Library News

At 4 p.m. on Friday, December 1, 2006, Nicholas Birns will give a talk entitled “When Neglected Books Are Revived: The Cases of William Godwin and Dawn Powell.” Birns is on the faculty of Eugene Lang College, The New School. The talk, sponsored by the Syracuse University Seminar in the History of the Book, will take place in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons on the first floor of E. S. Bird Library.

Using William Godwin’s 1793 novel Caleb Williams and the novels of the 20th-century American novelist Dawn Powell as test cases, this talk will explore what it means for a book to be lost and to be revived, the different ways that revived books are received in academia and in the general literary culture, and the nature of revivals themselves as cultural phenomena. The talk will close by drawing lessons from these cases for considering “revivals of neglected books.”

Nicholas Birns, who has taught literature at The New School since 1996, is the author of Understanding Anthony Powell, the editor of Antipodes, and the co-editor of Companion to 20th-Century Australian Literature. He has written for European Romantic Review, Southern Quarterly, Arizona Quarterly, Religion and the Arts, and Review of Contemporary Fiction. He has lectured in Sweden, the UK, and Australia. Birns has a Ph.D. in English from New York University.

The History of the Book Seminar Series at Syracuse University is sponsored by the University Library, the School of Information Studies, and the College of Arts and Sciences: the Dean’s Office and the departments of Anthropology; English; History; Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics; Philosophy; and Religion.

CONTACT
Mary Beth Hinton
Syracuse University Library
315-443-2130
mbhinton@syr.edu

Posted by Mary Beth Hinton at 3:34 PM | Permalink

For one day, November 30, patrons with overdue library book fees can pay their fines with donated food items. All locations of SU Library, SU Law Library, and SUNY/ESF Moon Library will be accepting canned goods and other non-perishable food items at the rate of $1 per donated item.

Please bring your donation to the circulation desk at any of the participating libraries between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m.

All food collected will be donated to the Syracuse Downtown Emergency Services for distribution to those in need all over Onondaga County.

Students, faculty, and staff without current fines may also contribute to this worthwhile effort.

CONTACT
Gerri McCarthy
Syracuse University Library
gcmccart@syr.edu
443-3855

Posted by Mary Beth Hinton at 10:59 AM | Permalink

On Thursday, November 16, 2006, at 4 p.m. in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons (first floor of Syracuse University’s E. S. Bird Library), Robert Mattison will give a lecture entitled “Grace Hartigan: Painting the Past and the Present.” This event, sponsored by Syracuse University Library Associates, is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the lecture.

Grace Hartigan (1922–) was a major participant in the explosion of creative energy that was the New York artistic and literary scene of the early 1950s. An important abstract expressionist painter, Hartigan was included in the famous show Twelve Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956. This lecture will focus on Hartigan’s distinctive inventions during her long career and place her in the cultural context of the modern era, with particular emphasis on her relationships with such writers and artists as Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Barbara Guest, and Joan Mitchell.

Robert S. Mattison is Marshall R. Metzgar Professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. He received his PhD from Princeton University. Mattison is the author of four books and more than sixty articles and exhibition catalogs on modern art. In addition to Hartigan, he has written on such artists as Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. His particular fascination is working with living artists.

PLEASE NOTE: This lecture is being held in conjunction with a Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) exhibition entitled Imagine! Painters and Poets of the New York School on the sixth floor of E. S. Bird Library. The exhibit is part of the Syracuse Symposium, which for 2006/2007 has chosen imagination as its theme.

On display is material from the recently processed Grace Hartigan Papers, as well as from the Syracuse University Art Galleries, the Grove Press Archives, and SCRC’s extensive holdings of art and literary magazines from the 1950s.

The exhibition is free and open to the public. It will be available weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (excepting holidays) until December 15, 2006, after which time it will travel to the Palitz Gallery at the Joseph I. Lubin House in New York City.

Pay parking for the lecture and the exhibition is available in the Marion visitor lot on Waverly Avenue.

CONTACT
Mary Beth Hinton
Syracuse University Library
315-443-2130
mbhinton@syr.edu

Posted by Mary Beth Hinton at 11:29 AM | Permalink

Library staff are conducting a series of hands-on workshop for RefWorks, an online citation and bibliography management system. RefWorks allows you to import bibliographic information from a number of sources, including the SUMMIT online catalog and many of our online databases. With the Write-N-Cite program, you can automatically enter citations and generate a bibliography directly into your paper.

For times and location, click on http://library.syr.edu/cite/index.html

CONTACT
Maryjane Poulin
Email: mdpoulin@syr.edu
Phone: 3-9771

Posted by Mary Beth Hinton at 2:16 PM | Permalink