Arabic Collections Online (Kitab Talk Series)
Tuesday, September 14, 12 – 1 p.m.
Learn about the Arabic Collections Online project at this virtual event, with Guy Burak, Middle Eastern and Islamic studies librarian, and David Millman, assistant dean for digital library technology services, both of New York University.
Arabic Collections Online is a publicly available digital library of public domain Arabic language content. It currently provides digital access to 17,213 volumes across 10,133 subjects drawn from rich Arabic collections of distinguished research libraries, such as New York University, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, American University in Cairo, American University of Beirut, United Arab Emirates National Archives and Qatar National Library.
Register for Arabic Collections Online
Off the Shelf: Author Talk with Kristy Nabhan-Warren
Thursday, September 23, 12 – 1 p.m.
Whether valorized as the heartland or derided as flyover country, the Midwest became instantly notorious when COVID-19 infections skyrocketed among workers in meatpacking plants—and Americans feared for their meat supply. But the Midwest is not simply the place where animals are fed corn and then butchered.
In “Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland,” native Midwesterner Kristy Nabhan-Warren digs deep below the stereotype and reveals the grit and grace of a heartland that is a major global hub of migration and food production—and also, it turns out, of religion. New and old Midwesterners say that a mutual language of faith and morals brings them together more than any of them would have ever expected.
Kristy Nabhan-Warren is the V. O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Chair of Catholic Studies and a professor in the departments of religious studies and gender, women’s and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa. Nabhan-Warren will join us for a virtual talk about the book.
Won’t You Come and Sing for Me? The Music of Hazel and Alice (Folk Legacy Series)
Thursday, October 14, 7 – 8 p.m.
This virtual exploration of the musical legacy of bluegrass pioneers Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard will feature performances by International Bluegrass Music Association vocalist of the year award winners Laurie Lewis and Dudley Connell, fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves and clawhammer banjo player Allison de Groot. Following their performances, the musicians will participate in a panel discussion moderated by Lewis and Gerrard with record producer Peter Siegel.
When Dickens and Gerrard recorded their first album, “Who’s That Knocking?,” in 1965, bluegrass music was dominated by male performers. The duo’s renowned performances have made them role models for future generations of women in bluegrass.
This event is the first in the Southern Folklife Collection’s two-part Folk Legacy Series celebrating great legacies in American vernacular music.
Register for Won’t You Come and Sing for Me?
Mind-Body Medicine and Black Women’s Clubs in the Era of Jim Crow (Bullitt History of Medicine Club Lecture Series)
Monday, October 18, 12 – 1 p.m.
By exploring records of several clubs’ practices of relaxation and breathing exercises, this virtual lecture will chronicle one of the ways that Black women “organized” their anxiety.
In addition to illuminating a long-overlooked history of wellness in Black communities, the talk will address larger questions about the intersecting histories of medicine, race and health—particularly as such dynamics relate to diagnostic conceptions and therapeutic treatments for ailments like nervousness, insomnia and indigestion.
Carrie Streeter is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California San Diego, specializing in United States history of health, gender and race. She also teaches history at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.
Register for Mind-Body Medicine and Black Women’s Clubs
Transcending Communal Divisions to Build the 1947 Partition Archive (Kitab Talk Series)
Tuesday, October 19, 12 – 1 p.m.
Learn about the 1947 Partition Archive from its founder, Guneeta Singh Bhalla, at this virtual event.
The 1947 Partition Archive is a project dedicated to documenting the people’s history of the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition, a globally disruptive event that created one of the largest mass refugee crises of the last century.
Through an innovative crowdsourcing approach developed in 2010, the 1947 Partition Archive has democratized historical documentation, bringing forth voices from communities previously underrepresented and histories previously unknown. Today, over 9,500 witness oral histories recorded from 14 countries in over 36 languages and dialects have been preserved in the archive, including digital copies of antiquated photographs, documents, and images of personal objects of historical value, gathered from personal collections.
Register for Transcending Communal Divisions to Build the 1947 Partition Archive
Open Access Scholarly Publication in Northern African Countries: Challenges and Opportunities (Open Access Week Event)
Wednesday, October 27, 12 – 1 p.m.
Kamel Belhamel, faculty of technology at the University of Bejaia, Algeria, will join us at this virtual event to talk about achieving open access for scholars in northern African countries. His analysis considers many factors involved in the challenge, including language, local versus international journals, open access funding, infrastructure, policy, and more.
The term “open access” refers to free, unrestricted online access to research outputs such as journal articles and books. Open access to scientific information and educational resources is becoming more and more necessary in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Northern African scientists and scholars face many constraints to their access to scientific information, including increases in journal subscription fees, a lack of reliable technical infrastructure, and uneven competencies in university libraries. Additionally, a lack of awareness of the benefits of open access affects the impact and visibility of these scholars’ and scientists’ information.
Register for Open Access Scholarly Publication in Northern African Countries
Off the Shelf: Author Talk with Warren Eugene Milteer Jr.
Thursday, October 28, 12 – 1 p.m.
On the eve of the Civil War, most people of color in the United States toiled in bondage. Yet nearly half a million people of color, including over 250,000 in the South, were free.
In “Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South,” Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. draws from a wide array of sources to demonstrate that from the colonial period through the Civil War, the growing influence of white supremacy and proslavery extremism created serious challenges for free persons categorized as “negroes,” “mulattoes,” “mustees,” “Indians” or simply “free people of color” in the South.
Segregation, exclusion, disenfranchisement and discriminatory punishment were ingrained in these people’s collective experiences. Nevertheless, in the face of attempts to deny them the most basic privileges and rights, free people of color defended their families and established organizations and businesses.
Milteer’s analysis of the way wealth, gender and occupation intersected with ideas promoting white supremacy and discrimination reveals a wide range of social interactions and life outcomes for the South’s free people of color and helps to explain societal contradictions that continue to appear in the modern United States.
Warren E. Milteer Jr. is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Milteer will join us for a virtual talk about the book.
Register for Off the Shelf with Warren Eugene Milteer Jr.
Boom Boom! The Music of John Lee Hooker (Folk Legacy Series)
Thursday, November 4, 7 – 8 p.m.
This virtual celebration of the music of legendary blues musician John Lee Hooker will feature performances by Grammy Award winners Bobby Rush and Alvin Youngblood Hart. Following the performances, Rush and Hart will participate in a panel discussion moderated by Wayne Goins, Distinguished Professor of Music and director of jazz studies at Kansas State University.
With a career spanning more than half a century, John Lee Hooker was “King of the Boogie” and an architect of the blues, folk and rock and roll.
This event is the second in the Southern Folklife Collection’s two-part Folk Legacy Series celebrating great legacies in American vernacular music.
Register for Boom Boom! The Music of John Lee Hooker
History of Chagas Disease: Science and Health in Brazil (Bullitt History of Medicine Club Lecture Series)
Tuesday, November 16, 12 – 1 p.m.
This virtual lecture will explore the history of Chagas disease, discovered by the physician Carlos Chagas in 1909 in a poor, rural area of Brazil.
The talk will focus on studies and debates on Chagas disease as a medical and social problem connected to poor health conditions of the rural population and considered to be an obstacle to Brazil’s project of modernization. It will also address the controversies about clinical and epidemiological aspects of the disease, in a context of intense nationalism and disagreements about the political meanings of the so-called tropical diseases.
Simone P. Kropf holds a Ph.D. in history from the Universidade Federal Fluminense, in Brazil, and is a professor at the graduate program of the history of sciences and health at Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro.
Register for History of Chagas Disease
Grooves and Waves: Phonograph Records as Historical Sources in the Digital Age (Kitab Talk Series)
Tuesday, November 16, 12 – 1 p.m.
Learn about the Gharamophone project at this virtual event, with Christopher Silver, Segal Family Assistant Professor in Jewish History and Culture, McGill University, and curator of Gharamophone.com.
In the decades following the advent of the phonograph at the end of the 19th century, thousands of shellac records circulated across the Middle East and North Africa. Etched between their grooves were a stunning array of popular, classical and folkloric songs, sketches and monologues, and the otherwise sublime sounds of an extended era of profound change. At mid-20th century, most of the region’s earliest phonograph records disappeared––or at least were thought to.
This presentation focuses on the birth of the recording industry in French colonial North Africa and the outsized role played by a minority of Arabophone Jewish musicians and impresarios. It provides a case study of Gharamophone.com, an online archive launched in 2017 to recover, digitize, and provide historical context for the Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian 78 rpm records that animated more than half a century.
Register for Grooves and Waves
Off the Shelf: Author Talk with Gregory Samantha Rosenthal
Thursday, November 18, 12 – 1 p.m.
“Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City” tells the story of an LGBTQ community in Roanoke, Virginia, a small city on the edge of Appalachia. Interweaving historical analysis, theory and memoir, Gregory Samantha Rosenthal tells the story of their own journey—coming out and transitioning as a transgender woman—in the midst of working on a community-based history project that documented a multigenerational southern LGBTQ community. Based on over forty interviews with LGBTQ elders, the book explores how queer people today think about the past and how history lives on in the present.
Gregory Samantha Rosenthal is associate professor of history at Roanoke College and co-founder of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project. Rosenthal will join us for a virtual talk about the book.
Register for Off the Shelf with Gregory Samantha Rosenthal
