Brown University Library

The Brown University Library, the Sarah Doyle Center, Pembroke Center, and the LGBTQ Center are thrilled to welcome Bishakh Som to campus on September 26th for a lecture on Trans/Migrations: Journeys Through Art, Architecture, Comics, and Gender.

Through charting her history of cultural and geographical displacements, Bishakh Som will propose that such continuous movements have been integral to reckoning with herself not only as part of a South Asian diaspora but also as a transgender femme. She will trace how ideas of travel, migration, language, and longing for a sense of home/belonging have been crucial to her art-making as it has itself migrated from its roots in comics, through architecture and painting to now roosting firmly back in comics, a medium which has allowed her to integrate these previous endeavors into one practice.

To learn more visit: https://events.brown.edu/sdwc/event/291127-transmigrations-journeys-through-art-archit

Fifteen humanities scholars from across the nation gathered in Brown University’s John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library this week with a shared mission: Explore best practices for authoring and publishing a first-rate, digital-first monograph and leave with the skills to create their own.

With focus on supporting HBCU faculty, Brown library expands access to scholarly digital publishing The Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing institute introduces scholars, many of whom are from historically Black and other minority-serving institutions, to best practices in online scholarly publishing.

The John Hay Library acquires the papers of Joy Harjo, former U.S. Poet Laureate and 2024 Brown honorary degree recipient.

Brown University’s John Hay Library acquires former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s papers Harjo’s writing drafts, correspondence, scripts and teaching materials will significantly enhance the University’s scholarly resources from Native and Indigenous writers and performers.

In partnership with the Providence Public Library, the Brown Library is hosting a series of free activities this summer including story time with Bruno the Bear and visits from Elvy, Brown's comfort dog.

Brown University Library to host free summer reading events for local kids and families In partnership with Providence’s libraries, the Brown series aims to create fun, educational summer experiences for kids, welcoming all ages for storytimes, hands-on STEM activities, tours and more.

Happy Pride! Your Brown University Library is highlighting “Archives of Sexuality and Gender: International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture” as its Electronic Resource of the Month.

“Archives of Sexuality and Gender: International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture” examines diversity in underrepresented areas of the world such as southern Africa and Australia, highlighting cultural and social histories, struggles for rights and freedoms, explorations of sexuality, and organizations and key figures in LGBTQ history. It ensures LGBTQ stories and experiences are preserved. Among many diverse and historical 20th century collections, materials include:

- The Papers of Simon Nkoli, a prominent South African anti-apartheid, gay and le***an rights, and HIV/AIDS activist

- Exit newspaper (formerly Link/Skakel), South Africa’s longest running monthly LGBTQ publication

- Geographic Files, also known as “Lesbians in…” with coverage from Albania to Zimbabwe

- The largest available collection of digitized Australian LGBTQ periodicals

The Library Expert whose specialties intersect with this archive is Leo Lovemore, Librarian for History, Society, and Culture. You can reach out to them directly at [email protected] for virtual or in-person consultations, classes, and meetings.

April is Jazz Appreciation Month! The Brown University Library is highlighting Qwest TV for education, a video resource that includes a wide range of music content with particular strengths in rare jazz performances and jazz festival documentaries.

Created by Quincy Jones and curated by his team, Qwest maintains an archive of more than 1,300 videos; Qwest also commissions new performances and interviews with some of the most intriguing performers of the music world. Enjoy watching and listening to a wide range of musicians from Miles Davis and Pharoah Sanders to Moondog and Dafné Kritharas.

Please note that for full Qwest.TV/edu functionality, you will need to enable pop-ups in your browser and sign in using your Brown credentials. You may also need to clear your cache.

The library expert whose specialties intersect with this database is Laura Stokes ([email protected]), Performing Arts Librarian. You can reach out to her directly for virtual or in-person consultations, classes, and meetings.

This is your Library. You belong here.

On view at Brown’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice through July, "Art and the Freedom Struggle: The Works of Mumia Abu-Jamal" serves as a creative companion to the biographical “Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Portrait of Mass Incarceration” exhibit currently on display at Brown’s John Hay Library.

Simmons Center exhibition examines art and incarceration, through Mumia Abu-Jamal works “Art and the Freedom Struggle: The Works of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” on view at Brown’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, underscores the impact of creation during incarceration.

On view at Brown’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice through July, the exhibit "Art and the Freedom Struggle: The Works of Mumia Abu-Jamal" serves as a creative companion to the biographical “Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Portrait of Mass Incarceration” exhibit currently on display at Brown’s John Hay Library.

Simmons Center exhibition examines art and incarceration, through Mumia Abu-Jamal works “Art and the Freedom Struggle: The Works of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” on view at Brown’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, underscores the impact of creation during incarceration.

Join Brown University Library as we host a cross-disciplinary panel discussion centered on Kimberly Juanita Brown’s Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (Paperback from MIT Press, February 2024. Open access digital edition by Brown University Digital Publications; full digital release June 2024).

Full details: https://library.brown.edu/create/libnews/mortevivum/

Speakers include the author, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Associate Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College; Kim Gallon, Brown University Associate Professor of Africana Studies; Juliet Ho**er, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science; Kevin Quashie, Brown University Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in English; and Avery Willis Hoffman, Artistic Director of the Brown Arts Institute and Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics.

Date: Wednesday, April 3, 2024
Location: Willis Reading Room at the John Hay Library, 20 Prospect St, Providence & on Zoom (link shared on website closer to event date)

Program:

5 – 5:25 p.m.: Book sale and author signing
5:30 p.m.: Welcome remarks
5:45 p.m.: Reading by author Kimberly Juanita Brown
6 p.m.: Panel conversation
6:45 p.m.: Audience Q&A
7 p.m.: Reception
Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by Brown University Library, Africana Studies, Brown Arts Institute, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Comparative Literature, History of Art and Architecture, Modern Culture and Media, and Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

On Seeing
Mortevivum is the inaugural title of On Seeing, a new multimodal book series published by The MIT Press and Brown University Digital Publications. Devoted to visual literacy, publications foreground the political agency, critical insight, and social impact inscribed in visuality and representation. Centering underrepresented perspectives and understudied questions, books in the series articulate complex ideas about how we see, comprehend, and participate in the visual world.

Mortevivum
Mortevivum is a powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness. Since photography’s invention, black life has been presented as fraught, short, agonizingly filled with violence, and indifferent to intervention: living death—mortevivum—in a series of still frames that refuse a complex humanity. In Mortevivum, Kimberly Juanita Brown shows us how the visual logic of documentary photography and the cultural legacy of empire have come together to produce the understanding that blackness and suffering—and death—are inextricable. Brown traces this idea from the earliest images of the enslaved to the latest newspaper photographs of black bodies, from the United States and South Africa to Haiti and Rwanda, documenting the enduring, pernicious connection between photography and a global history of antiblackness.

Brown undergrads: Did you work on a project, paper or art work that you are particularly proud of? Consider submitting it to the 2024 Undergraduate Prize for Excellence in Library Research. Don’t miss a great chance to be recognized for your course work, and win a $750 prize.

Apply now through April 5!

Student research projects that were submitted for a class during the 2023 calendar year and made exemplary use of library resources are eligible. Library resources used for research can include anything from books to online databases to datasets to rare materials at the John Hay Library or John Carter Brown Library.

Eligible projects can be research papers, digital projects, artwork, and/or group projects. Please note that senior theses are not eligible.

Applications should include the project itself, a statement on your research process (500 - 750 words), a list of sources used, and a letter of support from the faculty member who taught your class. More information and the application form are at https://library.brown.edu/ugresearchprize

HIRING : Director of Library Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. DEI & associated issues of racial justice continue to be major commitments and are integral to the Library’s mission on campus & our growth as an organization.

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3854002428/

Did you know that you can mine and analyze large amounts of text using resources offered by the Library? This month, Brown University Library is highlighting ProQuest TDM Studio and Scopus API as its Electronic Resources of the Month.

ProQuest TDM Studio is a platform that allows you to text and data mine (in other words, gather and analyze large amounts of text) from news and scholarly and other kinds of publications that Brown subscribes to via ProQuest. You can visualize and analyze your data with no coding required using TDM Studio Visualizations, or use the Workbench to process, analyze, and export your data using Python or R.

Subscribing to Scopus, a database with over 1.8 billion cited references, is among the Brown Library's targeted contributions to the University's Operational Plan for Growing the Research Enterprise. The references in Scopus are derived mainly from articles and journals dating back to 1970 in social sciences, STEM, and health sciences. As part of this subscription, Brown community members have access to Scopus APIs, plus free access to citation data, citation counts, metadata, and abstracts from scholarly journals as well as full-text downloads in XML. XML files can be text mined for non-commercial research purposes via Scopus’ Full Text API.

The Library experts whose subject specialties intersect with this resource are Cass Wilkinson Saldaña, Tarika Sankar, Andrew Creamer, and Ashley Champagne. You can reach out to [email protected] for one-on-one virtual or in-person consultations, classes, and data requests.

It's PUB DAY for “Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual,” a powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness, written by Kimberly Juanita Brown, the inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College. “Mortevivum” is the first in The MIT Press and Brown University Digital Publications’s (Brown University Library) On Seeing series, which is committed to centering underrepresented perspectives in visual culture. The OPEN ACCESS DIGITAL EDITION includes a video of author Kimberly Juanita Brown in conversation with poet Vievee Elaure Francis and a Community Engagement Toolkit, a guide to having open conversations about antiblackness, visual culture, and death. Visit on-seeing-mortevivum.org Association of University Presses

Prof. Massimo Riva's publication, "Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog Word," is one of five finalists in the multimodal, born-digital category. Congratulations to Prof. Riva and the Brown University Digital Publications team!

ACLS Names Finalists for 2024 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards ACLS is pleased to announce 10 finalists for the 2024 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards.

Brown University Digital Publications at the Library receives 2023 Brown University Excellence Award in Innovation!
https://www.brown.edu/about/admini%C3%A5stration/human-resources/talent-development/bear-day/excellence-awards

Postdocs apply now!

Forbes cites Brown Brown University Library on making choices about the use of generative AI tools in academic work.

Council Post: How To Start Navigating The Legal Minefield Of AI-Generated Content: 7 Tips For Creative Agencies Empower yourself with knowledge in the evolving arena of AI issues, and your agency can stay ahead of the pack.

The Library's Curator for the Black Diaspora, Dr. Christopher West, contributed to the curation of "A Matter of Truth," an exhibit that includes some items from the Library's Special Collections. On display at the RI Statehouse now through Jan. 19, 2024.

“A Matter of Truth” Dives Into Rhode Island’s History of Discrimination - Rhode Island Monthly The new exhibit by the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society explores the history of African heritage residents from the 1600s to the present.

The Library hosted the screening and displayed special collections materials related to Native and Indigenous activism and political engagement during this two-day event.

‘Mankiller’ director, legal scholar discuss Cherokee leader Wilma Mankiller at panel - The Brown Daily Herald Serving the Brown community since 1891

Foreign Affairs calls "A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures" by Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities Shahzad Bashir — produced with Brown University Digital Publications — a "dazzlingly creative and thought-provoking digital book."

A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures Bashir argues that Islam needs to be understood not as a monolithic, unchanging faith but as an accumulation of beliefs and practices that people have labeled “Islam” over time and across regions.

Trending Globally podcast about the Library's Voices of Mass Incarceration collecting focus featuring Amanda Strauss, Associate University Librarian for Special Collections and Director of the John Hay Library; Christopher West, Curator of the Black Diaspora, Brown University Library; and Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, Associate Processor of Sociology at Brown:

Archiving the ‘Voices of Mass Incarceration’ at Brown’s John Hay Library - Trending Globally: Politics and Policy In 1982, Mumia Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer. An ex-Black Panther, he had no prior criminal record. A...

"While the John Carter Brown and John Hay libraries have housed Native American and Indigenous materials within their collections in the past, there had never previously been a cohesive curation to them. That was until Kimberly Toney, the inaugural coordinating curator for Native American and Indigenous collections, was brought on board in July 2022 to help the libraries expand this field of knowledge on College Hill and beyond."

‘Critical for us understanding each other’: A look into Brown’s Native American and Indigenous collections - The Brown Daily Herald Collections at JCB, Hay highlight history of Native American and Indigenous people

“Banning books is an attempt to control what kids can imagine as possible for themselves and for their worlds,” said Leo Lovemore, Brown’s librarian for history, society and culture in Brown Daily Herald article.

Brown community members share concerns amid increase in LGBTQ+ book bans - The Brown Daily Herald The Herald spoke to University community members about how book bans targeting LGBTQ+ authors, identities and themes impact readers in Rhode Island and beyond. 

Brown PhD student Marcus Grant and ensemble performed "Vampire Nation" composed by Mumia Abu-Jamal at "Voices of Mass Incarceration: A Symposium."

A piece composed in solitary confinement and never performed gets its world premiere at Brown “Vampire Nation,” composed in prison in 2009 by Mumia Abu-Jamal and arranged by Brown Ph.D. student Marcus Grant, had its world premiere at a symposium focused on mass incarceration.

An incredible three days of learning at “Voices of Mass Incarceration: A Symposium.”

Three-day symposium explores history, reach of mass incarceration in America “Voices of Mass Incarceration: A Symposium” marked the public opening of an exhibition and John Hay Library collection with conversations, performances and receptions that drew hundreds from across the region and world.

Brown University Digital Publications at the Library is at the forefront of digital scholarship.

Digital scholarship initiative brings new life to research topics in the humanities With new Mellon Foundation grant, Brown will advance its foray into digital scholarship, starting with 'Furnace and Fugue.'

The Library is thrilled to have received $1.15 million from the Fund for the Education of the Children of Providence to support a collaboration with Providence Public School Department high schools to enhance learning and engagement with their school libraries, community libraries, and the Brown University Library.

Brown awards $1.25 million to library, participatory budgeting projects in Providence public schools Disbursements from the Fund for the Education of the Children of Providence will strengthen libraries at nine PPSD high schools and enable local middle schoolers to decide how their school spends $100,000.

We love talking with young people about preservation! At College Day 2023, Library Collections Care staff Erica Saladino and Roger Williams taught visiting high school students about the history and chemistry of iron-gall ink and how it affects manuscripts. The students got a chance to look at documents from our collection and did a hands-on exercise using conservation techniques.

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In partnership with the Swearer Center, students from Brown Votes organized a postcard campaign in support of local and national library initiatives. To learn more about visit https://libguides.brown.edu/NationalLibraryWeek.

Christina Sharpe is "The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought" in the New York Times.

Sharpe donated papers to the Feminist Theory Archive in 2018 in the name of the Pembroke Center's Black Feminist Theory Project. They are available for research at the John Hay Library!

The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought Christina Sharpe is expanding the vocabulary of life in slavery’s long shadow — peeling back the meaning of familiar words and resurrecting neglected history.