Next weekend is UConn’s Alumni Weekend and we are celebrating with two very special exhibits that we will highlight all next week right here on our blog.

Photographs from university activities and events are a significant portion of our collections, as is true with many archives in higher education institutions.  They are incredibly important in documenting life on campus.  But all too often the images are a result of staff photographers employed to take official pictures.  We often see a different idea of what was important when students are taking the images.  

The exhibit “Something Important Happened Today: Student Photography on Campus” is a special exhibit for us, as it is from the photograph collection of Carl Brandt, Class of 1949. While on campus in the late 1940s — a period of remarkable change on the Storrs campus — Brandt took thousands of photographs and this exhibit presents a selection of Dr. Brandt’s images, complemented by his memories.

Did you miss the Chris Shays lecture last month on staying true to yourself and your constitutents while in Washington?  It was a great lecture and you can view it on CT-N by clicking on the image below.

On Monday, May 4, 2009, at 2:30pm Ms. Thea Guidone will present the results of her research in the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection housed at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.  A recipient of the James Marshall Fellowship, Ms. Guidone is a children’s writer who lives in Hamden. At the University of Connecticut, she studied Children’s Literature with Francelia Butler, and Creative Writing with Matthew Proser, Elaine Scarry and Feenie Ziner. She earned her master’s degree at Yale University.  An active member of the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Ms. Guidone won Connecticut’s 2006 Tassy Walden Award for New Voices in Children’s Literature and is the author of Drum City (Tricycle Press, May 2010). She is at work on a middle grade novel set in New Haven in 1925.

Ms. Guidone will discuss subtext in schoolbooks and novels for girls, circa 1920’s, that informed and reinforced attitudes about wealth, privilege and class.  The presentation will take place in the Dodd Research Center’s conference room 162 and is free and open to the public.

The Dodd Research Center received the “Outstanding Ally Office/Department Award” by the University of Connecticut’s Rainbow Center last night at the Lavendar Graduation Ceremony.  The award recognized our public outreach efforts to educate the community on LGBTQ issues.  One of those recent efforts noted included the exhibit “From the Margins to the Mainstream:  Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer History, 1968-2008,” a historical and contemporary look at materials published by the LGBTQ community.  Included in the program was a screening of the film “After Stonewall”.  The award also recognized the continued effort by the curators to actively collect documents of value to the research of LGBTQ issues.  

For more information on the materials in our collection, here is a quick link to the Alternative Press Collections main page http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/collections/apc/brochure.htm

Join archivists from the Dodd Research Center as they give advice on what you can do to preserve your memories at home.  So bring your treasures and we’ll see you there!!

Thursday, April 16
7:00pm

Second Congregational Church
Route 44
Coventry, CT

Suggested donation of $5 to help repair the roof of the Strong Porter Barn in Coventry.
RSVP to jean.nelson@uconn.edu

Sponsored by the Dodd Research Center, Coventry Historical Society and the New England Archivists.

To celebrate National Poetry Month, a new exhibit showcasing works of Beat writers in various media from 1957 to 1966 opens April 6, 2009 at the Dodd Research Center.  The exhibit features letters, manuscripts, little magazines, photographs and audio recordings from the extensive literary collections held by the Center’s Archives and Special Collections.

 

Post-war America of the 1950s witnessed a blending of cultural influences and the emergence of new forms of performance, music, and visual arts.  Recent scholarship on writers and writings during this period emphasizes the role that art, media and popular culture had on the American literary imagination and on expressions of the individual in society.

 

Beat writers including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William S. Burroughs experimented with literary narrative, forms and mediums whether in reaction to or as a result of social and cultural influences of their time.  This exhibit highlights the works and collaborations of Beat writers from the 1950s and invites viewers to explore further questions.  What role did form and media play in making the work of the Beats known, available and accessible to readers?  How or did the threat of media censorship impact expression?  Did Beat writers help to usher in a new print culture or, rather, did they aim to dismantle it?  How or can literature shape a movement?

 

View “Words ‘Alive Like Animals’: An Exhibit of Beat Writers” at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, McDonald Reading Room Gallery, April 6 to May 2, 2009.  Gallery hours: 12:00 to 4:00, Monday through Friday.

 

Exhibit curated by Benjamin Miller, B. A. candidate in English, University of Connecticut.

If you would like to get insight into one of Connecticut’s most successful and controversial congressmen, join us for a discussion with former U.S. Representative Christopher Shays on Tuesday, April 7 at 5:00pm.

Represenative Shays spent 21 years in congress as a moderate Republican, often clashing with his own party on his social views. His entire career is a story of how politicians can successfully stay true to themselves and their issues.

Professor Adam Fairclough, the Sackler Chair in U.S. History at Leiden University in the Netherlands will be giving the Spring 2009 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture in Human Rights on

Tuesday, March 31, 2009
4:00pm, Konover Auditorium

Professor Fairclough’s first book, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1987) won an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana , 1915-1972 (1995) was the recipient of the Louisiana Literary Award, the L. Kemper Williams Prize for the best book in Louisiana history, and the Lillian Smith Book Award of the Southern Regional Council. His most recent book, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South won the 2008 Outstanding Book Award of the History of Education Society

Join us as we welcome one of the leading scholars in the study of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Artist Sara Rhodin will present a gallery talk and lecture on Tuesday, March 24, at 4 p.m., in the Konover Auditorium with a reception to follow. The exhibit, titled “Transitional Spaces in Post-Soviet Estonia” is on display in the Dodd Center West Hallway Gallery through April 20.

Ms. Rhodin was a Fulbright Scholar in Estonia in 2006/2007 and a New York Times intern in Moscow in 2008. She is currently a graduate student in Russian and East European studies at Harvard University.

Sponsored by the Office of International Affairs, European Studies, and the Human Rights Institute.

The Dodd Research Center’s African American Music Film Series presents:

 

“Jubilee Singers: Sacrifice and Glory”

 

Thursday, February 26th

4:30pm

Konover Auditorium, Dodd Center

 

In the chaotic decade following the Civil War, a group of young ex-slaves in Nashville, Tennessee, set out on a mission to save their financially troubled school by giving concerts. Traveling first through cities in the North, then on to venues across Europe, the Jubilee Singers introduced audiences to the power of spirituals, the religious anthems of slavery. Driven to physical collapse and even death, the singers proved more successful — and more inspirational — than anyone could have imagined. A portrait of faith, music, and sacrifice.