Brown University Library Special Collections

Archive for the ‘Exhibits & Events’ Category

Student Life exhibit at Maddock Alumni Center

Posted by Jennifer Betts on May 23, 2013

Faunce (e)In a continuing effort to showcase student life at Brown University, the University Archives has created an exhibit of photographs and museum objects in the lobby of the Maddock Alumni Center.

Since Brown University was founded in 1764, student life has undergone dramatic social, academic, cultural, and political changes. The exhibit provides a glimpse of student life through a variety of photographs, a fan and dance card from 1914, a mug from 1942, a freshman beanie from 1958, and a commemorative Faunce House mail box.

Collecting and preserving a diverse and fascinating student history is part of the mission of the University Archives. The University Archives welcomes donations from alumni who have historical materials on student life that can be preserved and made available to future students and researchers. Please contact the University Archives at [email protected] or (401) 863-2148 for additional information.

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Special Collections Senior Open House, May 22, 3 pm - 5 pm

Posted by Jennifer Betts on May 22, 2013

Bicycle club 1886The John Hay Library will host a Senior Open House on May 22, 3 pm – 5 pm. On display will be Orwell’s 1984, The Great Gatsby (first-edition), Vesalius (first-edition), Copernicus (first-edition), Shakespeare’s First Folio, Kelmscott Chaucer, Eliot’s Bible, Newton’s Principia (first-edition, first printing), Double Elephant folio volume of Audubon’s The Birds of America, Dance of Death bound in human skin, and artists books. University Archives will feature photographs of dorms, classes, buildings, and athletics, and humor publication the Brown Jug. The Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection will display 6,000 miniature soldiers.

The Hay’s Senior Open House follows on the heels of Professor Jane Lancaster’s 2 pm lecture on the history of Brown students’ college experience. The lecture will be in the Petteruti Lounge, Faunce House.

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John Hay Library: Focus on Special Collections-Audubon

Posted by Ann Morgan Dodge on November 5, 2012

Between noon and 1pm on November 14th, staff from the John Hay Library will be turning pages in one volume of John James Audubon’s masterwork The Birds of America. Please join us in the Lownes Room on the second floor of the John Hay Library.

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FOCUS ON SPECIAL COLLECTIONS: Geoffrey Hill and His Books Gallery Talk September 25th at noon

Posted by Ann Morgan Dodge on September 18, 2012

At noon on Sept. 25, Prof. Ken Haynes will give a gallery talk on his exhibit Geoffrey Hill and His Books. The exhibit is in honor of poet and former colleague Geoffrey Hill on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The talk will take place in the North Gallery of the John Hay Library.
The exhibit includes materials from the Library’s General and Special Collections as well as books from the private collection of Haynes (including works that formerly belonged to Hill). The exhibit is organized around fifteen published books of poetry, from For the Unfallen (1959) to Odi Barbare (2012). A few works have been chosen to accompany each of these books, to illustrate the different kinds of publications that have influenced Hill’s writing (children’s books, fantasy tales, poetry, art books, historical scholarship) and the different ways they have influenced it (in visual layout, in dramatizing the physical act of reading, in allusion and quotation, and in other ways).

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New Exhibit on View: Geoffrey Hill and His Books

Posted by Ann Morgan Dodge on September 14, 2012

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – Geoffrey Hill and His Books, an exhibit curated by Kenneth Haynes, Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics at Brown University, in honor of poet and former colleague Geoffrey Hill on the occasion of Hill’s 80th birthday, is on view in the North Gallery, John Hay Library, now through October 1, 2012.

The exhibit includes materials from the Library’s General and Special Collections as well as books from the private collection of Haynes (including works that formerly belonged to Hill).  The exhibit is organized around fifteen published books of poetry, from For the Unfallen (1959) to Odi Barbare (2012). A few works have been chosen to accompany each of these books, to illustrate the different kinds of publications that have influenced Hill’s writing (children’s books, fantasy tales, poetry, art books, historical scholarship) and the different ways they have influenced it (in visual layout, in dramatizing the physical act of reading, in allusion and quotation, and in other ways). Drop in the Hay and take a look!

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Rhode Island Slavery and the University

Posted by Jennifer Betts on August 31, 2012

September 3 – October 5, 2012
John Hay Library

An exhibit in support of the First Readings 2012 program for the Class of 2016, which focuses on Charles Rappleye’s Sons of Providence.

Using materials from the Brown University Archives and the Hay Library’s extensive holdings of primary sources on Rhode Island history, the exhibit provides an overview of how slavery, the slave trade and emancipation functioned in the politics and social life of early Rhode Island, and the manner in which attitudes toward slavery shaped the founding and growth of Brown University in its first century.

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120 Years of Women at Brown

Posted by Jennifer Betts on May 5, 2012


May 3 – June 29, 2012
John Hay Library

The exhibit chronicles the experiences of women during their years on campus and beyond. Drawing on materials from the University Archives, Christine Dunlap Farnham Archives, and Feminist Theory Archives, the exhibit illustrates the evolution of women’s education at Brown. On display are photographs, letters, papers, published materials, and artifacts that narrate personal reflections of women at Brown and the University policies that shaped their lives on campus over the past twelve decades.

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Señor Americanus: Lincoln's Man in Peru

Posted by [email protected] on May 20, 2011

Christopher Robinson Exhibition

A battered box. An invitation to a bull fight to celebrate Chilean Independence Day. A slightly worn uniform of heavy blue wool, found with a turkish cigarette in the pocket of its jacket. A game called Swiss Sticks. These are a few of the items displayed in our new exhibition on Christopher Robinson, who served the United States as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Peru during the Civil War.

The exhibition — a collaborative effort by filmmaker and collector Elizabeth Vangel of non-profit Foss Media, and the John Hay Library, follows the trajectory of Christopher Robinson (Brown 1825) from his roots in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, throught his stint as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the American Consulate in Lima during the Civil War. This little known Brown alumnus — a renowned lawyer in his day — was a key player in the effort to write a state constitution for Rhode Island, and an unfettered advocate for democracy in the United States and abroad. Beloved in Peru, Robinson made friends and contacts easily, even meeting with Garibaldi in Europe at an international peace conference in 1867.

The exhibition has been endorsed by the Rhode Island Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission, and is on view at the Hay Library’s North Gallery from May 15 through September 23, 2011.

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Seeing Ourselves, Showing Ourselves: Brown's Culture on Display, Haffenreffer Museum (Manning Hall)

Posted by Jennifer Betts on May 5, 2011

Seeing Ourselves, Showing Ourselves: Brown’s Culture on Display

May 3 –  June/July, 2011

Haffenreffer Museum (Manning Hall)

Students from Brown’s Public Humanities program have curated an intriguing exhibit of museum objects from the University Archives. The exhibit explores how objects, artifacts, and documents represent students’ experiences on campus.

The Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology: http://brown.edu/Facilities/Haffenreffer/index.html

The John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage: http://www.brown.edu/Research/JNBC/index.html

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A Life in Motion: A reading by Florence Howe, 4/29 at 3 pm, Pembroke 305

Posted by Jennifer Betts on April 25, 2011

Friday, April 29, 2011

3 pm

Pembroke Hall 305, 172 Meeting Street

Guest speaker: Florence Howe

Florence Howe has led an audacious life: she created a freedom school during the civil rights movement, refused to bow to academic heavyweights who were opposed to sharing power with women, and founded a feminist publishing house at a time when books for and about women were few. Sustained by her relationships with ironic writers like Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, and Marilyn French, she traveled the world as an emissary for women’s empowerment. Howe’s memoir spans her eighty years of personal struggle and professional triumphs.

Sponsored by the Brown University Library, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, and the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center.

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