October 2016 Archives

Join us for a book talk on Tuesday, November 1 at 4:00 pm in the Sterling Memorial Library's International Room.  Abbas Amanat, Professor of History & International Studies and Director of the Yale Program in Iranian Studies will present research done with his co-author, Fereydun Vahman, in their newly published book, "From Tehran to Akka: Babis & Baha’is in the Official Records of Qajar Iran" (Ashkaar Publishers, 2016).

This research is based largely upon documents held in the Ghassem Ghani Collection at Yale (MS 235, Manuscripts and Archives). This important collection of rare documents provides exciting documents on the history of Iran and the neighboring lands in the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Among other topics, it throws a new light on the less-explored story of the Babi movement in exile in the Ottoman Empire and at home between 1854 and 1872. The Collection also contains material by such celebrated statesmen as Amir Kabir and Mohammad Mosaddeq and related to activists such as Jamal al-Din Afghani.

All are welcome!

All are welcome to join us on Wednesday, November 2 at 4:00 pm in the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall for Sondheim: for the Record – the second lecture in a series sponsored by the Richard Warren Jr. (B.A. 1959) Fund for the Preservation and Promotion of Music. Light refreshments will follow in the Memorabilia Room.

The speaker, Thomas Z. Shepard, is a twelve-time Grammy Award winner, recording executive and album producer of Classical and Broadway projects, including a number of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals. He also produced the original cast recordings of 1776, La Cage aux Folles, 42nd Street, Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Raisin. Equally at home with the world of classical music, Mr. Shepard has produced hundreds of classical recordings, working with Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Vladimir Horowitz, Leontyne Price, Placido Domingo and many others.

After attending Yale's Graduate School of Music for a year, Mr. Shepard began working as a trainee for Columbia Records (now Sony) and later became co-director of CBS Masterworks. He later held executive positions as Division Vice President of RCA Red Seal and MCA’s division for Broadway and Classical music. Since 1989, Mr. Shepard has continued to work as an independent recording and concert producer, arranger, expert legal witness, educator, pianist, and a sought-after speaker on both musical theater and classical music.

Graduate Students! Interested in benefiting from the rich resources of the libraries at Yale? Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the options? Join us on Wednesday, November 2 at 4:15pm in the Hall of Graduate Studies, Room 119B for the first session of a series on the Fundamentals of Scholarly Writing. Come hear about how to navigate the libraries and archives at Yale so you can make the most of what's available.

Join us for a talk on Aging and Romance by Dr. Carole Goldberg, Director of SHARE and Assistant Clinical Professor in the Yale School of Medicine, on Thursday, November 10 at 1:00pm in the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall.

Connection, closeness, companionship and touch are lifelong needs that do not get old, even when we do. We may be graying but the benefits of shared, close relationships are essential at all ages, maybe even more so as we age. Welcoming new people into our lives may seem daunting. Maybe we’ve forgotten how or there is some hesitation around seeking new companions or opening our hearts to new relationships. Talking about it may be a useful place to start.

Dr. Goldberg is a licensed Clinical Psychologist. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Maine in Orono. She has a master’s degree and doctorate in clinical psychology from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Her pre-doctoral and post-doctoral internships were at Yale Psychiatric Institute and Yale University. She joined the staff of Yale’s department of Mental Health and Counseling in 1997. Carole is an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Yale School of Medicine, and the Inaugural Director of SHARE (Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education) since 2006. She is a certified sex therapist with AASECT [American Association of Sexuality Educators Counselors and Therapists] and a psychoanalyst, trained at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.

This talk is co-sponsored by Yale University Library and Yale Health.

All are welcome to join us on Monday, October 31 at 12:30 pm in the East Asia Library (2nd Floor of SML) for this talk by Wei Su (East Asian Languages and Literature at Yale), Charles Lu (Yale School of Medicine) and Ping Zhang (Yale School of Medicine), to mark the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in China.

One of major events during the Cultural Revolution was a nationwide “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside" movement (1968-1980), which “sent down” 17 million educated youth to live and work in rural villages and frontier settlements. In this talk, the three Yale speakers, who were also members of the educated youth generation – Wei Su, Charles Lu, and Ping Zhang – will share with the audience their “sent-down” experiences and reflections on the movement and Cultural Revolution. The talk is in conjunction with the current exhibit in the East Asia Library, From Propaganda Mobilization to Youth Demobilization: Selected Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) Sources in the Yale University Library.

A light lunch will be provided.

Join us on Friday, October 28 at 12:00 pm for a talk in the East Asia Library (2nd floor of SML) in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. 

During this year’s fiftieth anniversary of China’s Cultural Revolution, many have invoked the writer Ba Jin’s call for a Cultural Revolution Museum. Why has there been so little commemoration—state and otherwise—of one of the most important periods of China’s twentieth century?

This talk by Professor Denise Ho of Yale’s History Department, explores the history of the Rent Collection Courtyard, an exhibition that was displayed before and during the Cultural Revolution and which became one of the Mao period’s most iconic “model works." To this day, the Rent Collection Courtyard is on display in China, even though it is presented as art rather than propaganda. Professor Ho will examine the practice of exhibiting class in the 1960s, the role of display in the Cultural Revolution, and the legacy of the Rent Collection Courtyard in contemporary China.

Professor Ho is an historian of modern China, with a particular focus on the social and cultural history of China during the Mao period (1949-1976). Her research on the museums and exhibitions of the Mao era—taking Shanghai as a case study—examines the relationship between exhibitionary culture and political campaigns. Her first book, Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

The talk is in conjunction with the current exhibit in the East Asia Library, From Propaganda Mobilization to Youth Demobilization: Selected Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) Sources in the Yale University Library.

All are welcome. A light lunch will be provided.

All are welcome to join us for the following book talk in the Sterling Memorial Library International Room on Wednesday, November 2, at 4:00 pm.

Professor Seth Jacobowitz, Assistant Professor Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures at Yale, will discuss his recent publication, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture. The book boldly rethinks the origins of modern Japanese language, literature, and visual culture from the perspective of media history. Drawing upon methodological insights by Friedrich Kittler and extensive archival research, it investigates a range of epistemic transformations in the Meiji era (1868-1912) from the rise of communication networks such as telegraph and post to debates over national language and script reform. It documents the changing discursive practices and conceptual constellations that reshaped the verbal, visual and literary regimes from the Tokugawa era. This culminates in the discovery of a new vernacular literary style from the shorthand transcriptions of theatrical storytelling (rakugo) that was subsequently championed by major writers such as Masaoka Shiki and Natsume Sōseki as the basis for a new mode of transparently objective, “transcriptive” realism. The birth of modern Japanese literature is thus located not only in shorthand alone, but within the emergent, multi-media channels that were arriving from the West.

This book represents the first systematic study of the ways in which media and inscriptive technologies available in Japan at its threshold of modernization in the late 19th to early 20th century shaped and brought into being modern Japanese literature.

This semester, the Sterling Memorial Library Exhibits Corridor showcases the research of four exceptional Yale students. Camille Owens, a graduate student in African American and American Studies, is displaying excerpts from her research of “Bright” Oscar Moore, a black child prodigy who toured and performed in the United States during the late 19th century. Owens’ display examines Moore’s background, abilities, and repertoire.  
 

After discovering a cabinet card photograph in the Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American Collection at the Beinecke Library, Owens sought to learn more about Moore’s extraordinary life as a performing prodigy. Assembling a biography has proved to be tricky, however; Moore’s character, largely obscured by showmanship and white managers, remains elusive. Owens has created a fragmentary portrait of Moore by gathering pieces of ephemera from his career. The process has opened up many questions concerning race, disability, prodigy, and performance, and Owens’ research is ongoing as she continues to explore these broader issues.

With a grant from the Beinecke Library, Owens spent this past summer continuing her research by studying the James Weldon Johnson collection – coincidentally the subject of a current exhibit at the Beinecke – a collection containing works of many African American writers and artists. Other collections, online databases, and book holdings at the Yale Library have also proved invaluable, allowing Owens to examine her project from multiple perspectives. To learn more about Owens’ research about “Bright” Oscar Moore, stop by her display in the Sterling Memorial Library Exhibits Corridor!