All Families Weekend!

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This coming weekend, September 18-20, 2015, is All Families Weekend at Vassar.  What better time to show off the Library and all its architectural details to family and friends?

Here a few highlights:

The Library has a rich architectural history.  The Main Library was built in 1905 and has been expanded and updated several times over the past 110 years.  Most of the original architectural details are still present today — along with some breathtaking newer ones!  Bring your family and friends to the Library this weekend and enjoy this beautiful, historic building as well as the contents within!

For further information on the history of the Library, visit:

For more information on the events happening on campus during the weekend, please visit:

 

The Library Cafe Fall 2015 Season

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librarycafeThe LIbrary Cafe is a radio interview program hosted Wednesdays at Noon on WVKR (91.3FM) by Vassar Art Librarian Thomas Hill.  Mr. Hill talks each week with scholarly authors, curators, and librarians about books, research, and libraries.  Featured this semester are Vassar faculty authors Marc Epstein, Jennifer Church, Tobias Armborst, Amitava Kumar, and Andrew Tallon.   Regular guests include Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center curators discussing current exhibitions at the Center.  This semester the show also begins a series on the role of the liberal arts in contemporary society with a discussion with Grace G. Roosevelt on service learning at the Metropolitan College of New York, where she has spent her career teaching the history of education through classic texts to students training to become social service professionals.  The first show of the season airs Wednesday, September 16 at noon and features Marc Michael Epstein, Professor of Religion on the Mackie Paschall Davis & Norman H. Davis Chair at Vassar College, discussing his new book, co-edited with Eva Frojmovic: Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts (Princeton University Press, 2015).  Podcasts of previous episodes, along with a listing of scheduled guests, is available at http://library-cafe.org.  WVKR can be accessed via the Internet at: http://player.streamtheworld.com/player.php?callsign=WVKRFM

Angela Davis Speaking at Vassar on Wednesday, Sept. 16 – Read all about it!

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As many of you have heard, Angela Davis will be speaking at Vassar on September 16th to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the Women’s Studies Program at the college.  We here in the library are looking forward to Davis’ return to Vassar, and are taking this opportunity to read about her life and her work.  Looking at the library’s resources on Angela Davis is an excellent example of the broad range of books, primary sources, films and journal articles that you can find here.

angela-davis-political-biographyOn the shelves in the Main Library, you’ll find “A Political Biography of Angela Davis,” a pamphlet that was published by the New York Committee to Free Angela Davis in January, 1971, as Davis was awaiting trial.  If you’d like to dig deeper into the primary sources available about Davis’ trial, you’ll find a selection of documents related to the campaign to free Angela Davis in the database, “Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000.”  You can read Davis’ early work, such as her essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” originally published in the journal, The Black Scholar in 1971, or the autobiography she published in 1975 (in print or online).  Or you could read a collection of her more recent speeches and essays, The Meaning of Freedom (excerpted here) or a collection of interviews with Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture, published in 2005.

You could also learn more about Angela Davis’ background by reading her contribution to the book, Falling in Love with Wisdom: American Philosophers Talk About their Calling or by reading about the formative years she spent in France, recounted in Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis by Alice Kaplan.

Perhaps you’d like to watch a Angela davis combodocumentary film or two?  Invite some friends to watch Free Angela and All Political Prisoners (2013) or Black Power Mixtape (2011).

 

However you prepare, we hope to see you at the Chapel on Wednesday, September 16th at 5:30.