Hester Thrale Piozzi's Scrapbook Composition as Life Writing
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Wednesday, April 22, 6pm-8pm | Bobst Library, 2nd Floor Chase North Reading Room
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Eighteenth-century author, diarist, and socialite Hester Thrale Piozzi (1741–1821) kept an enigmatic notebook of literary scraps and excerpts entitled Minced Meat for Pyes. Compiled and expanded throughout the course of her everyday life, this visually striking and formally experimental manuscript functions as both a spatial and textual composition. As much a visual and material artifact as it is a written one, Professor Julie Park (Pennsylvania State University) will consider how Piozzi’s notebook offers a compelling redefinition of life writing, presenting it as a creative practice that unfolds across multiple media in the very act of living the life it documents.
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Spanish Civil War Posters: From 1930s Printing Presses to the Digital World
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Monday, April 27, 2pm-3pm | Bobst Library, Special Collections Center, 2nd Floor, Room 251
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Join NYU Libraries for an in-person Preservation Week event introducing a two-year conservation and digitization project to increase access to over 200 Spanish Civil War posters held in our Special Collections. Lindsey Tyne (Conservation Librarian), Ana Sofia Drinovan (Special Collections Project Conservator), and Michael Stasiak (Digital Content Manager) will introduce the project and engage the audience in an interactive discussion with a selection of physical posters. The session will cover conservation approaches, digitization strategies, and material observations.
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Screening and Talk: Preserving Sunrise Semester
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Wednesday, April 29, 3pm-4:30pm | Bobst Library, Special Collections Center, 2nd Floor, Room 251
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Join NYU Libraries for this in-person event showcasing Sunrise Semester, a TV show co-produced by NYU and CBS from 1957-1982, from which viewers could learn from NYU professors and even earn a college degree from home. With nearly one hundred courses, the surviving recordings of the program are a feast for the mind, and represent incredible snapshots of 20th century thought and higher education.
Michael Grant (Assistant Director for Media Preservation) and Janet Bunde (University Archivist) will introduce the history of the course and the project underway to preserve it for the future. The event will conclude with a screening of an episode of Sunrise Semester unseen for more than four decades.
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Village People: Life, Art & Activism
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On view through June 2026
Bobst Library, 2nd Floor, Special Collections Gallery
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New York City is the largest city in the United States in terms of population, a fact we experience daily while making our way through the streets and subways we constantly navigate and negotiate. Despite the mass of people around us, the city can also be surprisingly small and compact—a series of villages and communities. Bobst Library is placed at the central point of three distinct yet interconnected such localities—Greenwich Village, the West Village, and the East Village.
In the last century, the Villages have been defined and redefined by their residents as they move through and around buildings, streets, and parks. Neighborhoods become known by the reputations of their citizens, which attract similar inhabitants and interested spectators. The personalities of the Villages are constantly shifting within their limited geography.
Occupying a horizontal slice of Manhattan from the Hudson to the East River, and from Fourteenth Street to Houston Street, these neighborhoods have been the home of artists, writers, musicians, and activists across generations. NYU Special Collections has long collected the material productions of these individuals, their communities, and the organizations who have made these Villages their home. This exhibition highlights some of their stories.
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| The River That Flows Both Ways
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Bobst Library, 10th Floor North Reading Room
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The River That Flows Both Ways showcases a series of compelling and contemplative ceramic works by visual artist and NYU professor Jacqueline Bishop in her pursuit of commemorating the buried, interlinked histories of the Lenape lands on which most of NYU’s New York campus is located. Featuring archival collage digitally printed on six porcelain plates, The River That Flows Both Ways illuminates the early encounters of African enslaved laborers brought into Indigenous communities by European settlers during the 1600s. These complex interactions and intricate trade routes are juxtaposed with architectural landmarks alongside the flora and fauna native to New York.
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“A library is a growing organism,” reads the fifth “rule” of library science as penned in 1931 by S.R. Ranganathan, widely considered to be the father of library science. In a world where “library” and “book” have taken on vast new meanings it’s the last of Ranganathan’s five guiding principles that prompts us to continuously respond to our environment and deeply interrogate the ways we curate, collect, organize, and preserve information for generations to come.
Through six interactive sculptures, Rule No. 5 examines practices and objects that shape how we can search, who we will find, and what we remember.
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70 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012
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