Brown University Library News

The University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, together with the Digital Publications Faculty Advisory Committee, are pleased to announce the selection of the next scholarly work to be developed by Brown University Digital Publications.

Rehearsal Is at Dawn by Professor of Literary Arts Eleni Sikelianos is a multivalent, multimodal ancestral encounter that reaches into realms of Sapphic translation, activism, performance of antiquity, queer histories, and utopian politics. In 1901, Sikelianos’s great grandmother, Eva Palmer, moved from New York to Paris with her lover, the writer, instigator, and socialite Natalie Barney. The two Americans became the center of a wild tangle of lesbian love affairs and backyard performances that reimagined Sappho’s work and life. 

They and their circle of friends saw in the ancient past the possibility for sexual and artistic emancipation, especially for lesbian women. Eva became obsessed with draping, first using her hair, then fabricating cloth that mimicked the dresses she saw on ancient pottery, performing the past on her own body. 

In her second act, Eva moved to Greece and, with the poet Angelos Sikelianos, staged two boundary-shattering festivals in 1927 and 1930 — site-specific installations that revived the Delphic theater and changed the shape of Modern Greek culture. At the juncture between two world wars, the couple believed that the Delphic Idea would bring nations and people together, with artistic practices providing the tools to resist not only mechanized economies but, later, fascism. Their activities were sacred rehearsals for utopia. As a media-rich born-digital publication, Rehearsal Is at Dawn, with its dynamic weave of artefacts, archives, and artists, entangles past, present, and future.

Brown University Digital Publications

A collaboration between the University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, launched with generous support from the Mellon Foundation and further supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Brown University Digital Publications creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s novel, university-based approach to digital content development is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age.

Enhanced Digital Works

Projects that are selected by the program’s Faculty Advisory Committee are developed as enhanced digital works that draw on the capabilities of the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship. These scholarly works are then submitted to leading university presses that have corresponding academic interests and the infrastructure for peer review and digital publication.

Published Works

The previously published born-digital scholarly works developed by Brown University Digital Publications are 

• Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary, by Tara Nummedal, Professor of History, and Donna Bilak, Independent Scholar, which was awarded the 2023 Roy Rosenzweig Prize in Creativity in Digital History by the American Historical Association; 
• Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World, by Massimo Riva, Professor of Italian Studies, which was the category winner in eProduct for the 47th Annual PROSE Awards juried by the Association of American Publishers; and a finalist for the 2024 American Council of Learned Societies Open Access Book Prize; and
• A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures, by Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities, which was shortlisted for the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan International Book Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy.

Works in Development

Fourteen other faculty publication projects are currently in development: 

• The Sensory Monastery: Saint-Jean-des-Vignes co-authored by Sheila Bonde, Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Archaeology, and Clark Maines, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Wesleyan University; 
• Standing Still Moving: Arts of Gesture in Lateral Time by Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Modern Culture and Media; 
• Chika Sagawa, Japanese Modernist Poet by Sawako Nakayasu, Assistant Professor of Literary Arts;
• Travels in Search of the Slave Past: Monuments, Memorials, Sites of Slavery by Renée Ater, Provost’s Visiting Professor of Africana Studies; 
• Imperial Unsettling: Indigenous and Immigrant Activism Toward Collective Liberation by Kevin Escudero, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies;
• Art, Secrecy, and Invisibility in Ancient Egypt by Laurel Bestock, Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World & Egyptology and Assyriology;
• Trojan Women in Performance by Avery Willis Hoffman, Inaugural Artistic Director, Brown Arts Institute, Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics; 
• The Ruin Archive: Art and War at the Ends of Empire by Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, Associate Professor of History; 
• Border Assemblages: Re-collecting Moria by Yannis Hamilakis, Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies; 
• Going through the Motions: Animations of Black Being in the Breaks by Rebecca Louise Carter, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies; 
• In Networked and Programmable Media: Language Art with Personal Computation by John Cayley, Professor of Literary Arts; 
• The Chisolm Massacre: Reconstruction and the Politics of Violence by Christopher Grasso, Professor of History;
• Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism and Postfascism in the Marshes by Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies (forthcoming from Fordham University Press); and
• Articulations: Dancing across Modernities by Michelle Clayton, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature.

Brown University Digital Projects

In addition, Brown University Digital Publications has produced University projects such as the revised and expanded edition of Brown’s Slavery and Justice Report and the 13-volume Race &…in America digital series. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Brown University Library has established and administered (2022, 2024) a training institute, Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing: Resources and Roadmaps, designed for scholars who wish to develop innovative born-digital publications but may lack the necessary resources and capacity at their home institutions. A grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program establishes a cross-organizational training and support program, with the HBCU Library Alliance and University of Michigan Press, for HBCU library professionals seeking to gain or expand expertise in developing open access born-digital scholarship. BUDP also partners with the MIT Press on a multimodal book series, On Seeing, that explores under-examined questions in visual culture and includes an innovative community engagement toolkit. 

Contact

To learn more about Brown University Digital Publications, contact Director Allison Levy (allison_levy@brown.edu).