The International Committee of the GSLIS ALA Student Chapter will be hosting a panel discussion, “Libraries Under Siege: Censorship, Access, and Endurance in the Middle East” this Friday, February 7th, 2014. Kathryn La Barre, a GSLIS faculty member, will be moderating the event. According to the event page on the GSLIS website:

“This panel discussion will focus on the role of Middle Eastern libraries in environments fraught with civil unrest and military conflict. The participants will discuss censorship, access, power and politics in Syrian, Lebanese, and Egyptian institutions.”

Panelists will include Inaam Charaf, Randa Chidiac, and Laila Hussein Moustafa. Read more about this event and the panelists from the GSLIS newsroom.

The discussion will take place from 10:00am-11:30am in LIS 126 and is a joint on-campus/virtual event. To join the event virtually, visit this webpage.

Chinua Achebe, the renowned novelist, poet, and author of the novel, ‘Things Fall Apart‘ has passed on at the age of 82 on March 22nd at a hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

Premium Times reports that Professor Achebe had been suffering from an undisclosed ailment for some time.

He was the author of some highly influential books including Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease, Anthills of the Savannah, and A Man of the People and received several international awards for his works. His latest book, ‘There Was a Country‘, was an autobiography on his experiences and views of the civil war.

Until his death, he was the David and Mariana Fisher Professor of Literature at Brown University.

For books at the Literatures and Languages Library by Chinua Achebe click here, and for books about Chinua Achebe click here.

Two hundred and eleven years ago today, French poet, novelist, and dramatist Victor Hugo was born. Known today as one of the most important French Romantic writers, Hugo was a significant contributor to the early development of the Romantic period. Although most well-known in France for his poetry, Hugo’s novels, particularly Les Miserables and Notre-Dame de Paris (known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame in English), continue to be internationally known and studied. Scholars divide Hugo’s work into three periods: the first consists of lyrical works, such as odes and other romantic poetry; the second addresses political concerns and social conditions, as is exemplified in Les Miserables; and the third and final period of Hugo’s career focuses on mysticism and poetic vision as the basis for his poetic work. In addition to writing poetry and novels, Hugo became deeply involved in politics at a time when France was experiencing political turmoil. Hugo’s liberal, anti-Napoleonic views led to his exile for a brief time, although upon his return he served on the French National Assembly and Senate. Hugo’s death was nationally mourned; he was viewed as both an important literary figure as well as a political leader instrumental in shaping a democratic republic in France.

Visit the Literatures and Languages Library to discover books by and about Victor Hugo.

“The Future of Authorship” Panel (Brown Bag Lunch)

Date: February 22, 2013

Time: 12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Location: IPRH, Humanities Lecture Hall

About the event:

This panel will examine recently developed forms of scholarly communication, focusing on the ways scholars now create knowledge and communicate their findings to a range of audiences using innovative digital platforms and tools for conducting research, writing, and publishing. The aim of this panel is to explore the intellectual advances afforded by new modes of authorship, peer review, and publishing. Please join us for a panel discussion featuring the following speakers:

Nicholas Mirzoeff (Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU)

Kevin Hamilton (Art + Design; IPRH Coordinator of Digital Scholarly Communication)

Eduardo Ledesma (Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese)

Jodee Stanley (Editor, Ninth Letter)

Please bring your lunch. Cookies and beverages will be provided.

About the UIUC speakers:

Kevin Hamilton is an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design, where he has served in the New Media and Painting Programs since 2002. He also holds appointments in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, the Center for Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security, and is co-Director of the Center for People and Infrastructures at the Coordinated Science Laboratory. Kevin’s primary research lies in historical and theoretical work on the history of interface representations in mediated violence, with a special emphasis on government-produced films related to nuclear weapons development. Kevin’s work as an educator is focused on integration of practice-based and theoretical approaches to understanding technological mediation. This work includes the direction of “Learning to See Systems,” a new interdisciplinary graduate study track that will begin in Fall of 2013. Kevin Hamilton will serve as the Coordinator of Digital Scholarly Communication to direct the IPRH’s future involvement as a Scalar institutional partner, which will begin in Fall of 2013.

Eduardo Ledesma is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches Luso-Hispanic literature, film and new media. He received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University (2012) and holds advanced degrees in both structural engineering and Hispanic literature. His research focuses on avant-garde and experimental forms across different media. Currently he is working on several projects dealing with the confluence of experimental film, poetry and digital media.

Jodee Stanley is the editor of Ninth Letter, the award-winning literary/arts journal published by UIUC’s MFA in Creative Writing Program in collaboration with the School of Art + Design. Jodee supervises the graduate literary publishing practicum and also teaches editing at the undergraduate level. She has worked in literary publishing for twenty years and has been a speaker and panelist at various conferences and festivals. In 2009, she was awarded an Academic Professional Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIUC, and she received a 2007 Faculty Fellowship from the University of Illinois Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Her fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in several publications including Crab Orchard Review, Mississippi Review, Hobart, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She is currently co-editing an anthology of Midwest Gothic fiction.

Date: February 27, 2013
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: IPRH, Humanities Lecture Hall

This event is free and open to the public.

This event features members of the U of I Creative Writing faculty reading from their soon-to-be-published works. Professor LeAnne Howe will be reading from “An American Indian in Japan,” a creative non-fiction story about her travels throughout Japan during the 1993 International Year of Indigenous People. The story is forthcoming in Choctalking on Other Realities, New and Selected Stories, Aunt Lute Books, 2013. Professor Audrey Petty will be reading from High Rise Stories, forthcoming in McSweeney’s Voice of Witness book series (summer 2013), for which she interviewed former residents of the Chicago housing projects Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes, among others, for their firsthand accounts of Chicago public housing. Each author will read a selection, chosen for its particular significance to the author and her primary creative intention(s). After the authors have finished reading, Professor Robert Ramirez will lead a discussion of the role of memory and memoir in the humanities more broadly, and we will open the floor for discussion with the audience.

Interested in the digital humanities? Take the “Introduction to TEI” workshop at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and learn about one of the most important elements of digital humanities research, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup language. Spend a weekend learning the fundamentals of using XML for research, teaching, electronic publishing, and management of digital text collections. This hands-on workshop will be taught by Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman, experts from Brown University. Over the course of two and a half days, participants will learn how to work with XML technologies to develop digital representations of texts using the TEI standard. The workshop will take place in the LIS building on the UIUC campus, beginning Friday, February 22 and ending Sunday, February 24, 2013.

American writer Joyce Carol Oates turns 74 today. From her first book – the collection of stories By the North Gate – to her most recent novels, stories, memoir and other pieces of writing, Oates has maintained a daunting literary output that is yet accessible and diverse.

Oates’s body of work includes short story collections (among the most comprehensive are The Wheel of Love, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, and High Lonesome), collections of poetry, drama, and criticism, works for children and young adults, and even a number of works authored under pseudonyms (mysteries written as “Lauren Kelly” and “Rosamond Smith,” and stories written in the persona of the fictitious Portuguese writer Fernandes). Perhaps her most celebrated works, though, are her novels, which range from lengthy portraits of American life such as them, What I Lived For, We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and The Falls, to harrowing and brutal novellas including Black Water, Zombie, and Beasts. Her most recent work is the novel Mudwoman; forthcoming (among other books) is another novel, Carthage.

Frequent themes of Oates’s work include violence and the development of young lives: many of her works could be described as bildungsromans. Oates also writes frequently about the tensions of academic life (in novels such as Unholy Loves, Marya, and the recent Mudwoman), and she has even written several novels in a Gothic tradition, such as Bellefleur.

Oates has discussed her interest in “the phantasmagoria of personality,” and often disclaims autobiographical context in her fictional work (one exception that she’s pointed out is the appearance of her family and herself as a child in the novel Wonderland). However, Oates has written several works of a more personal nature, particularly the recent memoir A Widow’s Story, which discusses her life in the wake of the death of her husband Raymond Smith, with whom she founded the Ontario Review.

Greg Johnson’s biography Invisible Writer is a candid portrait of Oates’s life and work up to 1998. The Library has many of Oates’s works and criticism discussing Oates’s writing.

Here are more links discussing Oates’s life and work:

• Celestial Timepiece, a comprehensive site discussing Oates’s work
• Oates’s faculty homepage at Princeton
• Scholarly criticism of Oates’s work from the MLA International Bibliography
• “Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again,” an article from Smithsonian Magazine
• An in-depth 1978 interview with Oates from the Paris Review
• A recent article from Inside Higher Ed discussing Mudwoman‘s treatment of the role of women in academic life

AP Photo/Rick Maiman, File

Carlos Fuentes, a prominent Mexican intellectual and writer, passed away last Tuesday at the age of 83.  He authored a wide variety of works, including plays, short stories, political nonfiction, novels, and even an opera. He stood as a leading writer in the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s. He was friends with many of the other well-known Latin American writers, including Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Several major news sources have posted obituaries, including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the CS Monitor. The CS Monitor’s coverage is of particular interest, as the paper has posted a tribute from the Associated Press that is derived from interviews late in the author’s life. Photos from his wake at the Art Palace are posted online as well.

Some of his most acclaimed works are The Old Gringo, Where the Air is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz, and Terra Nostra. The library holds several of his works, both in Spanish and in English translation, as well as a variety of commentaries about Fuentes and his works.

Michel Hazanavicius’s recent film The Artist has garnered acclaim from critics and audiences for, among other things, carrying the tradition of silent film forward into the 21st century. While contemporary silent films are uncommon, this area is crucial to film history.

Several groups and individuals are working steadily to preserve and promote silent films. The Film Foundation, founded by director Martin Scorsese, is one such organization. Film preservationist Kevin Brownlow has also dedicated his career to preserving the silent film legacy; one of Brownlow’s most ambitious projects has been the restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoleon, a new version of which has recently been re-released in California to much acclaim. Brownlow’s books, such as The Parade’s Gone By, also provide an interesting overview of this era in film history.

Some other contemporary silent films, like The Artist, include Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! and the H.P. Lovecraft adaptation The Call of Cthulhu. Other films made in the sound era also pay tribute to the unique nature of silent film: Jacques Tati’s celebrated comedies such as Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and Playtime rely heavily on physical comedy of a primarily visual form, and classics including Singin’ in the Rain and Sunset Boulevard reflect on the legacy of the transition from silent film to sound.

UIUC’s Library holds many resources of interest for anyone who’d like to learn more about silent film. The online catalog lists over 500 silent titles on video and DVD, and the Library acquires new titles of this sort all the time: for example Wings (other than The Artist, the only silent film to have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards), or the famous French serial Les Vampires.

Works on early cinema (including silent film) can generally be found in LOC classification under PN1995.75, and a subject search for “Silent films – history and criticism” also yields many titles of interest. Searching in International Index to Film Periodicals for “Silent Cinema” as subject, or in International Index to Performing Arts for “Silent films” as subject, can also lead you to scholarly articles on the field in general.

The Media History Digital Library offers a wealth of primary sources: this collection of digitized film magazines from the early 20th century provides an invaluable glimpse at film culture in the pre-sound era.