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Announcement | Allison Levy & House of Secrets International Book Tour
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Allison Levy, the Library’s Digital Scholarship Editor and Visiting Scholar in Italian Studies at Brown, is the author of a new book, House of Secrets: The Many Lives of a Florentine Palazzo (Bloomsbury, 2019), currently being promoted through the U.S. and abroad.
The book has been well received by critics and readers. Historian Ingrid Rowland describes it as “an enthralling tour through an extraordinary Florentine palazzo, complete with romance, murder, lives of the rich and famous, and layer upon layer of history ranging from the heart of the Renaissance to yesterday. A scholarly thriller that is virtually impossible to put down.”
Allison Levy
An art historian educated at Bryn Mawr College, Allison tells the remarkable story of Palazzo Rucellai from behind its celebrated façade in House of Secrets. While staying in Florence during a teaching sabbatical, Allison had the opportunity to live in Palazzo Rucellai and learn about its history firsthand, becoming inspired to tell the stories of the real life characters who have populated the house and bring its history to life.
Upcoming tour events:
- Seattle: University of Washington Bookstore
- New Orleans: Garden District Bookstore
- Boston: Boston Public Library
- Detroit: Pages Bookshop
- Newport: Redwood Library and Athenaeum
- Providence: Books on the Square
- Washington, DC: Kramer Books
Completed tour events:
- London: Daunt Books
- Florence: Todo Modo Bookstore
- NYC: Casa Italiana-NYU (video)
- Providence: Brown University Library (video)
- Providence: Providence Athenaeum (audio)
2020
Next year, Allison will visit China to promote the book, after its translation into Chinese this year. The English paperback edition of House of Secrets will be published April 2020.
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Exhibit | Fort Thunder & Lightning Bolt: Old Mill / New Music
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From humble beginnings as a studio space rented by four RISD guys in the fall of 1995, rose the now mythic Fort Thunder collaborative, located in a dilapidated mill building on the west side of Providence. While there were other decrepit mills nearby, with funky names like Munch House, Box of Knives, & Pink Rabbit, also filled with RISD & Brown students who hosted concerts, Fort Thunder is the one that lives on in popular memory. Its young residents put Providence on the map with their unique underground art & music scene, and inadvertently inspired lasting changes in the city’s preservation community, when they fought the redevelopment of the historic property in Eagle Square that they had called home for almost 7 years.
The display features multi-media options with reproductions of Fort Thunder concert posters & handouts from the collection of Shawn Greenlee, RISD ’96, Brown MA ’03, PhD ’08, as well as recordings by some of the Fort’s bands, like Lightning Bolt & Forcefield. There are also images, maps, ephemera & photos related to the mill building (formerly the Valley Worsted Mills/American Woolen Co.) & the “Save Eagle Square” movement.
This exhibition participates in Year of the City: The Providence Project, a year-long exploration of the history, life and culture of Providence’s 25 neighborhoods through exhibitions, performances, walks, lectures and conferences produced by more than 50 different curators. https://yearofthecity.com/
Dates: April 29 – November 3, 2019
Time: Library Hours
Location: Orwig Music Library, 1 Young Orchard Avenue, Providence -
Event | Dr. Lindsey Jones: A database project on the education and incarceration of black girls in Jim Crow Virginia
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On Wednesday, May 1, 2019 at 4 p.m. in the Digital Scholarship Lab at the Rockefeller Library, Dr. Lindsey Jones will give a talk about the database she is creating about the education and incarceration of black girls in Virginia during Jim Crow.
This event is free and open to the public. A Q&A and reception will follow the talk.
Dr. Jones is collecting information about the girls who were committed to the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, the state of Virginia’s reformatory for black girls, operational between 1915 and the 1950s, after the courts across the state labeled them “delinquent.” The reformatory was designed by a statewide network of black women activists to protect and educate troubled black girls rather than punishing them for adolescent misbehaviors.
Lindsey Jones
Dr. Lindsey Jones, Presidential Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Education at Brown, is working on a book project that explores the education and incarceration of black girls in Jim Crow Virginia, focusing specifically upon the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls. As part of this project, Dr. Jones is designing a relational database to collect information about the individual girls who were committed to this reformatory.
This event is part of the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship dSalon series.
Date: Wednesday, May 1, 2019
Time: 4 p.m.
Location: Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller Library, 10 Prospect St, Providence