Brown University Library News

The Library and the Cogut Center for the Humanities are pleased to welcome Laura Mandell, Professor of English and Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture at Texas A&M University, who will present a talk entitled, “Whither the Scholarly Monograph,” at 3 p.m. on Friday, October 2, 2015 in the Digital Scholarship Lab on the first floor of the Rockefeller Library. The talk will be followed by a question and answer period along with a reception in the DSL.

Laura Mandell is Professor of English and Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (2015), Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), a Longman Cultural Edition of The Castle of Otranto and Man of Feeling, and numerous articles primarily about eighteenth-century women writers. An article in New Literary History, “What Is the Matter? What Literary History Neither Hears Nor Sees,” describes how digital work can be used to conduct research into conceptions informing the writing and printing of eighteenth-century poetry. She is Project Director of the Poetess Archive, an online scholarly edition and database of women poets, 1750-1900, Director of 18thConnect, and Director of ARC, the Advanced Research Consortium, overseeing NINES, 18thConnect, and MESA.

Her current research involves developing new methods for visualizing poetry, developing software that will allow all scholars to deep-code documents for data-mining, and improving OCR software for early modern and 18th-c. texts via high performance and cluster computing.

Professor Mandell’s talk is co-sponsored by the Cogut Center for the Humanities and the Brown University Library’s lecture series, New Directions in Scholarly Publishing and the Challenges of Evaluation.

Christopher Geissler has been appointed the Director of the John Hay Library and Special Collections. Christopher will begin this new role effective September 21, 2015.

Christopher has held two previous positions at Brown: first as Project Archivist in the University Archives and more recently as Librarian for American and British Literary and Popular Culture Collections. In addition, Christopher has held positions at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Library in Williamstown, MA, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Christopher earned degrees in American Studies at Yale University (B.A., M.A., M.Phil.) and received a Masters in Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Drawn from the collections of Brown University Library, the exhibit investigates the poetic work of men and women incarcerated in the United States in the last decades of the twentieth-century. It is an open-ended examination of the challenges and potential for communication across the socio-economic divide engendered by mass incarceration.

Online exhibit: Poetry from the Age of Mass Incarceration

Dates: September 21, 2015 – January 4, 2016
Time: Open to the public 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Monday through Friday
Location: Willis Reading Room Gallery, John Hay Library, 20 Prospect Street, Providence