Fellowship winners will study next at Oxford and Cambridge

May 11, 2021

Emma Brodey ’21 has been awarded the King’s-Yale Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in English at Cambridge University, where she will study 18th-century and Romantic literature and the history of the book. At Yale, she is an English major focusing her studies on 19th-century English literature and creative nonfiction. Her academic thesis explored Jane Austen and George Eliot’s novels through the lens of material texts and the embodiment of the 19th-century woman reader. Her creative thesis was a memoir about the role of Austen in her own family. Brodey has also studied letterpress printing, helps lead the Yale Guild of Bookmakers, and often teaches bookbinding workshops for the Yale community. She works as a research assistant at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Her most recent curated exhibit, “Publication and Prejudice” focuses on copies of “Pride and Prejudice” in the Yale Library collections.

Yale poets, experts weigh in on relationship between social media, poetry (Yale Daily News)

May 7, 2021

Nancy Kuhl, Beinecke Curator of Poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature, said that the publishing history of American poetry is rich and fascinating. Innovation made by American poets, such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickison, provided a “fertile ground” for later writers. “Social media platforms add a new layer — allowing poets to reach new audiences around the world and providing a virtual space for the development of dynamic new poetry communities,” Kuhl said.

Blood, Tears and Samurai Love: A global collaboration uncovers a lost love story in a library manuscript

April 29, 2021

The untitled manuscript is housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and is being referred to as the Shūdō tsuya monogatari, roughly meaning “male-male relationship stories.” Set in 1714 in Dewa Province in Northeastern Japan, the story features unusual full-color illustrations and is written in kuzushiji, a challenging calligraphic script commonly used in Japanese texts before 1900 but now legible only to scholars with specialized expertise.

‘It couldn’t be more relevant’: the unseen Richard Wright novel finally getting its due (The Guardian)

April 22, 2021

A truncated part of the novel was later released as a short story, but the original manuscript’s existence was known only to a handful of scholars. Then, in 2010 Julia, a journalist, poet and advocate for death row inmates, unearthed the novel among her father’s papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut.

African American studies department hires three assistant professors, hiring searches continue (Yale Daily News)

April 16, 2021

Howard added that resources such as the Beinecke Library and a more robust doctoral program in African American literature, as well as interdisciplinary programs in English and other departments, make the move especially enjoyable.

The Stone Heads of 320 York

April 12, 2021

But the heads embedded in the entrance archway were not mentioned as part of that initial scandal. So we did some digging in the Beinecke Library’s archives and found a typewritten account by one of the workmen involved in the planning of the building, Wesley Needham. Needham was quite a character. He served as an adviser in Tibetan literature at the Yale University Library and had no training in architecture except “through the study of books on architecture borrowed from the New Haven Public Library.” Nonetheless, he served as a draftsman in the construction of 320 York Street as one of what he estimated as about eighty-five draftsmen serving under the chief architect, James Gamble Rogers. These people drew up plans and created drawings of proposed carvings, which they submitted, in the case of the Hall of Graduate Studies, to the architect John Donald Tuttle for approval. Needham recalled working on a “series of snails” to be molded over the windows in the lounge: “Tuttle didn’t mention what they symbolized (possibly the slow pace of graduate students on their way to a higher degree),” a surprisingly painstaking project that went through a number of drafts. Needham dryly comments, “Now when I look at them, I wonder if they were worth so much effort.”

The Symbolic Animal (New York Review of Books)

April 8, 2021

The philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s most timely insight is that even in a scientific age, people are prone to magical, mystical thinking.

Canadians Dionne Brand and Canisia Lubrin among finalists for $165K US Windham-Campbell Prize (CBC)

March 22, 2021

Michael R. Jackson and Nathan Alan Davis Recipients of 2021 Windham-Campbell Prizes for Drama (Playbill)

March 22, 2021

This year, the prestigious annual award for literary achievement is spotlighting the Black and queer experience.