Upcoming Events: December 2023

Please join us for the following public events and exhibits being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:

Thursday, December 7 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: “Desire, Anxiety, Shame: Transatlantic (Re)Mediations and ‘Italian Culture'” by Loredana Polezzi (Stony Brook University).


The exhibition Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States is now open and will run through the fall semester.

Tours of the exhibit may also be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Rachel Bohlmann at (574) 631-1575 or Rachel.Bohlmann.2@nd.edu.


The December spotlight exhibits are Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (August – December 2023) and TBD (December 2023 – November 2024).

Rare Books and Special Collections will be closed for Notre Dame’s Christmas and New Year’s Break
(December 22, 2023, through January 1, 2024).

We otherwise remain open for our regular hours during Reading Days and Exams, and welcome those looking for a quiet place to study.

Upcoming Events: November 2023

Please join us for the following public events and exhibits being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:

Thursday, November 2 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: “The Dilemmas of Friendship in Dante’s Italy” by Elizabeth Coggeshall (Florida State).

Thursday, November 9 at 5:00pm | Book Presentation: La vita dell’altro. Svevo, Joyce: Un’amicizia geniale by Enrico Terrinoni (Affiliate of the Center for Italian Studies). Terrinoni will be joined by Sara Boezio, Charles Leavitt, and Clíona Ní Ríordáin for a roundtable discussion of his book. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies.

Thursday, November 30 at 4:30pm | Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States: A Panel Discussion.

A tour of Hesburgh Libraries’ Fall 2023 exhibition, Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States, precedes the panel discussion (4:30 – 5:00pm). A reception will follow the panel discussion, in the Hesburgh Libraries Scholar’s Lounge.

Free and open to the public; no tickets required.


The exhibition Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States is now open and will run through the fall semester.

A curator-led tour, open to the public, will be held noon–1:00pm on the following upcoming Friday: November 17. Tours of the exhibit may also be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Rachel Bohlmann at (574) 631-1575 or Rachel.Bohlmann.2@nd.edu.


The November spotlight exhibits are Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (August – December 2023) and Path to Sainthood: Brother Columba O’Neill (October – November 2023).

RBSC will be closed during the University of Notre Dame’s Thanksgiving Break, November 23 – 24.

Upcoming Events: October 2023

Please join us for the following public events and exhibits being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:

Thursday, October 5 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: “The Archival Turn and Network Approach: Examining Evolving Translation Practices and Discourses in the British Publishing Firm Complex, 1950s-1980s” by Daniela La Penna (University of Reading, UK).

Thursday, October 24 at 5:00pm | McBrien Special Collections Lecture Series: “Chief O’Neill in Ten Tunes” by Dr. Seán Doherty (Dublin City University).

Captain Francis O’Neill’s collection 1001 Gems: The Dance Music of Ireland (1907) is so important to the world of Irish traditional music that it’s sometimes called the Bible or simply, ‘The Book’. Starting as a pandemic project, the Irish composer and musicologist Seán Doherty analyzed all 1001 tunes in this influential collection. In this lecture and performance, Seán will discuss the music along with O’Neill’s biography and will play tunes linked to key moments in Chief O’Neill’s life.

Captain O’Neill donated his personal library to the University of Notre Dame, where it is held at the Hesburgh Library. Dr. Doherty’s research visit is supported by the Keough-Naughton Library Research Award in Irish Studies.


The exhibition Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States is now open and will run through the fall semester.

Curator-led tours, open to the public, will be held noon–1:00pm on the following upcoming Fridays: October 13 and 27 [tour on 10/27 cancelled], and November 17.

Tours of the exhibit may also be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Rachel Bohlmann at (574) 631-1575 or Rachel.Bohlmann.2@nd.edu.


The October spotlight exhibits are Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (August – December 2023) and Path to Sainthood: Brother Columba O’Neill (October – November 2023).

RBSC will be open regular hours (9:30am – 4:30pm) during the University of Notre Dame’s Fall Break, October 16 – 20.

Welcome Back! Fall 2023 in Special Collections

Rare Books and Special Collections welcomes students, faculty, staff, researchers, and visitors back to campus for Fall ’23! We want to let you know about a variety of things to watch for in the coming semester.

Dublin Walking Tour

This week thousands of supporters of Notre Dame’s football team will travel to Ireland for the Aer Lingus Classic. The Hesburgh Libraries has developed a multimedia walk in Dublin’s city center that connects stories of our library collection with the streets and buildings along the way.

Learn more and access the app
in last week’s blog post.

Fall 2023 Exhibition: Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States

This exhibition explores the fraught, circuitous and unfinished course of emancipation over the nineteenth century in Cuba and the United States. People—enslaved individuals and outside observers, survivors and resistors, and activists and conspirators—made and unmade emancipation, a process that remains unfinished and unrealized.

Curator-led tours are open to the public, noon – 1 pm on the following Fridays: September 1, 15 and 22; October 13 and 27 [tour on 100/27 cancelled], and November 17. Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Rachel Bohlmann at (574) 631-1575 or Rachel.Bohlmann.2@nd.edu.

Curated by Erika Hosselkus, Latin American Studies Curator and Associate University Librarian, and Rachel Bohlmann, Curator of North Americana.

Stop in regularly to see our Collections Spotlights

Fall Spotlight: Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities

This exhibit features a selection of sources from the Joyce Sports Research Collection that document and preserve the history of football at Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs). During the era of Jim Crow segregation, the vast majority of African American college students and student athletes attended HBCUs.

Many of the yearly gridiron contests between rival institutions developed into highly anticipated annual events that combined football with larger celebrations of African American achievement and excellence. The programs, media guides, ephemera, guidebooks, and other printed material on display document the athletic accomplishments, the celebrations, the spectacle, and the community-building that accompany football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Curated by Greg Bond, Curator of the Joyce Sports Research Collection and the Sports Subject Specialist for Hesburgh Libraries.

August-September Spotlight: Centering African American Writing in American Literature

Author photos and bios from the back cover of Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad’s Scottsboro Boy (1950).

Decades before Alex Haley’s Roots swept to number one on the New York Times Best Seller List in 1976, writing and editing produced by African Americans was central to twentieth-century American publishing. Literary production was interracial. View examples of mid-century books by African Americans whose designs—from dust jackets to illustrations to bindings and paper quality—conveyed their centrality in publishing and American literature.   

Curated by Korey Garibaldi, Associate Professor of American Studies, and Rachel Bohlmann, Curator of North Americana at Hesburgh Libraries.

These and other exhibits within the Hesburgh Libraries are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.

All exhibits are free and open to the public during business hours.

Special Collections’ Classes & Workshops

Throughout the semester, curators will teach sessions related to our holdings to undergraduate and graduate students from Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College. Curators may also be available to show special collections to visiting classes, from preschool through adults. If you would like to arrange a group visit and class with a curator, please contact Special Collections.

Events

These programs are free and open to the public.

Friday, September 1 at noon-1:00pm |First of the curator-led tours of the Fall 2023 Exhibition, Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States. Additional tours will be held September 15 and 22; October 13 and 27, and November 17.

Friday, September 1 at 2:00-4:00pm | Spotlight Exhibit Tour and Open House, Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, with curator Greg Bond.

Tuesday, September 19 at 4:00pm | Centering African American Writing in American Literature – American Studies Professor Korey Garibaldi will draw on his new book, Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America (Princeton, 2023), and on recent library acquisitions to discuss how, during the middle of the twentieth century, modern American literature and its production were interracial. He will explore multiple aspects of American literary creation, including how African American content has been embodied in dust jacket and cover designs, illustrations, the style of type and bindings, and the overall production quality. 

Learn more about Special Collections and other Library Events.

Thursday, October 5th at 5:00pm | The Fall 2023 Italian Research Seminar and Lectures will begin with a lecture by Daniela La Penna (University of Reading, UK), “The Archival Turn and Network approach: Examining evolving translation practices and discourses in the British publishing firm complex, 1950s-1980s.”

Learn more about this and other Events in Italian Studies.

Recent Acquisitions

Special Collections acquires new material throughout the year. Watch this blog for information about recent acquisitions.

An early Italian vernacular response to Martin Luther’s teachings

by Alan Krieger, Theology and Philosophy Librarian

The Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired a very rare sole edition of an early Italian vernacular response to Martin Luther’s teachings, Giovanni Pili Da Fano’s Iesus Maria Opera vtilissima uulgare co[n]tra le pernitiosissime heresie Lutherane p[er] li simplici (Bologna, 1532).

“At the end of the 1520’s and especially in the course of the 1530s, the Italian market offered a wide range of anonymous books in the vernacular that were merely translations, often partial, of Lutheran texts disguised behind seemingly innocent titles… To the complete absence of reaction by controversialists … there had been one significant exception… Giovanni of Fano offered the uneducated reader a Luther skilled in controversy, a violently anti-Roman, systematic theologian and subverter of tradition, presenting, together with a ‘clearer notice’ of the fundamentals of Catholic doctrine, a fully detailed picture of Lutheran errors.”

Giorgio Caravale, Beyond the Inquisition:
Ambrogio Catarino Politi and
the Origins of the Counter-Reformation

(University of Notre Dame Press, 2017)

The first chapter of the work treats the handling of all kinds of heretics. Fano subsequently introduces his lay reader to the usual anti-Lutheran responses found in Latin treatises of the time: on the unity of the Church; St. Peter and the Apostolic Succession; on faith, Confession, the Eucharist, indulgences, Purgatory, idolatry, prayer, and finally on the celibacy of the clergy.

We have located only one other North American institutional holding of this title.

Upcoming Events: April 2023

Please join us for the following public events and exhibits being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:

Thursday, April 6 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: “Democracy and Defeat: Morante, Moravia, and Malaparte in Capri, 1946” by Franco Baldasso (Bard College).

Monday, April 17 at 4:00pm | Special Collections Lecture: “Heinrich Jöst’s Warsaw Ghetto Photographs and the Challenges of Interpreting Holocaust Images” by Daniel H. Magilow (University of Tennessee, Knoxville). This lecture is co-sponsored by Hesburgh Libraries, Florence & Richard C. McBrien and Richard C. McBrien Endowment and by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.

Thursday, April 27 at 5:00pm | Ravarino Lecture: “Pandemic and Wages in Boccaccio’s Florence” by William Caferro (Vanderbilt).

RBSC will be closed for Easter weekend, April 7-9, 2023.


The spring exhibit, Printing the Nation: A Century of Irish Book Arts, features selected books from the Hesburgh Libraries’ Special Collections that demonstrate the art and craft of the Irish book since 1900. The exhibit, curated by Aedín Ní Bhróithe Clements, will run through the semester.

Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups, and additional curator-led tours are available at 12 noon on the following upcoming Friday: April 21.

The April spotlight exhibits are Language and Materiality in Late Medieval England (February – April 2023) and Hagadah shel Pesaḥ le-zekher ha-Sho’ah – Pessach Haggadah in memory of the Holocaust (April – May 2023).


Although ongoing library renovations will continue through 2023, Special Collections is no longer behind a construction tunnel!

Upcoming Events: February 2023

Please note that the corridor outside RBSC is temporarily narrowed to a pedestrian tunnel due to ongoing library renovations, but we generally remain open during our regular hours.

Please join us for the following public events and exhibits being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:

Thursday, February 23 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: M.A. Students Presentations (University of Notre Dame)

“Anybody here speak English? / Non dovete avere paura, non c’è ragione”:
Dubbing as Translation and Rewriting in Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna,
by Santain Tavella

The Infernal Arno: Mapping the Arno in Dante’s Hell
through the Lens of Purg. XIV,
by Toby Hale

Tuesday, February 28 at 3:30pm | Exhibit Lecture: “The Changing Face of Irish Writing” by Brian Ó Conchubhair (Associate Professor of Irish Language and Literature, University of Notre Dame). This lecture has had to be rescheduled—a new date will be announced later.


The spring exhibit, Printing the Nation: A Century of Irish Book Arts, features selected books from the Hesburgh Libraries’ Special Collections that demonstrate the art and craft of the Irish book since 1900. The exhibit, curated by Aedín Ní Bhróithe Clements, will run through the semester.

The February spotlight exhibits are Language and Materiality in Late Medieval England (February – April 2023) and “That Just Isn’t Fair; Settling for Left-Overs”: African American Women Activists and Athletes in 1970s Feminist Magazines (February – March 2023).


Rare Books and Special Collections will be closed
from 11:30am to 2:00pm on Thursday, February 9, 2023.

Welcome to Spring 2023 in Rare Books & Special Collections

Upcoming Events: January

Please join us for the following event being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:

Thursday, January 26 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: “The ‘Literary Canon’ of Early Venetian Humanism (1374-1446) between the Classics and the Moderns “ by Rino Modonutti (University of Padova). Sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies.

Spring Semester Exhibits

The spring exhibit Printing the Nation: A Century of Irish Book Arts will feature selected books from the Hesburgh Libraries’ Special Collections to demonstrate the art and craft of the Irish book since 1900. The exhibit, curated by Aedín Ní Bhróithe Clements, will open in January and run through the semester.

The current spotlight exhibits for are Hesburgh Library Special Collections: A Focus on W. B. Yeats (November 2022 – January 2023) and The Ladies Flower-Garden of Ornamental Annuals (December 2022 – January 2023). Later in the month, we will be installing the spring semester spotlight, which will explore changes in language within select Middle English manuscripts and early printed books from the 15th through 17th century (January – April 2023).

Classes in Special Collections

Throughout the semester, curators teach sessions related to our holdings. If you’re interested in bringing your class or group to work with our curators and materials, please contact Special Collections.

Recent Acquisitions

Special Collections acquires new material throughout the year. Watch our blog for announcements about recent acquisitions.

Upcoming Events: December 2022

Please note that the corridor outside RBSC is temporarily narrowed to a pedestrian tunnel due to ongoing library renovations, but we generally remain open during our regular hours.

Please join us for the following public event being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:

Thursday, December 1 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: “Fellini, Film, and the Proliferation of Petroculture in Postwar Italy” – Lora Jury (University of Notre Dame).


Daughters of Our Lady: Finding a Place at Notre Dame, an exhibition of materials from the University of Notre Dame Archives curated by Elizabeth Hogan and reflecting on the 50th anniversary of coeducation at Notre Dame, will run through December 16th.

The current spotlight exhibits are Hesburgh Library Special Collections: A Focus on W. B. Yeats (October – December 2022) and The Ladies Flower-Garden of Ornamental Annuals (December 2022 – January 2023).

Due to OIT infrastructure work being done in the Hesburgh Library, Special Collections will be closed
on Monday, December 19, 2022.

Rare Books and Special Collections will be closed for Notre Dame’s Christmas and New Year’s Break
(December 23, 2022, through January 2, 2023).

We otherwise remain open for our regular hours during Reading Days and Exams, and welcome those looking for a quiet place to study.

Upcoming Events: November 2022

Please note that the corridor outside RBSC is temporarily narrowed to a pedestrian tunnel due to ongoing library renovations, but we remain open during regular hours.

Please join us for the following public event being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:

Thursday, November 10 at 5:00pm | Italian Research Seminar: “Deadly Letters: Plague, Banditry, and Heresy in Early Modern Mail” – Rachel Midura (Virginia Tech).

Thursday, November 11 at 4:00pm | “Ireland’s Lament”: The Story of the Manuscript of a 17th-century Irish Historica Poem in the Hesburgh Library. A panel discussion on the recently-acquired manuscript, Tuireamh na hÉireann (Ireland’s Lament), with the Department of Irish Language and Literature and the Keough-Naughton Institute of Irish Studies.


Daughters of Our Lady: Finding a Place at Notre Dame, an exhibition of materials from the University of Notre Dame Archives curated by Elizabeth Hogan and reflecting on the 50th anniversary of coeducation at Notre Dame, will run through the end of the fall semester.

The current spotlight exhibits are Hesburgh Library Special Collections: A Focus on W. B. Yeats (October – December 2022) and “Rosie the Riveters with a Vengeance” and Other Wartime Contributions by American Women (October – November 2022).

RBSC will be closed for the Thanksgiving Holiday,
November 24 – 25.