News

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

  • Emily Bernard: Creativity in Isolation

    May 5, 2020

    We asked scholar, critic, and prize-winning essayist Emily Bernard what she has been thinking about, working on, and reading in this time of isolation and...

  • The Bullet/The Amulet (LA Review of Books)

    May 3, 2020

    Writing a biography begins with detective work, but it’s not simply that. My work on Sidney Howard, for example, entailed months of reading in the National Archives, talking to his family, reading his correspondence from Berkeley to the Beinecke at Yale. I collected shards of meaning, but how to look at these discoveries was informed by Sam. From his readings of Darwin’s writing to his self-appraisal of his own professional performance, Sam understood that the conundrum that the thing observed and the subjectivity of the observer are always intertwined.

  • The Calm of Collage (Austin Kleon)

    May 3, 2020

    Here’s a great video of Donald Margulies in his basement studio: I find that during this bizarre time that we’re living in globally, I’m not able to write. I’m just not able to focus and put words together in any satisfying way. I’ve found tremendous solace and release in collage.

  • Belonging at Yale – Focus on Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

    May 1, 2020

    Beinecke and other Yale Library special collections steward important collections of contemporary Asian American authors, creators, and communities. Illustrative highlights in the Yale Collection of American Literature include archives of poets such as Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge (2021 winner of the Bollingen Prize) and Arthur Sze – see Contemporary Asian American Poets: A Top Ten List for links and ideas on searching the collections. Recent additions to the Yale Collection of Western Americana include Japanese American family photo albums such as those compiled by Komao and Eiko Baba that include more than 550 photographs documenting their lives, relatives, and acquaintances from 1917 into the 1990s. There are similar holdings for the Torii, Nobuyama, Matsukane, and Ichiyasu families. Several Yale records document Japanese American incarceration during World War II. The guide to those records highlights the important work by the Reparative Archival Description Working Group to provide guidance on the remediation of the description of these collections.

  • The digital Dark Ages (Yale Alumni Magazine)

    May 1, 2020

    As knowledge of our predicament spreads, data professionals, tech leaders, and journalists have raised the question of whether the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries will become a digital dark age, a time from which few records will survive for our successors in the centuries and millennia to come. If we do nothing, it seems likely that much of what we write, think, and create will pass out of human knowledge. But a slowly growing team of data devotees, hardware nerds, librarians, and scrappy volunteers is hoping to take the first few steps to keep our era from oblivion.

  • Yale Library responds to coronavirus pandemic (Yale Daily News)

    April 24, 2020

    When Yale Library announced its closure last month, Susan Gibbons — the Stephen F. Gates ’68 University Librarian and Vice Provost of Collections and Scholarly Communication — said “our buildings may be closed, but Yale Library is very much open and active online.”

  • Landscape Photography and the American West (video on Vimeo)

    April 22, 2020

    A conversation between artists Karen Halverson, Lauren Henkin, and George Miles, William Robertson Coe Curator of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, about photography and the American West. The foundation for the discussion was the exhibition "Eye on the West: Photography and the Contemporary West," which was presented at Beinecke 09/2018-12/2018 and curated by George Miles.

  • 2020 Yale College Poets Reading Now Online

    April 21, 2020

    The annual Yale College Poets Reading sponsored by Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL) reading series, cosponsored by the Creative Writing Program in...

  • Knit to This: A Pivot, in the Basement (Mason Dixon Knitting)

    April 18, 2020

    One of my more hopeful thoughts during this time is that we are going to get art out of this. Maybe the musicians, artists, and writers are going to give us amazing things. And maybe it won’t be the art they have done in the past.

  • 10 Highlights from Pace Gallery’s Virtual Saul Steinberg Exhibition (Interior Design)

    April 2, 2020

    Similar to Proust, artist Saul Steinberg was a homebody, creating a body of work­—which exceeds 8,000 drawings—about the whimsy and potentials of life indoors. “Imagined Interiors,” a virtual exhibition on Pace Gallery’s Online Viewing Room, offers a visit to interiors Steinberg illustrated with a post-World War II humor, imagining the new order forming before him with a bitterly joyous and tirelessly curious pen.

  • Zambian writer Namwali Serpell wins $165,000 Windham-Campbell Prize (Face2Face Africa)

    March 25, 2020

    Zambian author Namwali Serpell has been awarded one of the world’s most lucrative literary awards – Yale’s Windham Campbell Prizes 2020. Serpell is one of the eight recipients of the annual prize. The rest of the recipients are; in fiction, Yiyun Lee (the United States/China) alongside Serpell; in nonfiction, Maria Tumarkin (Australia) and Anne Boyer (United States); in poetry, Bhanu Kapil (United Kingdom/India) and Jonah Mixon-Webster (United States); and in drama, Julia Cho (United States) and Aleshea Harris (United States).

  • Kennedy Center Education Artist-in-Residence Mo Willems Presents LUNCH DOODLES! (Princeton Magazine)

    March 25, 2020

    Mo began his career as a writer and animator on Sesame Street, where he garnered six Emmy Awards. His work has been exhibited around the world, including solo retrospectives at the High Museum in Atlanta and the New York Historical Society. Over the last decade, Mo has written three musical theater works based on his books, two of which were commissioned and toured by the Kennedy Center. His papers reside at Yale University’s Beinecke Library.

  • Yale leaders talk about COVID-19: Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Tamar Szabó Gendler

    March 23, 2020

    Faculty who are used to writing notes on a chalkboard are instead using digital whiteboards. Faculty teaching laboratory-based courses have made films using remote-controlled webcams to let students watch experiments up close. In the absence of access to the Yale library, faculty are taking advantage of the rich digital archival collections available through the Beinecke. At the Center for Language Study, over 230 faculty and graduate students participated in online practice sessions on running language classes using Zoom.

  • Eight writers honored with Windham-Campbell Prize (Yale Daily News)

    March 23, 2020

    The international literary community, unable to gather in London as originally planned, tuned into the live-streamed announcement of Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize recipients on March 19. Yale’s Windham Campbell Prizes, one of the world’s most lucrative literary awards, come with a $165,000 award for each of eight winners. “All around the world, governments are taking action, closing libraries, theatres and schools,” said host Damian Barrs in his pre-recorded remarks. “People are afraid. Now more than ever, stories have the power to unite us to open hearts and minds, to provide company, to comfort and to console.”