Sept. 27: Sean Quimby talk on "Collecting in the History of Fear"
What are Americans really afraid of? In this lecture, entitled "American Phobia: Collecting in the History of Fear," Sean Quimby, director of the Library's Special Collections Research Center, will consider the role of fear in American life. The lecture will take place at 4 p.m. on Thursday, September 27, in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons, first floor, E. S. Bird Library.
In the post 9/11 world, we have grown accustomed to periodic “terror” alerts, but how did fear figure into the printed discourses of generations past? Quimby will detail the Special Collections Research Center’s ongoing project to build research collections that may help answer these questions. Burgeoning recent scholarship has equipped us with the tools required to examine this elusive topic, and available historical resources—religious tracts, popular psychology texts, eugenics manifestos, as well as self-help, child-rearing, and comportment manuals—can help us begin to trace the lineage of fear in America.
Sean Quimby holds graduate degrees from the Hagley Fellows Program in the History of Industrialization at the University of Delaware and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the fall of 2006, he came to Syracuse from Stanford University, where he served as a manuscripts librarian.
This talk, sponsored by the Syracuse University Library Associates, is free and open to the public. Pay parking is available in the Marion lot on Waverly Avenue.
