Summer Scholars Lunchtime Talks

Join us for two lunchtime talks.Clean Clothes and Fossil FuelsFossil fuels radically changed Americans' laundry habits between the 1920s and the 1970s. Automatic washing machines, tumble dryers, and synthetic detergents made from petroleum enabled a single worker to produce clean, dry clothes within a few hours. Yet electric appliances required oil rigs and coal mines, and the new detergents produced foaming rivers and toxic algae blooms. Julia Guarneri discusses the environmental trade-offs involved in labour-saving laundry technologies and explores how manufacturers and utility companies pushed Americans towards ever-higher resource use.Curating Toni Morrison's Random House ListIn the late 1960s and 1970s, Toni Morrison was a senior trade editor at Random House. During her time there she commissioned around fifty titles, many of which were landmark publications in their day such as fiction and memoir by African American women, the autobiographies of Angela Davis, Muhmmad Ali and Huey P. Newton, archival scrapbooks of African American history, literary anthologies of Black writing and more. Tessa Roynon describes her forthcoming project at the Library to curate a unique collection of these highly significant and beautiful books.

Join us for two lunchtime talks.Reimagining Indigenous Female PowerCarmen Ávila reflects on the creative and research process behind her historical novel The Fall of the Rain Kingdoms, inspired by the life of the Indigenous Mexican ruler Lady Six Monkey which took place during the 11th century and was depicted on pre-Hispanic codices. Through this work, Ávila examines the intersections of memory, female power, and literary imagination and combines historical reconstruction with speculative and feminist storytelling to recover the voices of Indigenous women erased from dominant history.From Battlefield to ClassroomDinos Pappas explores how education became a central tool of U.S. federal policy toward Native Americans, from 19th-century assimilation campaigns to later movements for self-determination. Drawing on our holdings, he considers government reports, Indian school materials, reform literature and Native student writing and explores how schooling was used to reshape Native identity and how Native communities challenged, adapted and reclaimed education as a space of cultural survival and sovereignty.

Join us for two lunchtime talks.From Page to Stage, The Rediscovery of the Music of Gilda RutaOn the shelves of the Library lie hidden musicological treasures – the compositions for voice and piano by Italian-born Gilda Ruta. Once a lauded composer whose music was played in Carnegie Hall, Ruta has since fallen into obscurity and her music has gone silent. Through the magic of research and performance, Malinda Haslett brings her music back to life as part of Summer Scholars.Afro-Indigenous Brazilian objects in British Museums and LibrariesIn her doctoral research, Luisa Karman explores the link between British imperialism and knowledge production that both propelled and were fed by extractivist practices on a global scale, leaving traces in institutions such as museums and libraries. In this talk she considers the context around objects sent from 1850s Bahia (Northeast Brazil) to the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens by British Vice-Consul James Wetherell and discusses the posthumous publication of his diaries and related first-hand accounts of British officers, botanists and traders held at the British Library. She also shares the research guide she produced as part of her PhD Placement at the Library, focusing on items pertaining to Afro-Brazilian religions in our collection.

Join us for two lunchtime talks.Bringing Edward S. Curtis and 'The North American Indian' into focusFor a little over a century, critics and collectors alike accused Edward S. Curtis of staging and romanticising his photographic images of the North American Indian. Donna Morrow shares stories about Curtis and his travels, explains where these images reside and what Native Americans think of his work today, and talks about the descendants of some of the people he photographed as well as Curtis’ own family.Tractable Conversations: Indigenous Language Lists in Early Modern TextsIn the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European writers mapped the world through text, producing a wealth of letters, narratives, and diaries. They also began to map the linguistic world, with travellers producing language lists which transliterated Indigenous languages into European alphabets for dissemination. Emily Stevenson examines examples of early modern North American Indigenous language lists to consider both the role that they played as ideological tools in the colonisation of North America, and how they simultaneously used Indigeneity to create stable concepts of European nationhood.

Join us for two lunchtime talks.Jumbie Dance – Writings of ResistanceIn researching the slave history of Montserrat, it is not surprising to note that the African spiritual practices of the island in the 18th to 20th centuries have been systematically and deliberately erased, ensuring that only the Eurocentric religious practices remained intact. Montserrat has suffered further, from migration in the 1950s to a brain-drain in the 1980s and more recently the evacuation and displacement of at least 8,000 people due to volcanic eruption of 1995. Yvonne Weekes gives voice to a culture which has slowly been erased and excavates the Montserrat Jumbie Dance through essays and poems.Dance and American Folk DramaIn the early twentieth century, many American theatre-makers looked to dance and ritual as ways of creating a distinctly American folk drama. They were inspired in part by European experiments in poetic and dance drama, but also by ideas about Native American performance, which they often treated as a source of authentic connection to place. At the same time, Native communities were being restricted in their own ceremonial practices, revealing a deep contradiction at the heart of this search for national theatrical form. Daniel Ibrahim Abdalla explores the diverse ways in which American theatre drew on Indigenous dance as both an artistic model and a cultural fantasy.