of exteriorized, carefully crafted persona deemed suitable in the struggle for cultural recognition. It was in the sonnet, that poets were first able to move beyond these constraints toward a fuller self-expression. Dunbar, Braithwaite, and a number of their contemporaries took advantage of the emotional depth associated with the sonnet form to articulate a literary subjectivity that was often partial and paradoxical but constituted an important step toward cultural and psychological emancipation.

Timo Müller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Augsburg, Germany, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 2009. His main research areas are modernism, ecocriticism, and African American and Caribbean literature. He has published The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway (2010) as well as articles in journals including Anglia, The Journal of Modern Literature, and Twentieth-Century Literature. An article on James Weldon Johnson and the genteel tradition is forthcoming. His research at Beinecke is for his current book project, The African American Sonnet.

Image: Aaron Douglas illustration appearing in Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, 1926.

Thistlewood kept meticulous daily records of his experiences as a planter and slave owner from 1748 – 1786. The 37 volumes of his diaries leave a detailed portrait of the racial, sexual, economic, and other realities of plantation life in eighteenth-century Jamaica. Over 20 volumes of reading notebooks document his participation in the British literary and scientific cultures of the Enlightenment. His series of 34 weather observation notebooks offer an archive of the climate in Jamaica over three decades, and of the enactment of those philosophies of observation, categorization, and measurement which characterize Thistlewood’s notes on plantation management.

The archive has already been the subject of several important recent works by scholars including James Walvin, Trevor Burnard, Douglas Hall, and Michael Chenoweth. The collection adds to the Beinecke’s already extensive manuscript and archival holdings for early modern British history and materials relating to slavery and abolition, and will prove an invaluable resource for scholarship in the Atlantic World, the Caribbean, African Diaspora Studies, cultures of empire, and British and European history.

Once catalogued and housed, the collection will be open for research in the fall. Please don’t hesitate to contact Kathryn James (kathryn.james@yale.edu), the Beinecke’s Curator for Early Modern Books and Manuscripts, with any questions.

Images: Documents form the Thistlewood Archive.

EXHIBITION CLOSING PARTY
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 5:00

More about Multitudes: http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2011/09/14/multitudes/

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Yale University, 121 Wall Street, New Haven
Free and open to the public

The Photographic Memory Workshop is pleased to invite graduate students, post-doctoral students and academic fellows of the Yale community to submit presentation proposals to its 2011-2012 Graduate Student Working Group. In addition to our usual calendar of visiting scholar lectures, our workshop series offers members of the Yale community working on photography an opportunity to present and discuss works in progress.

Our aim is to bring together people from a variety of disciplines to give feedback and to inspire productive critical conversation about the visual material.

At each meeting, the speaker will give a 20-30 minute informal presentation centered on a set of photographs, instruments, or materials.  These presentations can be formal papers, works in progress, or curatorial projects. Electronic images of the subject being presented (but not the text of the presentation itself) will be pre-circulated to the group by email prior to each meeting. The presentation will be followed by critical conversation and feedback about the speaker’s research project/paper/exhibition.

We are open to any submission related to photography. This includes, but is not limited to, photography’s material processes and cultural history, scientific and applied photography, photographs in books, as well as conceptual, fine-art, and commercial photography.  We especially welcome proposals relating to objects in any of the Yale University collections.

Photographic Memory Workshop Meetings:
The Workshop meets several times throughout the semester, generally at 6pm on Wednesdays. Specific dates and time TBA–contact the organizers for details or to receive announcements about meetings and related events.

Submission Guidelines: 
Please send a 250-500 word proposal along with a selection of images relating to your research topic by October 1st, 2011 to photographicmemoryworkshop@gmail.com.

About the Photographic Memory Workshop: 
This is the thirteenth year of the Photographic Memory Workshop under the mentorship of Professor Laura Wexler. The workshop, which brings together graduate students, faculty, and staff from a wide variety of disciplines, explores the myriad of possibilities inherent in the study of photographs and/or memory. Should you have any questions about the workshop or our activities, please email photographicmemoryworkshop@gmail.com or contact the graduate student fellows at heidi.knoblauch@yale.edu and audrey.sands@yale.edu.

About Photography in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection:
Photographic materials in the Collection compliment the book and manuscript collections, with a close relationship to archival materials and other primary documentation. Holdings document the lives of writers and literary communities, cultural spaces, and significant events of various kinds and include everything from snapshots and passport photographs to fine art and portrait photography by some of the most important photographers of the 20th century.

About Photography in Yale Collections:
A Directory of Yale Photographic Collections provides a portal through which to mine the breadth of the University’s images across repositories and disciplines. The interdisciplinary nature of these resources opens the possibility for endless discoveries of images illustrating sweeping applications of the medium and at the same time presents exciting avenues for the creative use of photographs in object-based learning. http://photostest.odai.yale.edu/directory/index.php

Image:
Half length portrait of Matilda Sissieretta Jones, known as “the Black Patti;” from the Randolph Linsley Simpson Collection of Photographs of African Americans (JWJ MSS 54).

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then . . . . I contradict myself;
I am large . . . . I contain multitudes.

Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, 1855

Founded in 1911 when Yale College graduate Owen Franklin Aldis donated his distinguished library of first editions of American fiction, drama, and poetry to the Yale Library, the Collection of American Literature stands as one of the most important collections of its kind. In the century following Aldis’s gift, the Collection has continued to grow, building on core areas and expanding to include complementary materials, from individual manuscripts to expansive literary archives, from little magazines and lively ephemera to high-tech artists’ books. The highlights exhibited in Multitudes: A Celebration of the Yale Collection of American Literature, 1911–2011 reveal areas of bibliographic strength and new development while demonstrating the Collection’s extraordinary richness, eclecticism, and depth. From the colonial period to the present, the Collection celebrates American Literature as a living art form with a complex history. Its evolving and vibrant traditions are a subject worthy of both rigorous scholarly attention as well as leisurely pursuit for the general reader.

Image: Samuel Hollyer, lithograph from a daguerreotype of Walt Whitman by Gabriel Harrison, 1855. Title page, Leaves of Grass, first edition 1855. An example of the Yale Collection of American Literature’s great strength in printed, manuscript, and visual materials documenting American Poetry is its outstanding collection of materials relating to the life and writing of Walt Whitman. One of the most important works of American Literature, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a celebration of the democratic spirit, the emotional and intellectual power of literature and art, and of the poet himself. In this work, Whitman introduced a new mode of writing and of expression. In the 150 years since it was first published, Leaves of Grass and its author have played a crucial role in shaping American literature and America’s literary imagination. The Beinecke’s Whitman holdings contain copies of all major editions of Leaves of Grass, including five copies of the extraordinarily rare first edition, published in 1855, and several copies of the 1856 second edition, featuring a quotation from a letter Whitman received from Ralph Waldo Emerson in response to the first edition: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career…” In addition to printed works, the Library’s Walt Whitman Collection contains letters, manuscripts, photographs, art, and other material dating from 1842-1949, and features the Whitmania of Yale benefactors Owen Aldis, Louis Mayer Rabinowitz, Adrian Van Sinderen and others. Outstanding manuscripts include Whitman’s early 1850s text “Pictures,” often called a prototype for poems in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass because its expansive energy predicts the experimental free verse that characterizes Whitman’s work. The Collection also includes numerous photographs of the poet. Whitman was quite conscious of his public persona and understood the powerful role that photography, still a new and developing technology, could play in helping him to reach his American audience. From the “rough” depicted in the portrait on the title page of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, to the respectable bard appearing in the edition published five years later, to the “Good Gray Poet” that emerged in the 1860s, Whitman’s photographic image evolved over the course of his career as a writer and public figure. The Whitman Collection also includes artworks and objects such as bronze medallions and Whitman’s own eyeglasses.

For more information about the Yale Collection of American Literature, contact Louise Bernard, Curator of Prose and Drama (louise.bernard@yale.edu) or Nancy Kuhl, Curator of Poetry (nancy.kuhl@yale.edu). Multitudes: A Celebration of the Yale Collection American Literature was organized with the assistance of Charlotte Parker, Y’2013.

The Amos Beman Scrapbook collection includes news clippings related to and collected by Amos Gerry Beman, a black minister in New Haven, Connecticut. Beman was a national leader during the mid-nineteenth century, a proponent of abolition, suffrage, temperance and educational and moral reform.

Beman grew up in Colchester, Connecticut and later Middletown, Connecticut, where his father, Jehiel Beman, was appointed pastor to the first African American church in Connecticut. Beman’s father had worked tirelessly for emancipation and civil rights, and his grandfather, Caesar Beman, had been manumitted after serving in the Revolutionary War.

The scrapbooks document the parish where Amos Beman served as pastor and the work of other ministers; they include church dedications, announcements of temperance meetings, discussions of education for African-Americans, debates regarding African colonization, published speeches of Frederick Douglass, accounts of Amos Beman’s public appearances and speaking engagements, as well as correspondence, letters to the editor authored by Beman and the Proceedings of the Connecticut State Convention of Colored Men, held in New Haven on September 12-13, 1849 and June 6-7, 1865.

Call number: JWJ MSS Beman

Image: Amos Beman Portrait, Scrapbook 3

More images from the Collection: Amos Beman Scrapbooks Image Guide