The Girl's Own Book: Selections from the Ellery Yale Wood Collection

Open through June, 2021 in the Rare Book Room, First Floor of Canaday Library. Open to campus community members only until campus re-opens to visitors.

The Girl’s Own Book explores the range of books aimed at girls and young women readers from the beginnings of children’s book publishing in the late 18th century, and looks at how children’s books changed in response to transformations in printing technologies and sensibilities and ambitions of young women readers.

The Girl's Own Book is now open in Canaday Library and online. We are also blogging regularly about books from the exhibition. Please check out our blog posts. And remember to follow us on Facebook.

Hours
Through June, 2021. Rare Book Room, First Floor, Canaday Library
Monday-Friday, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. when the library is open | other times by appointment, SpecColl@brynmawr.edu.
Open to campus community members only until campus re-opens to visitors.


Upcoming Events
All events will take place on Zoom and are open to the public. Registration is required - follow the link for each event. Further news of events and Friday Finds will be posted as they are scheduled.

 

April 23, 2021, 12:00 pm. Friday Finds: Digital Color on Ancient Stone: Restoring Paint to Ancient Sculpture Through Digital Tools

Ancient Greek sculpture was painted in bright colors and vibrant patterns, yet it is exhibited today as bare white stone often without mention of the polychrome painted surfaces. In the summer 2020, the Coloring the Past: Restoring Color to Ancient Sculpture Through 3D Modelling and Projection Mapping project combined research on ancient pigments and painting with digital technologies to create a sensory viewing experience by restoring color to two plaster casts of Greek relief sculpture in Carpenter Library. In this presentation, the students will explain their process building 3D hypothetical colorized reconstructions of these reliefs which were then projected onto the sculpture to provide a more authentic and colorful viewing experience. By exhibiting the ancient world in color, we expand the narrative and reception of ancient sculpture and rethink false concepts of beauty and “whiteness” that have been misappropriated by radical groups and white nationalists. Presenters include Research and Instruction Librarian Laura Surtees, Molly Kuchler (graduate student in Classics), Mira Yuan (Archaeology and Museum Studies ’21),  and Vimbai Mawoneke (Math and Chemistry ’21).
Register at https://brynmawr.libcal.com/event/7619156


Past Events

April 9, 2021. Presences & Absences: Assessing the Legacies of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry. Presentation by Beck Morawski, ’21 on their online exhibition, For Roses, Too, in honor of the centennial of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry. The Summer School opened in 1921 and ran through 1938, during which time it hosted about a thousand women working in manual labor and the industrial sector, recruited the first Black students to study on campus, redefined what it means to be a Bryn Mawr student, and radically changed the playing field of worker's education throughout the country. College Archivist Allison Mills hosts the event. 
Watch the recorded event

March 12, 2021. The Histories of Little Fanny and Little Henry
Haverford Professor Rosetta Young discusses two of the first mass-produced paper dolls, The History of Little Fanny and The History and Adventures of Little Henry, and their accompanying narratives, exploring how the gendered expectations of the period shape their characterizations. Fanny and Henry's narratives parallel one another: they are both kidnapped, fall into poverty, and work their way into independent respectability before reuniting with their parents. Subtle variations, however, cast their stories in different lights; while Fanny's narrative suggests that she deserves her fall from the upper class and that her experience is a corrective for her vanity, Henry's trajectory serves to prove his internal worth and validate his initial elite status.
Watch the recorded lecture.

March 3, 2021.  “I” is for “Ideology”: Spelling Books and Primers as Cultural Battleground.  A (Zoom) Lecture by Heather Klemann,Yale University. What are words like “surveillance” and “usurper” doing in spelling books for children? We might ask this question of the  propagandistic Abécédaire de la cour de France (Alphabet Book of the Court of France, Paris, 1814) for young monsieurs and mademoiselles published during the Bourbon Restoration, where these words appear. This talk examines how works like the Abécédaire  enfold children into political movements through performances of learning to read: turning pages, sounding words aloud, and connecting images to text.
Watch the recorded lecture.

February 26, 2021.  Who Built Bryn Mawr? An Introduction and Invitation.   Learn more about the Who Built Bryn Mawr? project and its paid summer internship opportunities! The Who Built Bryn Mawr? project is a multi-year effort to diversify and complicate the way we think about the history of Bryn Mawr. The project sponsors research, writing and exhibitions that explore the silences and gaps in our understanding of the College’s history, and recognizes the wide range of alumnae/i, faculty, and staff who have made important contributions to the building of the College. This event will discuss the project and the opportunities for students, faculty and staff to be involved, including the student internships this summer. Featured speakers will be Professor Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, the faculty mentor for the program this summer, College Archivist Allison Mills, student researcher Emma Ruth Burns (Class of 2021) and President Kim Cassidy. 
Watch the recorded event.

October 9, 2020. Allison Mills Reads from The Ghost Collector. Allison Mills (College Archivist) reads from her first YA novel, The Ghost Collector. Rooted in a Cree worldview and inspired by the author’s great-grandmother’s stories, The Ghost Collector delves into questions of grief, loss, and the many ways people can linger after death. Read more about Allison's work at https://allisonmillswrites.com.
Watch the recorded event.

Events not recorded:

October 23, 2020. Friday Finds - Story Hour. Our first Story Hour of the year!  Students who helped curate The Girl's Own Book will share favorite children's stories. Esme Read,  Lucy Verweij, and Beck Morawski (all '21) will read an old favorite about a bear of very little brain, an award-wining picture book from 1991 about perfection, and a beautifully illustrated nonsense book about the Google Bird written long before our Google was dreamed of. 

October 16, 2020. ’24 ’31 Students Study Race. Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows Cindy Chea ('22), Hilana El-Mekkoussi ('21), Peyton Moriarty ('21), Tino Nguruve ('22), and Elizabeth Zhao ('22) spent the summer researching and building a digital exhibition on BMC history. '24 '31 Students Study Race tells the story of two conferences organized by Mawrters in 1924 and 1931 to foster dialogue about race, inviting Black students and intellectuals (including Black luminaries such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Alice Dunbar Nelson) to discuss race relations and racial justice with white students. The fellows will present their work on the project--from archival research to web design to data visualization--and why this history matters today.

 

 

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Canaday Library in the snow.

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