January 2017 Archives

With the recent completion of its renovations, the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library is delighted to announce the inaugural exhibit, on view in its brand-new exhibition space in the corridor outside the Music Library from January 27-April 25. The exhibit, entitled A Riff on Ruff: Yale’s Jazz Ambassador to the World, will honor the 85th birthday of Professor Willie Ruff of the Yale School of Music. Ruff is a world-class musician on two instruments (horn and bass), a multifaceted researcher, a well-connected impresario, and a polyglot world traveler. A Yale alumnus and professor, he is a long-time friend of the library, and is truly one of a kind. The exhibit features a variety of items including photographs, video interviews, sound recordings, manuscripts, and awards. Many are drawn from the library’s archival collections, while others are borrowed from Ruff's personal collection. The exhibit will notably feature audio and video content for the first time, thanks to new technology that has been installed in the Music Library's new exhibit space. On online version of the exhibit is also available. 

In conjunction with this exhibition, Ruff will also present a talk on February 16th entitled And This is What They Said, in which he will discuss a seminal series of interviews he conducted with the last of the living pioneers of jazz in 1974. These artists, including Dizzy Gillespie, Eubie Blake, Ethyl Waters, John Hammond, and others, vividly recalled their output of classic phonograph records. Ruff recently donated the interviews to Yale’s Oral History of American Music. To celebrate, Ruff will present excerpts from the interviews along with clips from legendary jazz performances. 

Beginning Tuesday, January 17, Manuscripts and Archives are recommencing services that were suspended over the break, due to preparations for renovations in the Manuscripts and Archives Reading Room. The following services are now available in the Franke Reading Room (until approximately November, 2017), which is located on the left as you enter Sterling Memorial Library's High Street entrance.

• Reading room use and materials’ access
• In-house and remote reference work
• Office-of-Origin requests
• ILL lending and return
• Special Collections Transit Hub/Secure unit-to-unit LCS shipments

Manuscripts and Archives is undergoing a major renovation of its public spaces during 2017. While the renovation is in progress all public services, including the reading room where researchers consult collection materials, has been temporarily relocated to the Franke Room in Sterling Memorial Library. 

Find more details about the renovation here.
 

Photo: Rendering of the new reading room in Manuscripts and Archives to be opened later this year. Courtesy of Newman Architects.

Join us on January 24 for an Arts and Humanities Book Talk by Lamin Sanneh, D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School, and Professor of History at Yale University, who will be talking about his book, Beyond Jihad: The Pacifist Tradition in West African Islam. The talk will begin at 4:30 pm in the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, but please join us any time from 4:00 pm for refreshments and conversation.

Over the course of the last 1400 years, Islam has grown from a small band of followers on the Arabian peninsula into a global religion of over a billion believers. How did this happen? The usual answer is that Islam spread by the sword-believers waged jihad against rival tribes and kingdoms and forced them to convert. Lamin Sanneh argues that this is far from the whole story. Beyond Jihad examines the origin and evolution of the African pacifist tradition in Islam, beginning with an inquiry into the faith's origins and expansion in North Africa and its transmission across trans-Saharan trade routes to West Africa. The book focuses on the ways in which, without jihad, the religion spread and took hold, and what that tells us about the nature of religious and social change.

At the heart of this process were clerics who used religious and legal scholarship to promote Islam. Once this clerical class emerged, it offered continuity and stability in the midst of political changes and cultural shifts, helping to inhibit the spread of radicalism, and subduing the urge to wage jihad. With its policy of religious and inter-ethnic accommodation, this pacifist tradition took Islam beyond traditional trade routes and kingdoms into remote districts of the Mali Empire, instilling a patient, Sufi-inspired, and jihad-negating impulse into religious life and practice. Islam was successful in Africa, Sanneh argues, not because of military might but because it was made African by Africans who adapted it to a variety of contexts.

A new exhibition at the Haas Family Arts Library, on view until March 31, presents materials from the Yale Library marking the 50th anniversary of Yale Repertory Theatre.

In 1966, Robert Brustein, Dean of Yale School of Drama, founded Yale Repertory Theatre, a resident professional company that would serve as the equivalent of a “teaching hospital” for theater artists in training. From the beginning, the company has focused on championing new plays alongside productions of classic works. Fifty years later, after winning a Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater and launching numerous world premieres that have gone on to Broadway and theaters around the world, Yale Rep continues to nurture and challenge daring artists, bold choices, and adventurous audiences.

This exhibition features production photographs from Manuscripts and Archives and archival materials from Arts Library Special Collections. It accompanies Yale Rep at 50: Daring Artists, Bold Choices, a selection of more than 70 production photographs spanning the company’s five-decade history, on view January 10-April 8 at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, as well as a smaller exhibition of the same name at the Study at Yale.

Image: Jarlath Conroy and Paul Giamatti in Hamlet, 2013. Photograph by Joan Marcus for Yale Repertory Theatre.

"Beyond Boundaries: Second Annual Symposium on Hybrid Scholarship at Yale University"

April 7, 2017 from 9:30am-1:00pm
Sterling Memorial Library, Lecture Hall and Exhibition Room

How can 3D printing help preserve cultural heritage sites? What might digital maps tell us about the political, commercial, and historical realities of film festivals? To explore these questions and more, join the Digital Humanities Lab and Yale STEAM for the second annual spring symposium to showcase hybrid scholarship at Yale University. Undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff will present projects that highlight the questions that can be asked and considered via digital methods and collaborations between the sciences and humanities.

The symposium is open to the entire Yale community and public. Coffee and refreshments will be provided. Video recordings from the symposium can be found on our YouTube playlist.

Event Schedule

Organized by the Yale Digital Humanities Lab and Yale STEAM, with generous support from the Center for Teaching and Learning

Here are a few photos from the event

Visits to Yale by Martin Luther King Jr (1959 & 1964) & Coretta Scott King (1969) are documented in Manuscripts & Archives, and are part of a new banner exhibit in the nave of Sterling Memorial Library, on view until March 3.

Dr. King was invited to Yale in 1959 by an undergraduate lecture committee and spoke on “The Future of Integration.” He returned to Yale in 1964 to receive an honorary degree, along with Averell Harriman, Philip Jessup, Sargent Shriver Jr, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne. Dr. King was released on bail from the St. Augustine, Florida jail, just two days before receiving the degree from Yale. He had been arrested for ordering food in a whites-only motel. Dr. King’s honorary degree caused considerable reaction, both pro and con, around the country. Coretta Scott King was named the first Frances Blanshard Fellow at Yale in 1969. While on campus she met with women graduate students and spoke to a standing room only crowd in Woolsey Hall on the importance of campus unrest in addressing social injustices.

The materials in this exhibition are reproductions of records from the Office of the President, Kingman Brewster (RU 11); Office of Public Affairs and Communications, Yale Events and Activities Photographs (RU 690); Buildings and Grounds Photographs (RU 703), the Helen Hadley Hall Fellowship Program (RU 9), and YaleNews.

Happy New Year! Hope you all had a wonderful holiday break!

If you would like to use one of our East Asia Library classrooms (SML 207 and SML 218) for your Spring classes or discussion sections, it is time to make a reservation now. SML 207 is equipped with a permanent computer workstation, projector, VCR and DVD player. SML 218 is larger and equipped with an overhead projector and two speakers. To make a reservation, please send a request with your class title, meeting time and desired classroom to east.asia.library@yale.edu.  You can check the availability of both classrooms online from here: http://schedule.yale.edu/booking/EAL. The online calendar also allows you to book the room for one-time events at a maximum length of 3 hours per request on weekdays during the academic year. 

Also, do not forget that you are more than welcome to use both classrooms for quiet study, group discussion, meeting, etc.   We will put the class schedule outside both classrooms, so everyone will know when the room is reserved. Please kindly leave the door open if you are not in a discussion or meeting in the classroom.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.