General

The Library just wrapped up a celebration of National Poetry Month, during which daily pop-up poetry readings were held under Alexander Calder’s Red Fossils mobile in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library.  Every weekday at noon, a student, faculty, or staff member read a favorite—or sometimes, an original—poem to an appreciative audience.  Readers from across campus shared poems that resonated with them, a surprisingly intimate and often profoundly moving experience for the listeners.  Those of us who “took ten” to hear a reading can testify to the enduring power of poetry; see the list of the readers and their chosen poems below.  The series was dedicated to the memory of Professor of English Celeste Goodridge, who passed away in March.

Our thanks to all who participated!

Date	Reader	Title/Class Year	Poem Read
April 2	Charlotte Daniels	Associate Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures	The Moose, Elizabeth Bishop
April 3	Sabrina Hunte	2020	Generations, Sabrina Hunte
April 4	Anna MacLean	2019	I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, William Wordsworth
April 5	June Lei	2018	Cadmium Red, June Lei
April 6	Parker Lemal-Brown	2018	Scratch Draft Manifesto, Parker Lemal-Brown
April 9	Hailey Beaman	2018	Song of the Statue, Rainer Maria Rilke
April 10	Sarah Bay-Cheng	Professor of Theater & Dance	Play, Gertrude Stein
April 11	Michael Reed	Senior Vice President for Inclusion and Diversity	The Mask, Maya Angelou
April 12	Karl Maria Fattig	System & Digital Initiatives Librarian	Le spectre de la rose, Theophile Gauthier, from Poesies diverses, 1833-1838
April 13	Daniel Rechtschaffen	2018	Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas
April 16	Clayton Rose	President	A Couple, Carl Sandburg
April 17	Leana Amaez	Associate Dean of Students for Diversity & Inclusion	Ode to My Socks, Pablo Neruda
April 18	Guy Mark Foster	Associate Professor of English	American Wedding, Essex Hemphill
April 19	Martina Duncan	Registrar	In the Basement of the Goodwill Store, Ted Kooser
April 20	Shinhee Kang	2018	America, Allen Ginsberg
April 23	Matt O’Donnell	Editor, Bowdoin Magazine	Nate Brown is Looking for a Moose, Matthew Olzmann
April 24	Helen Ross	2018	As I Walked Out One Evening, W. H. Auden
April 25	Sakura Christmas	Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies	An excerpt of the first book (titled “The Jetavana Temple”) of the very long epic poem, Heike monogatari (Tales of the Heike). It was orally transmitted about events in Japan at the end of the twelfth century, and compiled and written down sometime before 1330. As a result, there is no author.
April 26	Sebastian Urli	Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Spanish	Ternera acosada por tábanos,by peruvian poet Blanca Varela and One Art, Elizabeth Bishop
April 27	Joachim Homann	Museum of Art Curator	An Anna Blume, Kurt Schwitters
April 30	Slam poets Katherine Chi and Sanura McGill	2019, 2020	White Porcelain, Katherine Chi; Those Winter Sundays, Robert Hayden and Gone, Sanura McGill

Please join us for the last of this spring’s book launches, hosted by the Library. Professor Saiber will discuss her new book, “Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy” with Aaron Kitch, Associate Professor of English.

May 3, 2018 | 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM | Hawthorne Longfellow Library, Nixon Lounge

Refreshments will be served. Free and open to the public.

Students Quyen Ha and Sabina Hartnett text-mined German sources to reveal trends in discourse. Professor Birgit Tautz explains…

In summer 2017, Quyen Ha and I worked together as part of a Gibbons Fellowship that Quyen won. I’ve long been interested in popular discourse on China in 18^th century German language newspapers and journals — unlike established then-and now-famous literary texts — the popular often remains anonymous, is repeated, stolen, translated or republished without attribution of source. (There was no copyright law in the 18^th century!) So I had a hunch that the journals may help us explain how the image of China in German lands morphed from one that was largely positive and respectful, in part because of China being perceived as an ancient harbor of philosophy, to one that turned increasingly negative, irrational and into sinophobia. Quyen wrote a program that assisted with text recognition, making old German print legible, and “mined the data,” leading to sets and patterns waiting to be explored. She applied topic modeling and created data sets that I not only used in a seminar on 18^th century German literature but that we are now interpreting: and the patterns we find reveal a much more complicated image of China than we expected.

Sabina Hartnett brings her far-ranging expertise in digital and computational studies (DCS) to her honors project in German. Her topic is very timely and revolves around the public discourse on refugees in Germany today, but also in historical perspectives. Here, the historical data serve to illustrate how concepts and words became engrained in the German language, were eclipsed or promoted by massive dictionary projects of the 19^th century and resurrected, popularized, and emotionally invested in recent years. She shows in fascinating ways how data may help us understand how people think and talk and become politically enshrined and invested in closed-off ways of thinking.

In both projects, digital and computational studies methods help us to read in new ways and open up to debate long-standing truisms.  And in the future, we look forward to applying DCS methods to the new database, German Literature Collections, for which the Library purchased the text-minable file.

Please join us as Scott MacEachern, professor of anthropology, discusses his new book, Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa.

This is the second event this semester in the Library’s book launch series.

March 1, 2018 | 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM | Hawthorne Longfellow Library, Nixon Lounge

Refreshments will be served. Free and open to the public.

Watch lab experiments in  Biology, Neuroscience, General Lab, and Cell & Molecular Biology.

Please join us as Birgit Tautz, George Taylor Files Professor of Modern Languages, discusses her new book, Translating the World: Toward a New History of German Literature Around 1800, with Associate Professor of English Ann Kibbie.

This is the first event this semester in the Library’s book launch series.

February 1, 2018 | 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM | Hawthorne Longfellow Library, Nixon Lounge

Refreshments will be served. Free and open to the public.

Professor Margaret Boyle partnered with Special Collections & Archives to engage students in digital transcription of early modern Spanish recipes.

Continue reading »

Please join us for the first Food for Thought of the year.

Adira Polite ’18 will present Lessons From My Summer in Prison: Crime and Punishment in the 21st Century.  She will recount her summer as a restorative justice facilitator and prison missionary in South Africa. Her talk will feature a crash-course in restorative justice and she will share multiple stories from her time within the nation’s prisons. The lecture also will explore the birth of restorative justice in the United States and how its growth may impact the future of the American legal system.

Wednesday, November 29 @ 8 p.m. in H-L’s Nixon Lounge (3rd floor)

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED – WITH OUR APOLOGIES

Please join us as Barbara Weiden Boyd, Winkley Professor of Latin and Greek, presents her new book, Ovid’s Homer: Authority, Repetition, Reception. This is the third and final event in the Library’s book launch series this semester.  More to come in the spring!

November 30, 2017 | 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM | Hawthorne Longfellow Library, Nixon Lounge