Special Collections News

Step right up for a look behind the curtain at the shows that once dazzled American audiences in a new exhibit at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. “Under the Big Top: The American Circus and Traveling Tent Shows,” opens to the public on Friday, Jan. 18 at the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries.

The Russell B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies is proud to host the exhibit “Education of the Negro: a depression era photographic study by Horace Mann Bond” featuring over eighty photos from Bond’s field study of black student achievement. Opening on January 18, 2019, in the Harrison Feature Gallery at the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries, the exhibition, curated by Gallery L1, Atlanta, offers a glimpse into the lives of African American children in the 1930s.

In accordance with the University's late opening on Tuesday, Dec 11th, due to possible bad weather, the UGA Libraries will be opening at 10:00 a.m. 

Happy Thanksgiving! 

The Russell Special Collections Libraries will be closed Thursday and Friday in observance of Thanksgiving. We will be closed Saturday for the home football game vs Ga Tech. 

We will resume our regular hours Monday, Nov. 26 8 am - 5 pm Monday through Friday and Saturdays 1-5 pm. 

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the UGA Libraries are joining forces with the English Department to offer a host of Frankenstein related activities in the month of October. The Frankenreads events are part of an international celebration organized by the Keats-Shelley Association of America.

On Halloween, Wednesday October 31st our Frankenread will begin in UGA’s Main Library at 8am and continue until 6pm. In the spirit of the novel’s multiple voices, readers will be drawn from across the campus and the larger Athens community. The Frankenread will be accompanied by a slideshow of images drawn from popular culture and curated by Dr. Christopher Pizzino (UGA English).

Patricia Cahill will deliver the 2018 Symposium on the Book’s plenary talk, entitled “Archival Homeplaces: Shakespeare and African American Performance in the Early Twentieth Century.”

Cahill is associate professor of English at Emory University, where she specializes in Shakespeare and early modern literature, especially drama. She is the author of Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (OUP, 2008). She has also published articles and book chapters on such subjects as military technology and mathematics, animal matter and affect theory, and the senses in performance. She is currently working on two projects: a book that examines the affective dynamics of early modern stage properties, especially animal skins, and a study of Black Shakespeare and the Jim Crow South.

The Russell Library will cover new territory this October when the installation "WE: American Thanksgiving Conflict and Communion" opens on Monday, October 29, 2018, in the Harrison Feature Gallery of the Richard B. Russell Special Collection Library. Created by local sculptor and potter Micaela Hobbs, in collaboration with painter Jennifer Niswonger, the exhibit examines the history of the United States through the lens of the Thanksgiving dinner table. 

The 2018 Georgia Writers Hall of Fame events will begin Nov. 4 with a panel discussion of a new book on the late novelist Pat Conroy.

Published by the University of Georgia Press, Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy is a collection of stories from fellow writers he nurtured, including Grammy winners, National Book Award winners, James Beard Foundation winners and New York Times best-sellers, along with a cadre of friends and family members. At 3 p.m. contributors Terry Kay, Cynthia Graubart, and Cliff Graubart will participate in the discussion moderated by the book's editor Jonathan Haupt.

Conroy was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2004.

Pulitzer-prize winner Hank Klibanoff is the featured speaker Sept. 25 at the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Lillian Smith Book Awards.

This celebration will commemorate a half-century tradition, currently a collaboration of the Southern Regional Council, the University of Georgia Libraries, Piedmont college, and the Georgia Center for the Book, of recognizing authors whose books represent outstanding achievements demonstrating through high literary merit and moral vision an honest representation of the South, its people, its problems, and its promise.

The program, open free to the public, begins at 6:30 p.m. at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. A reception will follow.

The 2018 Lillian Smith Book Awards were presented Sunday, Sept. 2, to James Forman Jr and Nancy MacLean at the Decatur Book Festival. 

Forman’s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America examines how mass incarceration, which affects people of color disproportionately, stems from the war on crime that began in the 1970s and was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers. He is shown being congratulated by UGA University Librarian Toby Graham, right.