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COLLECTIONS IN THE CLASSROOM

Students in a new certificate program share what they’ve discovered

By Yale Library

August 14^th, 2024

Yale University’s new graduate certificate program—Material Histories of the Human Record—opens up the classroom walls and invites students into Yale Library Special Collections.

The certificate program was founded in 2022 by Lucy Mulroney—director of Academic Affairs and Exhibitions for Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library—and Ayesha Ramachandran, professor of Comparative Literature.

Students in this cross-disciplinary program have the opportunity to deepen their academic research by working directly with primary sources related to their individual research. Students work with faculty members, artists, archivists, conservators, curators, and researchers in cultural institutions throughout the university to gain firsthand experience in a variety of disciplines.

The program is designed to develop students’ understandings of the debates, methods, theories, and real-world constraints involved in working with cultural heritage collections. Drawing on the library's extraordinary collections and expert staff—and in collaboration with faculty members interested in the possibilities of teaching with collections—the innovative program bridges collections, archives, libraries, and academic scholarship.

“The idea of the program,” Mulroney said, “is to draw an arc for the students from doing research in collections for their own projects to understanding the ethics of building and describing collections through to the complexities of displaying and preserving collections.”

Mulroney and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, assistant professor, Department of English, taught last year’s foundational proseminar, Theory and Praxis of Material Histories. The spring semester culminated in a pop-up exhibition session in a classroom at Beinecke Library. Students curated their own selection of collection materials: Pakistani legal texts, Nigerian market literature, LGBT ephemera, historical fragments, and the manuscripts of formerly enslaved people and Black female literary workers.

Drawing on class discussions about the ethics of describing and displaying cultural heritage, students discussed their choices as they presented their individual pop-up exhibitions to each other. Photos of the six exhibits and selected objects are shown here, along with excerpts from the students’ accompanying texts and remarks.

Gideon Melvin

“This exhibition includes two authors who were Black American slaves. As a former slave, Frederick Douglass penned an autobiography titled ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.’ Hannah Crafts wrote ‘The Bondwoman’s Narrative’ while in her condition of slavery. Juxtaposing these two authors in an exhibition allows us to consider the testimony of their incredible stories, their dogged determination to learn how to read and write--despite potentially grave consequences if their literacy were discovered—and their courage to escape from the cruel grip of slavery. Both authors expressed a burning desire to know, a longing to cipher the knowledge forbidden to them in newspapers, books, pamphlets, and other publications. Pursuing this desire led them to more than one form of freedom.

There’s something about Hannah Crafts that I thought, she needs to be on display. There should be research. She should be read. She should be acknowledged as someone able to rise about her circumstances and to realize full freedom and personhood denied through things like slave codes.

“This exhibition is important because it displays the literacy of Frederick Douglass and Hannah Crafts. By illustrating their ability to learn how to read and write under conditions of duress, we debunk the pseudoscientific myths that Black people were cognitively inferior to their White counterparts. The exhibition is important in a modern world where IQ tests, bell curves, affirmative action, and all manner of stereotypes continue to be discussed in the public sphere and impact the national education program.”

(“I would quietly steal away from their company to ponder over the pages of some old book or newspaper that chance had thrown in [my] way. Though I knew not the meaning of a single letter, and had not the means of finding out I loved to look at them and think that some day I should probably understand them all.” The bound manuscript of “A Bondswoman’s Narrative” was a gift to Beinecke Library from historian, professor, and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates Jr. ’73.)

Iz Klemmer

“The first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights occurred on October 14, 1979, reportedly drawing 79,000 participants. The march was replicated again in 1987, 1993, 2000, and 2009. At its peak in 1993, organizers estimated that about 1 million people were in attendance. From the first March in 1979 to the last in 2009, the LGBT community dealt with issues like the AIDS epidemic and inaction by the federal government, visible gaybashing cases like that of Wyoming teen Matthew Shepard, and anti-gay legislation like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which banned gay and lesbian people from military service.

“Although subsequent marches grew in size and popularity, they were also subject to criticism. Some organizations promoted the inclusion of politicians as speakers, advocating for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Others criticized such demands as promoting the assimilation of LGBT people into a society they viewed as unjust. The March became a symbol of the contentious political discourse happening within the LGBTQ+ community.

“Exhibit materials are drawn from the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Collection and the Family Equality Council Records at Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.”

Thobile Ndimande

“The Onitsha Market Literature (OML) collection draws its name from the area east of the Niger River, where this marketplace has been known as a socioeconomic hub. It grew from the 1950s and thrived in the 1960s and 1970s. The name stuck onto the pamphlets’ form and didactic narrative style as this African literature dispersed across varying locales in Nigeria, such as Ibadan. OML is a repository of the historical and cultural context in which these publications were created and circulated. This alternative literary form encapsulates the sociality of the marketplace and, more broadly, African life at a critical time in Nigerian history.

“The OML Collection is a popular African Literature that affords capacious engagement, drawing perspectives of African Feminist Thought, Postcolonial Studies, African Political Studies, and even Printmaking and Visual Arts. Viewers will note that the pamphlets have visual illustrations, reproduce photographs on paper, and play with various fonts and sizes. The literary eye will encounter the various genres of literary narrative formation—short story, drama plays, historical and political narratives. Thematically the ones on view present a gendered didactic narrative style that imagine the author to be advising the reader directly or through the moral arc of the story.”

Maimoona Yaqub

“Pakistan gained independence from the British in 1947, following a bloody partition with India. In the aftermath of partition, citizens of the nascent state faced the existential question of national identity and belonging. The 1950s were a particularly contentious period in Pakistan. Various stakeholders, including religious groups, political elite, academics, and women’s rights groups played a part and contested the nation-building process. As religion formed the basis for partition, ‘its place in state ideology was a question that had to be faced squarely in this Muslim homeland.’

“This exhibition showcases documents from the Caroline Farrar Ware (UNESCO) Papers to highlight Pakistan’s nation-building efforts during the 1950s. Three types of printed materials from the 1950s offer three different, at times contradictory, vocabularies of nation building. When seen together, these documents offer a multifaceted perspective on the challenges and aspirations of the nascent nation. They invite us to consider critically the competing visions and narratives that shaped Pakistan’s identity and its place in the world.

“A few critical guiding questions for the viewer include: What ‘national narrative’ is being constructed through these documents? How do these documents complicate the official nationalist narrative propagated by the Pakistani state? What insights do they provide into Pakistan's social, political, and cultural dynamics during the 1950s?”

(During the year-long program, in preparation for their final projects, students received hands-on experience in bibliographic description, archival practice, and provenance research. In one session, Antonia Bartoli, curator of Provenance Research at Yale University Art Gallery, led the students through analyses of three case studies to explore the ethical issues surrounding acquisition and repatriation.)

Ruthie Block

“A foundational systems builder of Black thought, Dorothy Porter Wesley (1905–1995) may be best known for building Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, wherein she compiled the ‘largest card record of publications by and about the Negro ever made available in one place.’ A pioneering librarian, bibliographer, and curator, Porter’s construction of ‘invisible infrastructures’ has been focalized in recent scholarship ‘attending to knowledge producers and practices that nearly refuse to draw attention to themselves.’

“Recovering the history of Black women literary workers —often dismissed as ‘very nice women’ who ‘help, dust, shelve, arrange’ —a thorough consideration of Porter’s impact allows us to better recognize ‘the seemingly nonliterary work of building infrastructure’ as a critical site for the production of a ‘new Black imaginary,’ forged ‘against an information landscape that exiled black readers and texts alike.’”

Louise Moulin

“Museums and libraries house artifacts celebrated for their rarity, beauty, and cultural resonance. Yet, within their halls also lie heterogeneous items whose significance derives from their provenance, or history of origin and ownership. In this exhibition, I wanted to push this observation to the extreme by putting the spotlight on seemingly insignificant objects, almost debris—fragments of cement and wood—that gain a new importance when their stories are told.

“The contrast between the trivial appearance of objects like wood chips, fragments of cement, locks of hair, or even empty boxes and the profound impact of the events and characters that they bore witness to forces us to question our reverence for relics of the past. How do these objects serve as portals to bygone eras? How do we react to them when their authenticity seems questionable? By showcasing debris that are also material evidence of the past, I ask whether these objects’ presence in our collections reveals more about the mindsets of people from the past or about our own.”

This certificate program has been a great opportunity for me to discover books and items that Yale holds that I would never have come across in my own research. I feel I have grown as a researcher, instructor, and possible future curator.

(left to right: Ruthie Block, Maimoona Yaqub, Louise Moulin, Iz Klemmer, Lucy Mulroney, Gideon Melvin, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Rachel Herschman, Mario Grassi, Thobile Ndimande, Teresa Xu)

“During the past year,” Mukhopadhyay explained,“we have had students who are historians, literary scholars, archaeologists, and political scientists, with interests spanning from religion in late antiquity to contemporary queer theory. It’s been an amazing experience to have people with such a wide range of disciplinary skills in a classroom together.”

(Seminar instructors Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, assistant professor, Department of English, and Lucy Mulroney, director of Academic Affairs and Exhibitions for Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

Footnotes

Visual story by Deborah Cannarella and Monica Reed. Photographs of the pop-up exhibitions class session by Harold Shapiro. Photograph of Antonia Bartoli’s class session by Deborah Cannarella.

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FootNotes

Visual story by Deborah Cannarella and Monica Reed. Photographs of the pop-up exhibitions class session by Harold Shapiro. Photograph of Antonia Bartoli’s class session by Deborah Cannarella.