The Map Department's new hours are: Monday to Friday, 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. For more information, contact Abraham Parrish.

Natasha Trethewey, Poetry Reading
Wednesday, November 18, 4:00 p.m.
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact:nancy.kuhl@yale.edu

Natasha Trethewey is the 2009 James Weldon Johnson Fellow in African American Studies at the Beinecke Library; she is the author of Domestic Work (selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet), Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has received awards and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She is Professor of English at Emory University where she holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry.

The James Weldon Johnson Fellowship in African American Studies was established at the Beinecke Library in 2008. This fellowship is designed to permit outstanding scholars to devote a full academic term in residence at Yale University to conduct research and writing in connection with the James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Beinecke Library.
Founded in 1941 by Carl Van Vechten, the James Weldon Johnson Memorial collection stands as a memorial to Dr. James Weldon Johnson and celebrates the accomplishments of African American writers and artists, beginning with those of the Harlem Renaissance. Grace Nail Johnson contributed her husband’s papers, leading the way for gifts of papers from Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White and Poppy Cannon White, Dorothy Peterson, Chester Himes, and Langston Hughes. The collection also contains the papers of Richard Wright and Jean Toomer, as well as smaller groups of manuscripts and correspondence of such writers as Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman.

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"J. Edgar Hoover's Influence on American Political Culture"
Professor Beverly Gage, Department of History, Yale University
Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, 128 Wall St.
Thursday, November 19, 4:00 p.m.

Gage, author of "The Day Wall Street Exploded: America in its First Age of Terror "(Oxford, 2009) will speak on her current research on the FBI's founding Director, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover served under eight Presidents from Coolidge to Nixon and during his 48 year tenure as Director, the FBI grew in responsibility and importance and achieved iconic status in both American political and popular culture.

Beverly Gage is assistant professor of 20th-century U.S. history. Her teaching and research focus on the evolution of American political ideologies and institutions. She teaches courses on terrorism, communism and anticommunism, American conservatism, and 20th-century American politics. She completed her graduate work at Columbia University, where her dissertation received the Bancroft award for best U.S. history dissertation. Her first book, "The Day Wall Street Exploded" examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing.

In addition to her teaching and research, Professor Gage has written for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, Time, and the New York Times. She has also appeared as a historical commentator on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer (PBS). In 2007, the History News Network named her one of the country's Top Young Historians. In 2009, Professor Gage received the Sarai Ribicoff Award for teaching excellence in Yale College.

Connecticut’s Marriage Equality Story to be Preserved at Yale University

Love Makes a Family, a coalition of individuals and organizations that has been the leading voice in the campaign for marriage equality in Connecticut since 2000, has donated its records to the Yale University Library. Having accomplished its core mission of winning the freedom to marry for same-sex couples in Connecticut, the group is ceasing operations on November 13, 2009.

The Love Makes a Family records include correspondence, planning and legal documents, photographs, minutes of meetings, reports, website content, publications, financial documents, press releases, and research and subject files. The materials will be available in Manuscripts and Archives in Sterling Memorial Library in New Haven, where they will be part of a growing collection of primary source material documenting gender and sexuality at the local, national, and international levels.

Carol Buckheit, Executive Director of Love Makes a Family, said, “Yale’s world class library system will allow generations of people to access and learn from Love Make’s a Family’s work to win marriage equality in Connecticut. We are extremely gratified that our civil rights legacy will be preserved for all time.”

“Love Makes a Family has been a key agent of change in local and national lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights,” noted Christine Weideman, Director of Manuscripts and Archives. “Their records will provide valuable insight into the same-sex marriage movement and will be of essential value to scholars, students, and activists. We are honored to be entrusted with their preservation.”

Manuscripts and Archives, a department of Yale University Library, is a major center for historical inquiry and also serves as the documentary memory of Yale University. The Yale University Library supports all areas of current and historical lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender scholarship at Yale.

Records designated by Love Makes a Family as open to research will be available by spring, 2010.

For more information about the records, contact Mary Caldera in Manuscripts and Archives at (203) 432-8019 or mary.caldera@yale.edu.

New Haven, Conn. — An exhibition of aerial photography by noted photographer Robert B. Haas is now on view at Yale’s Haas Family Arts Library, 180 York Street.

The main exhibition has a limited engagement through December, while 16 large pictures by the photographer will remain on permanent display at the Haas Library. An artist’s talk and reception will be held at 5:15 p.m. on November 20. The free event is open to the public.

Yale University Librarian Alice Prochaska said, “Robert Haas is an accomplished artist whose works have been exhibited in New York, Washington, D.C., Europe, South America, China and Australia, and also published in National Geographic Magazine and Time. We are honored that he accepted our invitation to display these extraordinary and moving works of art in Yale’s Haas Family Arts Library.”

The exhibition, “Capturing the Inaccessible,” includes both published and unpublished photographs from three of Haas’ books: “Through the Eyes of the Gods: An Aerial Vision of Africa” (2005), “Through the Eyes of the Condor: An Aerial Vision of Latin America” (2007) and “Through the Eyes of the Vikings: An Aerial Vision of Arctic Lands” (forthcoming), all published by the National Geographic Society. According to Haas, aerial photography weaves together a set of themes into artistic impression. These themes are the vantage point of the winged creature, the view of what lies below and humankind’s exaggerated notion of where it fits into a larger scheme.

Haas is the author and photographer of a series of seven books of photography and the chair of Haas Wheat & Partners, a Dallas-based private investment firm. A graduate of Yale College (1969) and Harvard Law School, he has endowed professorships and has been a frequent lecturer at both institutions. Haas has focused on aerial photography since 2002, and throughout his artistic career he has donated all royalties to schools, libraries, non-profit foundations and wildlife conservation organizations around the world.

The Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library opened in 2008 in the renovated Paul Rudolph Hall and the new Jeffrey H. Loria Center for the History of Art. The library brings together the collections, staf, and other resources from the former Art + Architecture and Drama libraries and the Arts of the Book Collection, as well as staff and services for the Visual Resources Collection. It serves as the library for the Schools of Art, Architecture, and Drama, as well as the Department of the History of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Applications Invited for Lewis Walpole Library Fellowships and Travel Grants for Eighteenth-Century Studies

The Lewis Walpole Library, a department of Yale University Library, invites applications to its 2010 - 2011 fellowship program. Located in Farmington, Connecticut, the Library offers short-term residential fellowships and travel grants to support research in the Library’s rich collections of eighteenth century—mainly British—materials, including important holdings of prints, drawings, manuscripts, rare books, and paintings, as well as a growing collection of sources for the study of New England Native Americans. Scholars undertaking postdoctoral or equivalent research, and doctoral candidates at work on a dissertation, are encouraged to apply. Recipients are expected to be in residence at the Library, to be free of other significant professional obligations during their stay, and to focus their research on the Lewis Walpole Library’s collections. Fellows also have access to additional resources at Yale, including those in the Sterling Memorial Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Yale Center for British Art. Lewis Walpole Library fellowships, usually for one month, include the cost of travel to and from Farmington, accommodation in an eighteenth-century house on the Library's campus, and a living allowance stipend (now $2,000). The Library's travel grants typically cover transportation costs for research trips of shorter duration and also include accommodation on site.

To apply for a fellowship or travel grant, candidates should send a curriculum vitae, including educational background, professional experience and publications, and a brief outline of the research proposal (not to exceed three pages) to:

Margaret K. Powell
W.S. Lewis Librarian and Executive Director
The Lewis Walpole Library
P.O. Box 1408
Farmington, CT 06034
USA

Fax: 860-677-6369

While application materials may initially be submitted electronically to walpole@yale.edu, a hard copy is required for the application to be considered complete.

Two confidential letters of recommendation are also required by the application deadline. Letters of recommendation should specifically address the merits of the candidate's project and application for the Lewis Walpole Library fellowship. General letters of recommendation or dossier letters are not appropriate.

The application deadline is January 18, 2010. Awards will be announced in March and are expected to be taken up between July 2010 and June 2011.

Additional information about the Library, its collections, facilities, and programs, may be found at http://www.library.yale.edu/walpole.

Oral History of American Music at 40
Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve
Tuesday, November 3, 4:00 p.m. (Rescheduled from Oct. 29)
Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, 128 Wall St
Free and open to the public

Oral History of American Music (OHAM) at Yale is the only ongoing project in the field of music dedicated to the collection and preservation of oral and video memoirs in the voices of musicians. It is a special kind of history, one that captures sights and sounds and recreates the spontaneity of a moment in time. The sound of a voice is an immediate link to the past--gestures, speech patterns, laughter--these are vivid reminders of the unique qualities of a personality, and they reflect the atmosphere of his or her time and place in history. Artists in the OHAM collections include Virgil Thomson, Eubie Blake, Aaron Copland, Ned Rorem, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

Founded in 1969, OHAM is celebrating its 40th anniversary. This lecture by Founder and Director Vivian Perlis and Associate Director Libby Van Cleve will include a history of the project as well as recordings from the collection. Other anniversary events include a concert in Sprague Hall on April 6, and a special concert in Carnegie Hall on April 8, part of the 'Yale in New York' series.

Vivian Perlis is a historian of American music, specializing in twentieth century composers. She is widely known for her publications, lectures, recordings ,and film productions. On the faculty of the Yale School of Music, Perlis is founding-director of Oral History of American Music. With Libby Van Cleve, she is the author of the award-winning volume Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington, published in 2005 by Yale University Press.

Libby Van Cleve is Associate Director of Oral History of American Music. In addition to her work at OHAM, Van Cleve is recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary music for the oboe. She is an adjunct faculty member at Wesleyan University and Connecticut College.