The Lewis Walpole Library > News

April 2008:

Summer Fellowships in British 18th-Century Studies for Yale Graduate Students Offered. The Lewis Walpole Library offers summer fellowships to students enrolled in doctoral programs at Yale University who wish to pursue dissertation research in the Lewis Walpole collections. The application deadline for fellowships for the summer of 2008 has been extended to May. Awards will be announced shortly thereafter. For more details click here.

Master Class for Yale Graduate Students, May 12 - 16, 2008. The Lewis Walpole Library is once again offering a week-long master class in Farmington, taught by Brian Maidment and open to Yale graduate students. This year Curator Cynthia Roman will join Professor Maidment in teaching the class "Caricature and the Comic Image 1800-1850." The number of participants is limited. For more details click here.  

Fifteenth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture. On Friday, April 18, Leo Damrosch, the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard, presented the Fifteenth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture, "Feeling Free in the Enlightenment: Diderot versus Rousseau, or, Philosophy versus Lived Experience," in the Yale Center for British Art Lecture Hall, New Haven. For more details click here.

January 2008:

Print Metadata Seminar: On January 25, 2008, The Library hosted a seminar held as part of the Library's involvement in the Collections Collaborative project to reach agreement upon common or compatible practices for descriptive and imaging metadata and to develop a metadata registry and a metadata application profile for Yale University. For more details click here.

December 2007:

Fellowship and Travel Grant Awards Invited. Applications are invited for the 2008-2009 year (July through June). The Library offers visiting fellowships, normally for four weeks, as well as travel grants of lesser duration, to scholars engaged in post-doctoral or equivalent research and to doctoral candidates at the dissertation stage. In a typical year the Library awards up to a dozen fellowships and travel grants. The visiting fellowships, which include the cost of travel to and from Farmington, provide a stipend of $1,800 per month in addition to accommodation in an eighteenth-century house on site. The travel grants, which vary in duration and amount, also include accommodation. The application deadline is January 18, 2008. For more details click here.

Recent Acquisitions Exhibition. Recent Acquisitions 2003-2007: Selected Books, Manuscripts, & Works on Paper is now on view in the Library's new exhibition space. For more details click here.

September 2007

Library Reopens :

The Lewis Walpole Library officially reopened on September 27. Library staff and guests celebrated the completion of the renovation and construction project, as well as the 290th anniversary of Horace Walpole's birth, at a gala lawn party in Farmington.  

The Library's collection of books, manuscripts, prints, and drawings is once again accessible and may be consulted by appointment in the Library's splendid new Reading Room.

Tours of the Library and its collections have resumed. For an appointment, please contact Susan Walker, Head of Public Services.

The Library underwent a major renovation and addition that together included a spacious reading room, state-of-the-art collection storage, and new staff and conservation workspace. Construction began in spring 2006, and the first phase, which included the construction of the addition, was completed by early summer 2007. The renovation of remaining Library spaces was completed by the reopening. These now include a new exhibition space and classroom, enabling the Library to expand its programmatic offerings.

For details about the renovation project, click here.

For further information, contact the Librarian.

The Librarian, The Lewis Walpole Library, P.O. Box 1408, Farmington, CT 06034 USA

1 860 677-2140

walpole@yale.edu

April 2007:

Fellowship and Travel Grant Awards Announced. The Library is delighted to announce next year's Lewis Walpole Library Fellows. They will take up their fellowships or grants between July 2007 and June 2008. For more details click here.

Fourteenth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture. On Friday, April 27, in the Yale Center for British Art Lecture Hall, New Haven, Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and the University of Chicago, presented the Fourteenth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture entitled "Observation in the Enlightenment." For more details click here.

Summer Fellowships in British 18th-Century Studies for Yale Graduate Students Offered. The Lewis Walpole Library offers summer fellowships to students enrolled in doctoral programs at Yale University who wish to pursue dissertation research in the Lewis Walpole collections. The application deadline for fellowships for the summer of 2007 is April 16. Awards will be announced shortly. For more details click here.

The Library once again participated in the annual exhibition of items drawn from Special Collections throughout Yale. This year's installation, entitled "The History of Globalization: Artifacts and Documentation from Yale's Collections," was held as part of the season of events developed around the theme of "The Global Faces of the Yale Library."

November 2006:

Library Closed for Building Renovations. Because of the ongoing renovations, the Lewis Walpole Library will be closed until early summer 2007. During this time the Library will be able to offer only very limited public services. For more details click here.

Fellowship Program Resumes. Applications are invited for the 2007-2008 year (July through June). The Library offers visiting fellowships, normally for four weeks, as well as travel grants of lesser duration, to scholars engaged in post-doctoral or equivalent research and to doctoral candidates at the dissertation stage. In a typical year the Library awards up to a dozen fellowships and travel grants. The visiting fellowships, which include the cost of travel to and from Farmington, provide a stipend of $1,800 per month in addition to accommodation in an eighteenth-century house on site. The travel grants, which vary in duration and amount, also include accommodation. The application deadline is January 12, 2007.

April 2006:

Photoduplication services resumed.

The Library and Jonathan Edwards College sponsored the Opera Theatre of Yale College's production of Elisir d'Amore, by Gaetano Donizetti, conducted by Nick Chong and directed by Ethan Heard.

Robert Darnton, Shelby Cullom Davis '30 Professor of European History, Princeton University, presented the Thirteenth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture , "Slander: The Art and Politics of Slinging Mud, Paris and London, 1770-1795" on Friday, April 7, at 5:30 p.m. in the Yale Center for British Art Lecture Hall, 1080 Chapel Street‚ New Haven.

December 2005:

Library Awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Grant. The Library was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Preservation Assessment of the Prints and Drawings Collections. The grant will enable the Library to carry out a conservation assessment of the eighteenth-century British prints and drawings in the collection and to develop a comprehensive plan for their conservation treatment.

Photoduplication services suspended temporarily. As the Library prepared to move its collections to storage, photoduplication services were suspended from December 1, 2005, through March 31, 2006. They resumed in April 2006.

October 2005:

The Library participated in the Special Collections Fair held October 6 at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven. Assistant Librarian and Head of Public Services Susan Walker and Curator Cynthia Roman presented items related to the Duchess of Kingston's 1776 Bigamy Trial.

The items on display represented some of the many types of materials in the collection that support inquiry into a particular topic. These included prints, published texts, extra-illustrated books, and a manuscript journal. The trial was the subject of the Library's latest volume of Miscellaneous Antiquities, "The Production of a Female Pen": Anna Larpent's Account of the Duchess of Kingston's Bigamy Trial of 1776, published last year.

Prior to its closing, the Library offered tours to members of the Yale University Library staff through LiSA, the Library Staff Association, in celebration of Yale University Library's 75th anniversary.

September 2005:

For the English Department's first 18th-/19th-C. Colloquium of the academic year, the Library co-sponsored a talk by Helen Deutsch, Associate Professor at UCLA, entitled "'Hodge Shall Not Be Shot': Boswell, Johnson Pale Fire, and the Romance of Authorship." The talk was presented September 16 in New Haven.

May 2005:

For the Commencement Concert,sponsored by the Lewis Walpole Library and Saybrook College, the Saybrook College Orchestra, Perry So, Music Director, performed Selections from Candide by Leonard Bernstein, featuring Charlotte Dobbs, Soprano, and Amanda Ingram, Soprano, and Symphony No. 6 in B minor, "Pathétique" by Tchaikovsky. May 21, Battell Chapel.

April 2005:

Grants awarded for The Lewis Walpole Library/Strawberry Hill projects
The Library received two grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation totaling $37,500. One grant supports curatorial fellow Hope Saska who is developing an electronic database focused on the objects collected by Walpole for Strawberry Hill. The second grant, awarded to the Lewis Walpole Library and the Yale Center for British Art, funded an organizational meeting to plan a major exhibition dedicated to Strawberry Hill. The exhibition will be organized by those two Yale entities in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. For further details see the article in the Yale Bulletin & Calendar, April 1, 2005|Volume 33, Number 24, or contact the Library at walpole@yale.edu.

Joyce Appleby, Professor Emerita of History, UCLA, presented the Twelfth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture, "Thomas Paine and the Intellectual Underpinnings of American Democracy" on Friday, April 22, at 5:30 p.m. in the Yale Center for British Art Lecture Hall, 1080 Chapel Street‚ New Haven.

The Library sponsored the Opera Theatre of Yale College's performance of W.A. Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.

Parliaments, Peoples and Power 1603-1800, an International Conference at Yale, was held April 7-9 in New Haven and Farmington.

December 2004:

Renovation Planned for Academic Year 2005-2006. Fellowships Postponed. In light of the scheduled Library renovation project in the 2005-2006 academic year, the Lewis Walpole Library regretfully announces that no visiting research fellowships will be awarded for that year. Click here for further details.

October 2004:

"Antiquaries and Connoisseurs" An antiquarian's fascination with pieces of the past and a connoisseur's avid appreciation for works of art were widely recognized preoccupations of the period, and both made wonderfully tempting targets for caricaturists. Organized by Margaret Powell, this exhibition was on display in the Library's Side Hall through May 11, 2005.

June 2004:

On June 21, the Library hosted thirty members of the Rare Book and Manuscript Section of ACRL for tours and luncheon as part of the RBMS pre-conference held at Yale.

May 2004:

"Painted and Printed Color in Eighteenth-Century Satire," organized by curator Cynthia Roman, offered nearly thirty examples of color in printmaking in England and included works illustrating many techniques, from hand-colored mezzotints to prints on tinted paper. The exhibition was on view through October 6, 2004.

The third Master Class, “Reading Prints and Graphic Images 1740-1840,” taught by Brian Maidment, was held at the Library in Farmington from May 17-21.

The Library continued its support of undergraduate music at Yale by sponsoring a concert featuring the first act of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, performed by the Opera Theatre of Yale College and the Saybrook College Orchestra at Battell Chapel, May 22.

April 2004:

The Lewis Walpole Library and Jonathan Edwards College jointly sponsored:

W.A. Mozart's The Magic Flute, presented by the Opera Theatre of Yale College on April 2-3, 2004, at University Theater, 222 York Street

The Lewis Walpole Library Lecture was presented:

"'The Faithless Column and the Crumbling Bust': Alexander Pope and Sculptural Portraiture" by Malcolm Baker, Professorial Research Fellow, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and Professor, Art History and The History of Collecting, University of Southern California
April 23, 2004, Yale Center for British Art Lecture Hall

Recipients of Fellowships and Travel Grants were announced.

March 2004:

"Matrimony and Metaphor," a visual exploration of marriage as a pervasive theme in eighteenth-century graphic satire, was on view through March 8, 2004, in the Library's Side Hall.