Category Archives: Events

Admitted Students visit Bryn Mawr College Special Collections

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Bryn Mawr College Special Collections is proud to be part of the community offering campus wide activities for admitted students who will begin their Mawter lives in the Fall. Over the past few weeks we have welcomed dozens of students and their families into the Special Collections Reading Room on the Second Floor of Canaday Library.

As part of the active program of events at Bryn Mawr College, Special Collections staff and student workers spoke with admitted students and their families about the holdings we have spanning the College Archives, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection and the Art and Artifacts Collection.

Treasures on show include old scrapbooks from students in the early twentieth century, illuminated manuscripts of Chaucer’s collected works, first editions of novels by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and Asian and African art. These are a small selection of the wonderful pieces we have in our collections, and if you would like to know more about our holdings visit the Special Collections website here

If you have not yet visited with your family, this is the last week of our admitted students activities so please make sure you come along!

 

All images courtesy of Marianne Weldon, Collections Manager, Art and Artifact Collections

“Double Take” exhibition extended; gallery talk scheduled

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Double Take: Selected Views from the Photography Collection at Bryn Mawr College, 1860s-present

Exhibition hours: Monday through Friday, noon to 4:30 pm
Through February 17, 2012
Rare Book Room, Canaday Library

Gallery talk
5 pm, Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Rare Book Room, Canaday Library

Zoe Strauss, Philadelphia, PA (Melissa’s Handstand), 2004, color inkjet print; Gift of Robert and Marianne Weldon (2010.35.2)

Bryn Mawr College’s exhibition Double Take: Selected Views from the Photography Collection at Bryn Mawr College, 1867-2009 has been extended through February 17, 2012. Culminating, chronologically, with a group of recent photographs by Philadelphia’s Zoe Strauss, the subject of a current exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition spans nearly the entire history of the photographic medium, presenting a wide variety of works in unexpected pairings and groupings.

Exhibition curator Carrie Robbins and exhibition intern Nathanael Roesch—both graduate students in history of art at Bryn Mawr—will engage in an informal discussion of the exhibition at 5 pm on Wednesday, February 15, 2012, addressing the Bryn Mawr photography collection as well as the manner in which this exhibition was conceived, selected, and installed. Brian Wallace, Bryn Mawr’s new Curator and Academic Liaison for Art and Artifacts, will introduce Robbins and Roesch.

More information on, and selected images from, the exhibition may be found at http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/double_take_exhibition.html.

The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education announces its first undergraduate essay competition!

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Want to win $500? Got something to say about studying at a women’s college? Then enter the inaugural undergraduate essay competition for a chance to express your views and win a prize!

Bryn Mawr College was recently awarded funding from The Albert M. Greenfield Foundation to initiate an exciting new venture in digital humanities – the launching of the Digital Center for the History of Women and Higher Education. The Digital Center will comprise of an online portal to promote and support original research, teaching, and the exchange of ideas about the history of women’s education, both in the United States and worldwide.

Given recent media attention to the issue of single sex-education (see President McAuliffe’s recent piece in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/10/17/single-sex-schools-separate-but-equal/bucking-the-trend-at-womens-colleges) we want to hear what current students think about the impact of studying and living at a women’s college in the twenty-first century. Does it matter whether an institution is single-sex or co-ed? What is the impact for young women attending a single-sex college? What do you think is the future? We want to know!

So, for this competition we invite you to address the following topic in 1,000 words or less:

‘Why single sex education matters today’

Agree? Disagree? Have a persuasive argument either way? Write it down and be in to win.

The winner will receive a $500 cash prize, kindly sponsored by Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library, and the winning entry will be posted on The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center’s website. The deadline is Friday 27th January 2012 and all entries should be emailed to me, the Director, at jredmond@brynmawr.edu

This competition is open to current undergraduates of Bryn Mawr College only, but please check back for alum related events and get in touch if you are an alum with an idea for the Digital Center

Get involved! Have your say!

Learn more about the Greenfield Digital Center on the History of Women’s Education at http://greenfield.brynmawr.edu/.

National Library of Korea Rare Book Specialists Visit Bryn Mawr

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Two Rare Book Specialists from the National Library of Korea spent the day in the Bryn Mawr Special Collections on Wednesday, November 2nd examining and photographing 50 rare Korean books.  Hye-Eun Lee and Ji-Hee Han were spending the week in the United States to work on the Korean collections at Princeton and Bryn Mawr, and were accompanied to Bryn Mawr by Hyoungbae Lee, the Korean Studies Librarian at Princeton.   Bryn Mawr acquired its Korean book collection through a bequest in 1950 from Helen Burwell Chapin, Class of 1915.  Chapin was an expert in Asian art, and spent many years in China, Japan and Korea studying and collecting books, scrolls, and other art works.

Ji-Hee Han and Hye-Eun Lee of the National Library of Korea discuss Bryn Mawr's Korean books with Hyoungbae Lee, Korean Studies Librarian at Princeton

Even though Bryn Mawr’s Korean book collection is a small one, many of the books were printed with metal-cast type, a format reserved for important publications, often ones connected with the royal family.   A number of the books are quite early, including a 16th century collection of Buddhist sutras, and many of them contain illustrations, including a record of the ceremonies performed for the 80th birthday of Korea’s Dowager Queen in 1885.

Illustration from 16th century Korean book of Buddhist Sutras

Hye-Eun Lee and Ji-Hee Han are cataloging and doing further research on the books at Bryn Mawr, and will add information about Bryn Mawr’s holdings to the National Library of Korea’s catalogue of rare books.

The National Library of Korea’s interest in the books came about as the result of a larger project focusing on cataloging the Helen Chapin collections of Chinese,  Japanese and Korean books and scrolls.   The project is being supported by a gift from Bryn Mawr alumna Maxine de Schauensee Lewis ’57.

Illustration of a dance performed for the birthday celebration of the Korean Queen Mother, 1885