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Complete a Survey, Help Shape the Library’s Future
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Your Brown University Library will be conducting a study to assess how the Library’s services, collections, and other resources are used in order to better understand and document the Library’s impact on research, teaching, and learning at Brown, and to help us improve library services.
We appreciate your survey responses!
When and how will the survey be given?
Once a month over the next 12 months on differing days and times, anyone using the library website or visiting a library location may be asked to complete a very brief anonymous survey, either through a website pop-up or on paper during a visit to a library location.
Each version of the survey will take less than two minutes to complete. No personal information is collected unless you choose to share it.
Website Survey
The pop-up survey will appear if you are using e-journals, databases, interlibrary loan, e-books, streaming media, or other web-based library services during a survey window. You’ll be asked to complete the survey before accessing the resource.
Paper Survey
Anyone entering the Rockefeller, Sciences, or John Hay Library during a survey window will be given the paper survey and asked to return the completed survey before leaving.
Thank You!
Thank you in advance for helping us better understand and communicate the Library’s role in fulfilling the University’s academic mission.
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The Evolution of Cthulhu
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Cthluhu illustration by Janaya Kizzie In 1933, Howard Phillips (H.P.) Lovecraft published the story “At the Mountains of Madness,” creating a world that has captured imaginations. It is the looming ancient god of the story, Cthulhu, who gives the Cthulhu Mythos its name, both of which have spawned countless works (and nightmares) since.
Cthulhu Mythos
Stories, films, songs and more have been written within the Cthulhu Mythos, characterized by creeping dread, disgusting creatures and cosmic horror. Its abundant cultural presence lends the mythos the ubiquity of an inside joke among science fiction, fantasy and weird fiction aficionados, and resonance far beyond.
Charting the Cthulhu Mythos through time is akin to charting plant and animal evolution; environmental adaptation is necessary to survival — and cultural relevance. It is important to note that the constant appropriation of Lovecraft’s work has allowed the mythos to move away from its racist origins. As flora and fauna develop tougher bark and thicker coats to adapt to changes in climate, so too have the themes, places, figures and creatures of the Cthulhu Mythos taken new shapes to suit modern understanding and culture.
H.P. Lovecraft Collection
The Library’s extensive H.P. Lovecraft Collection includes holdings of manuscripts, letters, editions of Lovecraft’s works in all languages, periodicals, biographical and critical works, and many supportive collections of manuscript and printed materials of Lovecraft’s friends and associates. There are more than 1,000 books and magazines in 20 languages containing material by or about Lovecraft plus over 2,000 original letters and manuscripts of his essays, fiction and poetry. Many of the papers were given to the Library a few months after his death in 1937.
The Library holds array of materials related to weird fiction that may also be of interest to Lovecraft fans.
Evolution of Cthulhu in the Collection
In honor of NecronomiCon Providence, here is a sample of items held by the Library that demonstrate some of the ways that the Cthulhu Mythos has been adapted, remixed and changed from the mythos of Lovecraft’s time.
Shoggoths
A servile race known for its many eyes and underground travel, shoggoths were first seen in “In The Mountains of Madness.” They have evolved to portray anything from beloved pets to free creatures roaming the earth.
“I want you to learn to be free,” he told the shoggoth, “and I want you to teach your brothers.”
Elizabeth Bear, “Shoggoths in Bloom,” 2008
Long, Frank Belknap, “Episode No. 2 – Randolph Carter defies the daemons of Baal-Naplong” (1926). Howard P. Lovecraft collection. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:941871/ The King in Yellow
The King in Yellow, sometimes known as Hastur, first appeared in The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers in 1895, when H.P. Lovecraft was just five years old. The mysterious cosmic king haunts the minds of all who encounter the play written about him. More recently, the term “King in Yellow” has been used to describe cult leaders, elder gods, and unspeakable terrors.
“Something old and predatory and utterly terrible staring right back at me.”
China Mieville, “Details,” 2002
Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips), “The Science Library” (1904). Howard P. Lovecraft collection. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:729688/ (Shown: page 26 of 28 from The Science Library.) Cthulhu
Cthulhu, the central figure of the mythos, is an ancient god who appears half squid and half human. It is constantly intimated in the mythos that Cthulhu will end the world. Since his inception, Cthulhu has become everything from Davey Jones to cute plush toys.
“Guys. We are not going to destroy the world nor eat anyone in this room. Are we clear?”
Minions and Monsters, 2025
Lovecraft, H.P. (Howard Phillips), “Cthulhu” (1934). Howard P. Lovecraft collection. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:926699/ (Shown: page 3 of 6 from Chtulhu.) Necronomicon
The ultimate cursed book, the Necronomicon delivers a warning in Lovecraft’s story “The Hound.” It is said to hold spells to summon the dead (and worse). Over 100 years later, the accidental invoking of evil spells has become a trope and, at times,
a punchline.“Told you you should’ve put the book back, Danny!”
Evil Dead Rise, 2023 H.P. Lovecraft Papers" written at the bottom. "5¢" is in the middle of the paper with a small rocket ship under it.](https://library.brown.edu/create/libnews/wp-content/uploads/sites/44/2026/07/chemistry-619x1024.jpg)
Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips), “Chemistry, Magic, & Electricity” (1899). Howard P. Lovecraft collection. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:730451/ The Racial Imaginaries of H.P. Lovecraft
The permanent online exhibit, “A Blind Horror Beyond All Rational Proportion”: The Racial Imaginaries of H.P. Lovecraft, examines Lovecraft’s correspondence for insight into his conceptualization of race and how it is reflected in his fiction. The exhibit was curated by the 2020 Brown University Library Exhibitions Proctor, Alberto Alcaraz Escarcega, Political Science Ph.D. candidate.
John Hay Library Renovation and Access
You can view Brown’s special collections in person! While the John Hay Library is renovating its exterior this summer, a temporary special collections reading room is available in the Absolute Quiet Room on level A of the Rockefeller Library. It is open on the following schedule by reservation only. Please see Visiting the Brown University Special Collections for information about scheduling a reading room appointment via Aeon. The Hay will reopen in September.
- Monday and Tuesday: 1 to 5 p.m.
- Wednesday and Thursday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Friday: 10 a.m. to noon
The Call of Cthulhu
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” 1928 -
Winners of the Undergraduate Prize for Excellence in Library Research
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Brown University Library is pleased to announce that Paulina Gąsiorowska and Amira Haileab are the recipients of the 20th annual Undergraduate Prize for Excellence in Library Research, supported through the Center for Library Exploration and Research. This award, established in partnership with the Office of the Dean of the College, recognizes undergraduate projects that make extensive and creative use of Brown University Library’s collections, including print and primary resources, databases, and special collections.
The winning projects are honored with a $1,000 prize each and will be recognized at an awards ceremony on Wednesday, April 29 at 3 p.m. in the Racial Justice Resource Center on the second floor of the Rockefeller Library.
Winners
Paulina Gąsiorowska ’27
“On Re-Painting and (Self-) Primitivizing in Mela Muter’s Maternity Cycle”
Paulina Gąsiorowska’s research project, “On Re-Painting and (Self-)Primitivizing in Mela Muter’s Maternity Cycle,” takes up the life and work of early 20th century Polish-Jewish painter Mela Muter, who made her mark on French modernism by painting and re-painting maternity scenes across the aesthetic modes associated with the great (male) artists of the Western European avant-garde. Turning to exhibition catalogs and artist emigration archives, as well as frameworks of feminist, cultural, and art historians and theorists, the project posits a critical recognition of Muter’s pictorial surfaces as not constituting sites of pure radical subjectivity, but rather as staging dynamic negotiations of her ambivalent positionalities and complicities in modernist discourses of repetition and derivation, cosmopolitanism and primitivism, origin and originality.
Amira Haileab ’26
“A Black Red Sea: Understanding the Red Sea in Black Geography through the Conscript”
This paper is the introduction to Amira Haileab’s larger honors thesis project for AFRI 1970 with the supervision of Professors Kim Gallon and Jennifer Johnson. The project seeks to answer how The Conscript: A Novel of Libya’s Anticolonial War, by Dr. Abba Gebreyesus Hailu, understands and reimagines the Red Sea as a racialized space, and the significance of Black geography, the study of the relationship between Blackness and space, for understanding the role that the Red Sea plays in the novel. Written in 1927, published in 1950, and translated from Tigrinya to English in 2013, The Conscript is a fictional retelling of the experiences of Eritrean soldiers, known as the ascari. From 1889 to 1941, the ascari were conscripted by Italy to battle anti-colonial nationalist forces across African countries, including Sudan, Ethiopia, and Libya. The fraught journey of the ascari in The Conscript locates the region’s geography as a site of transformation, remembrance, and grief, highlighting the role that geography plays in informing identity. By analyzing two critical geographies in The Conscript — the coast and the desert — Amira’s paper works toward classifying the Red Sea as a particular lens through which the characters begin to understand their conscription and subjugation in relation to other African people.