News

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

  • Celebrating The Waste Land's Centennial

    October 24, 2022

    When its famous first line—“April is the cruellest month”—first appeared in print, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land swiftly captured the attention of the literary...

  • Celebrating Black New Haven & Dixwell Congregational UCC History

    October 17, 2022

    The Beinecke Library recognizes Black New Haven and one of the city’s most revered African American communities, the Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ (UCC). The Dixwell Church was founded at 105 Temple Street in 1820. It is the oldest African American Congregational UCC church in the world and among the oldest African American churches of any denomination in New Haven. It has a long social justice tradition with early congregants aiding escaped slaves seeking freedom through the underground railroad. While others supported the Amistad captives jailed in New Haven during their groundbreaking trial. Delayed by the global pandemic, the Dixwell Church celebrates its Bicentennial Plus Two anniversary this year. Its thriving congregation continues to be a center of the historic Dixwell neighborhood to this day. The Beinecke Library had the opportunity to share historically relevant items from the collection through a public viewing on September 17, 2022.

  • Tarocchi Virtual Study Day (Morgan Library)

    October 6, 2022

    A Comparative Technical Analysis of Tarocchi Cards from the Morgan Library & Museum, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Accademia Carrara, and the Pinacoteca di Brera

  • NHHI Hiring Spotlight – Tubyez Cropper

    September 30, 2022

    I have the privilege of being the Community Engagement Program Manager of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. I began my career as a Communications Social Media Intern, and after about a year, I became the Beinecke’s inaugural New Haven Promise fellow. One year later, I was promoted to a project manager and later grew into the Community Engagement Program Manager. I currently build and manage community events with local schools and history institutions to bring greater awareness to the Beinecke collections. I operate the library’s social media platforms, boost the library’s visual content, collaborate with curators and exhibition prep to create high-quality promotional content for the public, and give tours and lectures across New Haven. I would be remiss if I did not mention my appreciation for Michael Morand, Director of Community Engagement.

  • MCLA Professor Reflects on Fellowship at Yale’s Beinecke Library (MCLA)

    September 19, 2022

    During a summer as a research fellow at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Victoria Papa, Ph.D., found herself immersed in the archives of modernist authors. Dr. Victoria Papa at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Dr. Papa is Assistant Professor of English​ & Visual Culture at MCLA. Her teaching and research examine the intersections of creative expression and the survival of structural traumas in literature and visual culture from the modernist period to the present. She is a co-director of the CARE SYLLABUS – a public humanities and art project developed in collaboration with MASS MoCA.

  • Windham-Campbell Literary Festival returns with in-person events

    September 13, 2022

    The Windham-Campbell Prizes’ annual literary festival returns to campus Sept. 19 to Sept. 22 with a special lineup of events to mark its 10th anniversary, including a keynote address by former United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey.

  • The world as they knew it: New Beinecke exhibition charts rise of maps

    September 1, 2022

    Yale boasts one of the most significant map collections in North America, including the continent’s largest single assemblage of portolans — navigation charts that seafarers used to find ports. Ten of the Beinecke Library’s portolans, which comprise the exhibit’s centerpiece, are displayed in the two flat cases on either side of the building’s ground floor.

  • Digital project supports ‘bibliographic turn’ in Black literary studies

    August 11, 2022

    Digital project supports ‘bibliographic turn’ in Black literary studies By Allison Bensinger August 11, 2022 Share this with Facebook Share this with Twitter Share this with LinkedIn Share this with Email Print this A selection of books by Black authors (Photo by Tubyez Cropper) Yale’s Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill of Rutgers University recently received a $1.7 million grant from The Mellon Foundation to support the development of The Black Bibliography Project (BBP), an initiative that aims to revive and transform descriptive bibliography for African American and Black Diaspora literary studies.

  • That Weird Building on the Highway Is Actually Famous and Now a Hotel (Daily Beast)

    July 30, 2022

    A short walk north through neo-gothic delights leads to another modernist landmark open to the public, the Beinecke Library, designed by Gordon Bunshaft for Skidmore Owings Merrill. The exterior consists of marble panels held in place by precast blue-grey concrete panels over steel Vierendeel trusses. We’ve all seen marble before, it’s almost always opaque. When you enter you realize that this isn’t. Its 1-1/4-inch-thick marble slabs reveal ever-changing grain and light inside; a use of material without modern precedent, inspired allegedly by an alabaster wall in the Topkapi Palace. The shelves are all in the center, a tower of tomes within.

  • How Sinclair Lewis Invented Donald Trump (New Haven Independent)

    July 29, 2022

    To find out more about Lewis’s effort to predict such dire circumstance, I became a denizen of the Beinecke, the 1963 building of translucent marble and granite on Yale’s Hewitt Quadrangle. Here, there are priceless relics available to examine by any visitor. These include one of the few extant copies of the original Gutenberg Bible and John James Audubon’s The Birds of America.

  • A Postcard from New Haven, CT (Contingent Magazine)

    July 29, 2022

    Although I spent only two days researching at Yale, I found several pertinent sources for my dissertation. Most of that time I worked at the Beinecke Library, located next to the law school. Tall and modern, the exterior of the Beinecke looks drastically different from the more traditional gothic buildings nearby. Walking inside the library, visitors like myself find a large enclosed glass case of rare books. The library holds over 1 million books, and it’s quite something to see many of them in such a unique display. The library’s reading room offered great space to read through its many collections, small or large, without the pressure of hovering over other researchers.

  • IMLS Announces $21 Million Investment in U.S. Library and Archive Initiatives (IMLS)

    July 28, 2022

    The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and partners, will develop the first set of best practices for archival accessioning in the United States to help archives across the country strengthen and standardize their own accessioning practices. The best practices developed will help archives professionals work more efficiently and ethically, and the project events will help formally establish a community of practice where these professionals can support and learn from each other.

  • The World in Maps, 1400-1600 (Fine Books & Collections)

    July 14, 2022

    This exhibition presents many of the most historically significant manuscript maps from the late medieval and early modern period from the Beinecke Library’s vast collection of maps. It is focused on portolan charts - large, colorful charts that showed the shoreline of the Mediterranean, and were used by sailors to navigate from port to port

  • Wright Lab summer undergraduate researchers explore scientific treasures of Yale Beinecke Library

    July 14, 2022

    Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Beinecke) and the Medical Historical Library together house early editions of many milestones of achievements in physics, including those from Copernicus, du Châtelet, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and other scientists from the 16th-18th centuries, with topics ranging from early materials science, astronomy and cosmology, physics, and mathematics.

  • Remembering Judy Schiff: Library colleagues share memories

    July 13, 2022

    Throughout her impressive sixty-year-long career at Yale—including as ­Yale Library’s chief research archivist since 1971—Judith “Judy” Schiff earned the deep respect and admiration of colleagues throughout the institution. The news of her death this week prompted several of these many friends and co-workers to share their memories of the ways in which she inspired them as a mentor, historian, and valued member of the Yale and New Haven communities she loved.

  • In Memoriam: Judith Ann Schiff, Yale’s long-serving chief research archivist

    July 12, 2022

    Judith Ann Schiff, a longtime archivist at the Yale University Library who loved helping others gain a deeper understanding of Yale’s and New Haven’s histories, died on July 11. She was 84. Over the course of a Yale career spanning more than 60 years, Schiff — the library’s chief research archivist and the university’s longest-serving staff member in recent memory — guided countless students and scholars through the library’s archival collections. She built and managed many of those collections, making them more accessible to researchers. And she delighted in sharing fun, fascinating, and often forgotten stories from the university’s history through her beloved “Old Yale” column in the Yale Alumni Magazine. Generous by nature, she enjoyed sharing her knowledge of Yale’s history with alumni, frequently giving talks during reunions and other special events.