News

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

  • Trove of Gordon Parks “Study Sets” Comes to Yale Library

    November 9, 2021

    Yale University Library’s Beinecke Library has acquired a collection of more than 200 prints by renowned American photographer Gordon Parks. The prints, acquired directly from The Gordon Parks Foundation, constitute one of the largest collections of the photographer’s work available for study in an institution.

  • Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month at Yale

    September 24, 2021

    At the Beinecke: Jon Lewis Photographs from the United Farm Workers Movement A digital collection of photographs by Jon Lewis features scenes from the farm worker movement, the work and activities of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers of America’s California Grape Strike in the 1960s.

  • Yale student presents a virtual exhibit on Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Yale Daily News)

    September 20, 2021

    rodey conceived of this idea in a seminar she took during her sophomore year, “Art of the Printed Word,” taught by Richard Rose, a printer at the Yale School of Art. In an essay assignment, she compared the 1832 Philadelphia publication of “Pride and Prejudice” with the 2010 Belknap-Harvard annotated edition. Over the next year and a half, Brodey continued to reflect on how publishers treat and present the same text in different ways. Eventually, it became the leading theme of her exhibit. Nancy Kuhl, curator of poetry in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, advised the project. Kuhl brainstormed with Brodey about how she could use the collection’s objects to illustrate her ideas and arguments in a compelling way. “Working online required changing some of our work processes but the payoff is the opportunity to share [Brodey’s] excellent exhibition with a large online audience that might never visit New Haven to see it in person,” Kuhl said. “Besides, her detailed research and thorough knowledge made our work easy.”

  • Windham-Campbell literary festival moves online with nine-episode salon

    September 14, 2021

    Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes have transformed their flagship fall literary festival into a virtual salon series showcasing the creativity of its 2021 recipients over the course of nine episodes streaming every Wednesday from Sept. 15 to Nov. 10. Each episode will highlight one of the eight prize recipients with the final episode featuring a keynote address by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo based on the theme “Why I Write.” One-time registration for all nine episodes is free and open to the public. The series will take its audience on an international literary tour of words, music, performance, and art.

  • The Classroom in Crisis (Boston Review)

    September 13, 2021

    Following Brooks’s papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the authors trace how the formalist emphasis of mid-twentieth-century New Criticism emerged less from first principles than from the realities of the classroom, where a text might be understood as a se

  • Bright Young Librarians: Eric Ensley (Fine Books)

    September 9, 2021

    I’m eternally grateful that I was able to receive a PhD in English from Yale University, where I worked all five years in the Beinecke Library alongside librarians and curators like Ray Clemens and Diane Ducharme, who taught me so much of what I know about early books.

  • Analysis unlocks secret of the Vinland Map – it’s a fake

    September 1, 2021

    The Vinland Map, once hailed as the earliest depiction of the New World, is awash in 20th-century ink. A team of conservators and conservation scientists at Yale has found compelling new evidence for this conclusion through the most thorough analysis yet performed on the infamous parchment map. Acquired by Yale in the mid-1960s, the purported 15th-century map depicts a pre-Columbian “Vinlanda Insula,” a section of North America’s coastline southwest of Greenland. While earlier studies had detected evidence of modern inks at various points on the map, the new Yale analysis examined the entire document’s elemental composition using state-of-the-art tools and techniques that were previously unavailable. The analysis revealed that a titanium compound used in inks first produced in the 1920s pervades the map’s lines and text.

  • Barbara Shailor pictured seating in Beinecke Plaza with her donation in front of her.

    Fragment Donated in Honor of Toshiyuki Takamiya

    August 30, 2021

    Barbara Shailor, former director of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, donated a fragment in honor of Toshiyuki Takamiya. The fragment is from the same manuscript as Takamiya MS 91, a twelfth-century manuscript of Rufinus.

  • In Memoriam: Stephen R. Parks, acclaimed curator and bibliophile

    July 26, 2021

    Stephen R. Parks, curator of the James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for nearly 40 years until his retirement in 2004, died on July 22 at Yale New Haven Hospital after battling Parkinson’s Disease for several years. He was 81.

  • Michelle Light appointed Associate University Librarian for Special Collections and Beinecke Library Director

    July 15, 2021

    Michelle Light has been appointed as the new Associate University Librarian for Special Collections and Director of the Beinecke Library, effective October 1, 2021. The appointment was announced today by Barbara Rockenbach, Stephen F. Gates University Librarian. Light comes to Yale University Library from current service as the director of special collections at the Library of Congress. “Michelle brings great experience to build a more unified vision for Yale Library special collections and the Beinecke Library and to sustain and strengthen collections, access, user experience, and a work environment that attracts and retains the best staff,” Rockenbach said.

  • Juneteenth 2021 and the work still to do

    June 18, 2021

    Yale’s libraries and collections are another important source of educational enrichment and inspiration in the spirit of Juneteenth. For example, the Beinecke Library has a pair of films by Solomon Sir Jones that show Juneteenth celebrations in Texas and Oklahoma in the 1920s. The Beinecke’s collections also include an address by Frederick Douglass delivered on April 16, 1883 in the Congregational Church in Washington, D.C. for the 21st anniversary of emancipation in the District of Columbia; and the gold pen used by President Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.