Julia Bolton Holloway

February 2, 2022.

The scholar, librarian, and Catholic Hermit Julia Bolton Holloway, Custodian of the English Cemetery in Florence, talks about her scholarship, her role as keeper of an historic cemetery, about cemeteries and libraries as vital mirrors of memory, and her project to develop a cultural heritage library documenting the Cemetery's many notable residents and their histories. 

"Julia Bolton Holloway was born in London, grew up in Sussex, went to America at 16, studied at San Jose State University for the BA, and at the University of California, Berkeley, for the doctorate. Her Comparative Literature dissertation was published in three editions as The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer. She next published books on Brunetto Latino, a bibliography and an edition of Il Tesoretto, later a full length study of his life and writings as Twice Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, and is currently editing Brunetto Latino's Latin and Italian Opera.  She edited and translated Birgitta of Sweden's Revelations, in Saint Bride and her Book. That work led to research on Julian of Norwich, resulting in the definitive edition of the extant manuscripts in France and England with Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., and published by SISMEL, Anchoress and Cardinal: Julian of Norwich and Adam Easton, O.S.B., published by Analecta Cartusiana, ed. James Hogg, Julian among the Books: Julian of Norwich's Theological Library, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and Mary's Dowry: Contemplative and Pilgrim Women's Writings, Analecta Cartusiana, ed. James Hogg. She completed her father's work on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and published editions of Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, Penguin, and Casa Guidi Windows (in English and Italian), Aureo Anello Books. She raised three sons, taught at Quincy University, Princeton University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she was Director of Medieval Studies. She took early retirement to enter an Anglican convent, is now a Catholic hermit in Florence, Italy, where she directs an ecumenical polyglot library and is custodian of the Swiss-owned 'English' Cemetery where Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Savage Landor, Frances Trollope and many famous others, particularly slavery Abolitionists, are buried."

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Suzanne Preston Blier

 

      Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 1907. Oil on canvas, 8' x 7' 8" New York: Museum of Modern Art. 

September 21, 2021.

Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, discusses her award-winning book, Picasso's Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece (Duke UP, 2019).

“It is a condition of masterworks that they attract, even demand, interpretation and reinterpretation. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a case in point. In 1946, Alfred Barr called it ‘a battlefield of trial and experiment’ marking ‘the beginning of a new period in the history of modern art.’ Twenty-six years later, Leo Steinberg argued that its psychic and pictorial ‘violence’ resides in its power of displacement, in ‘the startled consciousness of a viewer who sees himself seen.’ Others have examined its ‘primitivism’ and l’art negre as central to its power and originality. Now, Suzanne Blier, through a close textual and visual analysis of an astonishing range of references, argues that Picasso’s creativity ‘involved both drawing on and subverting the past’ while reimagining the present and creating the future anew. Blier's study rewards close reading, just as the painting rewards close and sustained looking.” — James Cuno, President and CEO, The J. Paul Getty Trust

“Combining the specialized skills of an art historian with the zeal of a detective, Suzanne Preston Blier offers a bold and transformative re-reading of the Demoiselles. She startlingly shifts the interpretive foundations of Picasso and the Demoiselles: she shows us a Picasso not as bombastic egotist but as capacious globalist; not as masculine master fixated on female sexuality and its attendant anxieties, but as explorer of the power and presence of women and their generative capacities. This provocative and pathbreaking book scrambles the logic of modernism, primitivism, and feminism in the discipline of art history.” — Debora Silverman, author of Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art

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Robert K. Brigham

Maya Lin. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington D.C., 1982

May 1, 2019.

Robert K. Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar College, discusses his book Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam (PublicAffairs, 2018).

The American war in Vietnam was concluded in 1973 after eight years of fighting, bloodshed, and loss. Yet the terms of the truce that ended the war were effectively identical to what had been offered to the Nixon administration four years earlier. Those four years cost America and Vietnam thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and they were the direct result of the supposed master plan of the most important voice in American foreign policy: Henry Kissinger.

Using newly available archival material from the Nixon Presidential Library, Kissinger's personal papers, and material from the archives in Vietnam, Robert K. Brigham punctures the myth of Kissinger as an infallible mastermind. Instead, he constructs a portrait of a rash, opportunistic, and suggestible politician. It was personal political rivalries, the domestic political climate, and strategic confusion that drove Kissinger's actions. There was no great master plan or Bismarckian theory that supported how the US continued the war or conducted peace negotiations. Its length was doubled for nothing but the ego and poor judgment of a single figure.

This distant tragedy, perpetuated by Kissinger's actions, forever changed both countries. Now, perhaps for the first time, we can see the full scale of that tragedy and the machinations that fed it.

Ronald Patkus, Nikolai Firtich, Dan Ungurianu

April 10, 2019.

Historian and Associate Director of the Library for Special Collections Ronald D. Patkus joins Professors Nikolai Firtich and Dan Ungurianu of the Vassar Department of Russian to discuss the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) and the exhibit on view 23 January through June 10, 2019 in the Thompson Memorial Library entitled Ivan Turgenev and His Library, celebrating the bicentennial of Turgenev's birth.

Download the exhibition catalogue (PDF)

Charles Henry

March 13 & April 3 (repeat), 2019.

What is a library? Charles Henry, President of the Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) and former Director of Libraries at Vassar College, walks us through the door of that question as he is interviewed on February 27, 2019 for Radio New Zealand's popular program Nine to Noon  by that program's host Kathryn Ryan. He goes on to discuss CLIR's role in organizing the creation of a truly global digital library, and the promise of this effort for preserving cultural memory from threats of war and climate change. He also speculates on the potential of digital technology to enable literal discovery through the uncovering of hidden information.

34:19 minutes.

Raquel Rabinovich

December 12, 2018

The  artist Raquel Rabinovich (b. Argentina 1929) will discuss her exhibition Raquel Rabinovich: The Reading Room, on view in the Frederick Thompson Memorial Library at Vassar College October 25 - December 20, 2018.  The exhibition is being held concurrently with the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center exhibition Past Time: Geology in European and American Art and another related exhibition in the Vassar College Art Library: Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Geological Illustration from Catastrophism to the Anthropocene.

"The exhibition title The Reading Room refers to the location where the works are installed (an intervention of sorts in the south transept of Vassar's main library) but also serves as a metaphor for a possible approach to the work.  The selections on view each represent an attempt to transcend the routine of every day, inviting viewers to enter into a place of contemplation in which many layers of meaning can be read in, or into, the individual artworks.  Rabinovich describes this approach as a language of metaphors.  In a recent interview she said, 'Beyond the language of the novel or the poem or the story, there is always an element that is beyond the words, in between the lines, which is not literal.  And that world is, for me, a wonderful world.  I love that world.  I resonate with that world.'"

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Herman Eberhardt

Ayako Matsushita on her graduation day from Heart Mountain High School. Before the war she attended Marshall High School in Los Angeles.

Frank Hirahara 1944

October 25, 2017.

Herman Eberhardt, Supervisory Curator at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, discusses the Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, and his exhibition: Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II, on view in the Library's William J. vanden Heuvel Gallery through December 31, 2017.

Nicholas Adams

May 10, 2017: SEASON FINALE.

Architectural historian Nicholas Adams, Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Art at Vassar College, talks about the exhibition he conceived and helped to curate at the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library entitled Building Buffalo: Buildings from Books, Books from Buildings: Books on Architecture and Landscape from the Rare Book Collection of the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, on view until March 31,  2018.

Order the Catalogue.

42:46 minutes

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Holly Peppe

February 8, 2017.   

Holly Peppe, scholar, editor, and literary executor for the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, discusses Millay's life, her work, the new edition of Millay's Selected Poems (Yale, 2016), and the exhibition "Treasures from Steepletop" on view in the Main Library, Art Library, and Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center from January 22 through June 11, 2017, in celebration of the centennial of Millay's graduation from Vassar College.

"Yale University Press’s edition of the Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, superbly edited by Timothy Jackson, and with a brilliant introduction by Millay scholar Holly Peppe, constitutes a significant addition both to our understanding of Twentieth-Century American Poetry as well as to a fuller, more complex and balanced portrait of who the extraordinary poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was and—more importantly—is to readers searching for a more accurate picture of what made Modern Poetry modern. If she has been too often overlooked in the last half century and more, this edition will undoubtedly help restore Millay’s brilliant, witty, and tragic feminine voice to her rightful place among the company of Hart Crane, Frost, Williams, Pound, Eliot and Stevens."— Paul Mariani, Boston College

58:58 minutes.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay Society: http://millay.org 

Mildred Budny

October 12, 1016.

Mildred Budny (VC'71),  a Princeton-based medievalist, iconographer, scholarly impresario, and editor extraordinaire of the monumental Insular, Anglo-Saxon, and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: An Illustrated Catalogue, talks about her life with manuscripts, interdisciplinary scholarship, the uses of a Vassar education, and her organization, the Research group on Manuscript Evidence and its programs and publications.

Account of the interview by Mildred, with images of mss we discussed.

60:49 minutes (broadcast version)   Listen

71:34 minutes (full interview)  Listen

Rebecca Rego Barry

April 6, 2016.

Rebecca Rego Barry, editor of Fine Books & Collections magazine, discusses her book Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places (Voyageur, 2015).

"Anyone who loves used and rare books has stories to tell about discovering gems in unlikely places. These tales become badges of honor for bibliophiles and no-one has more stories of literary discoveries than booksellers."   

-- Richard Davies,  Abebooks Reading Copy

57z;44 minutes

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Amitava Kumar

December 16, 2015 

Amitava Kumar, Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College, discusses his new book of essays Lunch With a Bigot: The Writer in the World published this year by Duke University Press.

"These are the very best sort of essays: the kind in which the pleasure of reading derives from the pleasure of following a writer's mind as it moves from subject to subject, making us see connections we might otherwise have been unawayre of.  Often a single paragraph contains such a story or detail so arresting that the reader must pause to appreciate it before moving on." -- Francine Prose, author of Reading Like a Writer

55:29 minutes.

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Jeffrey T. Schnapp

February 4, 2015.

Harvard cultural historian and media theorist Jeffrey T. Schnapp (VC'75), Co-director of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society and founding Faculty Director of the Harvard Graduate School of Design's knowledge design studio metaLAB, talks about his new book, co-authored with Matthew Battles, entitled The Library Beyond the Book (Harvard, 2014), as well as about the Library Test Kitchen and experiments in library interfaces for the digital age.  

"With textbook readers and digital downloads proliferating, it is easy to imagine a time when printed books will vanish. Such forecasts miss the mark, argue Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles. Future bookshelves will not be wholly virtual, and libraries will thrive, although in a variety of new social, cultural, and architectural forms. Schnapp and Battles combine deep study of the library's history with a record of institutional and technical innovation at metaLAB, a research group at the forefront of the digital humanities. They gather these currents in The Library Beyond the Book, exploring what libraries have been in the past to speculate on what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels."

56.34 minutes.

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Lydia Murdoch

October 8, 2014.

 Lydia Murdoch (VC'92), Associate Professor of History at Vassar College, talks about her book Daily Life of Victorian Women (Greenwood, 2014).

"Contrary to popular misconception, many Victorian women performed manual labor for wages directly alongside men, had political voice before women's suffrage, and otherwise contributed significantly to society outside of the domestic sphere. Daily Life of Victorian Women documents the varied realities of the lives of Victorian women; provides in-depth comparative analysis of the experiences of women from all classes, especially the working class; and addresses changes in their lives and society over time. The book covers key social, intellectual, and geographical aspects of women's lives, with main chapters on gender and ideals of womanhood, the state, religion, home and family, the body, childhood and youth, paid labor and professional work, urban life, and imperialism."

58:55 minutes

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Dan Cohen

May 7, 2014.

Dan Cohen, Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America, discusses the DPLA, its organization, programs, and aspirations on the occasion of its first anniversary. 

"[T]he DPLA will go beyond its basic mission of making the cultural heritage of America available to all Americans. It will provide opportunities for them to interact with the material and to develop materials of their own. It will empower librarians and reinforce public libraries everywhere . . . ."  -- Robert Darnton, NYRB May 22, 2014

39:39 minutes.

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Christopher D. Johnson

April 9, 2014.

Christopher D. Johnson, Professor of early modern literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA, discusses his book, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images, published by Cornell University Press in 2012.

"This is a rich and learned book, and also an extremely humane and attractive one. The final chapter, on Warburg and Bruno, has the status of revelation. It is absolutely fascinating, not only as a dialogue in intellectual history but also as a political allegory. Christopher D. Johnson pays close attention to Warburg's ethical and epistemological aspirations when he focuses on Warburg’s final and uncompleted project: the Atlas of Images. Assembled during the years prior to his death in 1929, these collages strove to mount a history of cultural memory via a dense series of images from antiquity to the present." — Michael P. Steinberg, Brown University

45:24 minutes.

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View select panels from Warburg's Bilderatlas and other materials on the book's companion website.

Robert DeMaria, Jr.

March 5, 2014.

Robert DeMaria, Jr., Henry Noble McCracken Professor of English at Vassar College, talks about the paragon of eighteenth-century English scholarship and letters Samuel Johnson, Johnson's reading habits, his monumental Dictionary of the English Language, scholarly editing, and the final installments of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.

33:42 minutes.

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Ann M. Blair

November 20, 2013.

Harvard College Professor and Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Ann Blair will discuss her book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age, published by Yale University Press in 2011.

"There has always been 'too much to know.' In this lively and learned book, Ann Blair shows us how early modern Europeans managed to survive—and even to surf—what they saw as tidal waves of information. Her insightful comparisons, careful attention to the survival of traditional methods, and clear vision of the new culture of passionate curiosity that took place in the Renaissance give her work extraordinary range and depth." — Anthony Grafton.

53:14 minutes.

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R. David Lankes

September 18, 2013.

R. David Lankes, Syracuse University Professor, Dean's Scholar, and Director of the Information Institute of Syracuse, will talk about his vision for a new conception of librarians as

"radical agents of positive change" in their role as facilitators of community learning and knowledge-building, and his books Expect More: Demanding Better Libraries for Today's Complex World (2012), and The Atlas of New Librarianship (MIT, 2011), winner of the ABC-CLIO Award for the Best Book in Library Literature.

"The Atlas is not a book; it is a manifesto, a set of principles and convictions aimed at shaking new life and belief into a field that too often fears for its own future. Read it and be prepared to act." -- Andrew Dillon, University of Texas at Austin.

59:44 minutes.

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Joseph A. Dane

April 10, 2013.

Joseph A. Dane discusses his book, What Is a Book?: The Study of Early Printed Books, Published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2012.

“Joseph A. Dane is one of our most brilliant and prolific scholars of the early book, and this volume culminates a lifetime of research. For the general reader, it will offer a compelling survey of book history and book making. For the specialist, it will offer insights into the techniques of printers and the lives of collectors. For anyone concerned with how we read the past, and for anyone fascinated by the book as typographical artifact, What Is a Book? will be deeply valued." -- Seth Lehrer, UCSD.

49:56 minutes. 

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