News

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

  • Visits to campus highlight longstanding partnerships in France

    November 22, 2024

    Hélène Landemore, professor of political science at Yale and an alumna of ENS, met with the delegation. Later, the delegation met with Steven Wilkinson and Pamela da Silva, along with Brendan Walsh, senior associate provost for global strategy. The delegation toured the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library guided by Michael Morand, Beinecke director of community engagement. The delegation later had lunch with colleagues from the French Department and alumni from ENS. The delegation finished their visit by meeting with ENS and Yale graduate students at the French Department.

  • Beinecke Library 2023-2024 Annual Report

    November 13, 2024

    The Beinecke Library 2023-2024 Annual Report, including statistics and selected recent acquisitions, can be read and downloaded here: Beinecke Library 2023-...

  • Japan-Yale PEAKS leadership program hosted on Yale campus

    November 6, 2024

    While visiting Yale’s campus, the program participants toured the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and also visited Tsai CITY, the Center for Engineering Innovation and Design, Yale Ventures, the Peabody Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Since its inception in 2021, the program has involved over 200 participants from Japan and engaged more than 35 Yale faculty and staff.

  • New Haven rejected plans for the nation’s first Black college almost 200 years ago. Today, the city is weighing an apology (CNN)

    November 4, 2024

    A 2021 documentary about the story, produced by the Beinecke Library, garnered significant attention to the topic. It followed the university’s 2020 announcement of the Yale & Slavery Research Project. “We need to see history as dynamic, and to recognize that this is not some deep, past history,” New Haven City Historian Michael Morand told CNN. “The opportunity lost is one that has reverberations down to our present today. (Our) contemporary responses need to be as broad and as deep as the impact of stories such as this in history.”

  • Unpacking Holocaust Testimonies At The Beinecke (New Haven Independent)

    October 30, 2024

    In 1979, a New Haven-based television producer named Laurel Vlock and psychiatrist Dori Laub began filming the testimonials of Holocaust survivors and survivors of antisemitic violence. Over many years, thousands of interviews were recorded in more than a dozen languages. More than 10,000 hours of the resulting videos have been digitized, preserving material of great historical importance.

  • ‘Teachers matter most’: leaders announce Yale Teaching Fellowship

    October 30, 2024

    The fellowship emerged from recommendations of the Yale and Slavery Research Project, an effort undertaken by the university to better understand its formative ties to slavery and the slave trade. That project, convened in 2020, uncovered new information about how Yale and city leaders squashed a proposal to establish the nation’s first college for Black youth in 1831.

  • Beinecke Library hires six curators

    September 26, 2024

    The Beinecke Library has hired a cohort of six new curators—more than half of its curatorial team—who will shape how Yale Library special collections are selected, taught, and used for decades to come.

  • Remembering ‘Amnesia’: Digital preservationists reboot classic video game

    September 19, 2024

    A groundbreaking digital work of interactive fiction by the sci-fi novelist Thomas M. Disch, the game anchors “Remembering Amnesia: Rebooting the first computerized novel,” an exhibit on view through March 2 in the Hanke Exhibition Gallery at Sterling Memorial Library. Drawing on materials from Disch’s archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the exhibit explores the author’s novel attempt to move video games into the realm of literary fiction. It also describes the efforts of the Yale Library’s Digital Preservation unit to preserve the game, originally stored and played on now-obsolete hardware, and restore it to life.

  • Daniel Botsman named Sumitomo Professor of History

    September 13, 2024

    At Yale, Botsman has played a critical role in highlighting the Japanese collections of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library: he co-edited “Treasures from Japan in the Yale University Library” in 2015 and, with colleagues from across the university, convened a symposium on these collections. In addition, he has organized collaborative workshops for graduate students at Yale and beyond to learn new methods in Japanese history.

  • Special exhibit at the Beinecke showcases Holocaust survivors’ testimonies (Yale Daily News)

    September 4, 2024

    The Fortunoff Video Archive, a 45-year-old collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies collected at Yale, is currently on display at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The special exhibit, titled “In the First Person: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies,” aims to showcase the powerful first-person testimonies collected over four decades ago to mark the anniversary of the Archive’s formation.

  • Seeing Dances of the Harlem Renaissance, in Vivid Color (New York Times)

    September 3, 2024

    Along with the researchers Allyson Torrisi and Dahlia Kozlowsky, I dove into the archives of the New York Public Library, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., among others. After combing through thousands of black-and-white images from the early 20th century, I knew I wanted to depict this story of Black dance — as much about the present as the past — in vivid color.

  • Daggers, slides, maps, and more: Objects from 200-plus collections are new online

    August 12, 2024

    Yale Library Digital Special Collections continues to grow. According to librarian and access strategist Alison Clemens, from April 1 through June 30 of this year, more than 8,500 new object landing pages were created. These pages contain 30,000-plus images of individual items, including handwritten letters, manuscripts, photographs, maps, and more.

  • An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery (The Atlantic)

    August 8, 2024

    Lisa Fagin Davis was starting her medieval-studies Ph.D. at Yale in 1989 when she got a part-time job at the university’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Her boss was the curator of early books and manuscripts, and he stuck her with an unenviable duty: answering letters from the cranks, conspiracists, and truthers who hounded the library with questions about its most popular holding.