[Providence, RI] Brown University Digital Publications has launched the multimodal edition of Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning, the second title in the On Seeing series published by the MIT Press. Authored by Kimberly Juanita Brown, inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College, Black Elegies is a poignant, unflinching study of black grief as a form of elegy found in visual art, music, literature — everywhere, if you know how to see it.

The book, which Michael Boyce Gillespie praises as “stunningly beautiful and rigorous work,” includes analysis of major figures Toni Morrison, Carrie Mae Weems, Audre Lorde, and Marvin Gaye, among others. The multimodal edition offers readers a Community Engagement Toolkit, a guide to having open conversations about antiblackness, visual culture, and death.

Publications in the On Seeing series foreground the political agency, critical insight, and social impact inscribed in visuality and representation. The MIT Press will publish each On Seeing volume as a print book, ebook, and open access multimodal edition created by Brown University Digital Publications.

With Black Elegies, BUDP extends its focus on innovation, and offers a pathway to affordable and sustainable creation of born-digital scholarly monographs. Senior Library Technologist and BUDP staff member Holiday Shapiro developed Black Elegies using an original WordPress theme created by long-term external collaborator Jake Camara of Jake & Co. This cost-effective, in-house approach to scholarly publishing platform development also draws on the expertise of colleagues in the Library’s Digital Technologies unit. Further, the new release carries forward the design work of Crystal Brusch, BUDP Digital Publications Designer, and Yasuyo Iguchi, Design Manager at The MIT Press.  

Brown University Digital Publications — generously launched with support from the Mellon Foundation in 2015 with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services — creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge by advancing scholarly arguments in ways not achievable in a conventional print format, whether through multimedia enhancements or interactive engagement with research materials. Brown partners with leading scholarly presses to bring peer reviewed, open access, multimodal content to global audiences. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s novel, library-based approach to born-digital monograph publishing is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age.