Yale University Library News

December 2010 Archives

DECEMBER 2, 2010

Distinguished Achievement Award to Founder of Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive for holocaust Testimonies

Geoffrey Hartman, Sterling Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, and Faculty Advisor to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at the Yale Library, received the distinguished achievement award for Holocaust studies and research on November 5, 2010 at the Lessons and Legacies Conference in Boca Raton, Florida. Professor Hartman was recognized for his foundational role in establishing the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in 1981, bringing this material to the forefront of Holocaust studies, as well as to many other areas of academic research. In presenting the award, Professor Lawrence Langer of Simmons College noted Hartman has established “the theoretical and practical legitimacy of using eye-witness survivor accounts in the study of the catastrophe of European Jewry we call the Holocaust,” which has largely led the most distinguished historians of the Holocaust to rely on testimonies, such as those at the Fortunoff Archive, as one of their most important primary resources. Langer further noted:
...without the Fortunoff Archives at Yale and other similar collections, the story of what individual human beings endured during the Holocaust would remain entombed in a mausoleum of silence, locked in the vault of memory that loomed over the subject in the decades following their liberation. And it is now clear, or should be, that this silence was not the result of a reluctance or inability to speak about the unspeakable, but the absence of a sympathetic audience to hear what survivors had to tell…. But equally important is Hartman’s notion that telling is a form of facing. If Holocaust consciousness is ever to become more than a number (six million), a name (Mengele), and a place (Auschwitz), then audiences must develop the will to acknowledge and confront both the victimage and the human voice that has survived it.

Hartman is presently raising funds to migrate the video testimonies from obsolete analog formats to digital files for preservation, as well as for increased access. The three-year migration project began this fall and has received major support from the Morton K. and Jane Blaustein Foundation, Michael Vlock and Karen Pritzker, Peter Baldwin and Lisbet Rausing, and Michael L. Friedman.

Professors Omer Bartov of Brown University and Yehuda Bauer of Hebrew University (Jerusalem) also received this award. Past recipients have been Professors Christopher Browning (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Saul Friedlander (University of California, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv University). Lessons and Legacies has been held biannually since 1989 and is sponsored by the Holocaust Education Foundation in partnership with the host universities, this year Florida Atlantic University. Past conferences have been at Northwestern, Dartmouth, Notre Dame, University of Minnesota, Brown, and Claremont McKenna College.

THE FORTUNOFF VIDEO ARCHIVE FOR HOLOCAUST TESTIMONIES: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies is a collection of over 4,400 videotaped interviews with witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust. Part of Yale University's department
of Manuscripts and Archives, the archive is located at Sterling Memorial Library. For more information about the archive:http://www.library.yale.edu/testimonies/about/index.html

Posted by Yale University Library on December 2, 2010 1:18 PM

DECEMBER 14, 2010

New Exhibit at the Lewis Walpole Library

Illustrious Heads: Portrait Prints as History
22 November 2010 – 29 July 2011

Engraved “heads,” or portrait prints, in close alliance with literary history and biography, carried substantial power as expressions of political and social preoccupations in eighteenth-century England. Published for both book illustration and independent issue, with and without text, portrait prints recorded and articulated a national past that was conceived as the “portraiture” of illustrious historical persons—a visual and literary representation of a sequence of notable individuals—rather than as a narrative representation of a series of significant political, diplomatic, or military events. Additionally, straight portraits—and increasingly caricatures—of contemporary persons played a vital role in negotiating topical political and social issues and documenting the surrounding discourse for posterity. The prints selected for this exhibition suggest the variety of portrait and caricature publications and present some of the diverse ways in which they were considered as repositories of history, biography, and anecdote. The exhibition also explores the engagement of eighteenth-century audiences with questions of sitter classification, authenticity, provenance, and scarcity.


The exhibition is free and open to the public during gallery hours: Wednesdays, 2 - 4:30 p.m. The exhibition may also be viewed during tours of the Library by appointment. Please call 860-677-2140 for more information.

Posted by Yale University Library on December 14, 2010 10:46 AM

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