People & Places - Tulane University Special Collections
TUSC was delighted to welcome five student workers for the Spring semester: Liesbeth Blundell, Kaylee Bowers, Lauren Duncan, Alexander Silverboard, and Claire Stephens. They worked on a variety of projects, including staffing the reading room, learning scanning techniques, conducting collection surveys, and enhancing records in our collection database.
Faye Daigle and Leon Miller were interviewed by Susan Larson for her WWNO radio show “The Reading Life.” Faye and Leon discussed TUSC’s Anne Rice exhibit. The show was broadcast on November 25, 2022, and you can hear it here.
To promote the fall Anne Rice exhibition to the campus community, Faye Daigle organized an Interview with the Vampire (1994) movie screening with Tulane After Dark, a student programming team based in the Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life. Held on October 25, the event was well attended by around thirty Tulane students along with four students visiting from Loyola University. The moviegoers snacked on popcorn, pretzels, and candy vampire fangs as they watched the campy cult classic. Some students arrived in Gothic attire while a few used the event to debut their Halloween costumes. While providing students with spooky, seasonal fun, the event was also successful in attracting visitors to Jones Hall for the Anne Rice exhibition opening reception on October 27.
Cate Peebles’ last day with TUSC was March 3. Cate previously was Museum Archivist at the Yale Center for British Art before joining us in September 2021 as Archival Processing Manager. She will begin her new job in April as an Archivist of the Winterthur Museum in New Castle County, Delaware. We are thankful for the time she spent with us and wish her all the best in her new endeavors.
Leon Miller, curator of the Louisiana Research Collection, spoke March 15 to a joint meeting of the Sons of the American Revolution and American Legion Post 23. Miller spoke on the role of archives in cultural preservation. If you would like a speaker for your group, TUSC will be happy to try to arrange for one. Contact specialcollections@tulane.edu.
Melissa A. Weber, curator of the Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz, chaired a panel, titled “Whose Archive? Addressing Gaps in Black History and Memory in Archives,” for the American Studies Association annual meeting during November 2022. The same month, she presented twice at the joint meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS), Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and Society for Music Theory (SMT), which included giving a keynote, titled “What’s Missing in New Orleans Music Archives,” and participating on a roundtable, “Don’t Put it Off!: Archiving Your Research Materials at Any Stage of Your Career.” Also, as part of the New Orleans Film Festival’s premiere screening of the documentary Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, Weber moderated the Q&A with musician/composer Terence Blanchard, who scored the film, and Jackie Harris, executive director of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation. At the 2023 New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University, she moderated the “Sounds of New Orleans: Music Summit” panel, which featured authors Shawn Amos, T.R. Johnson, Tom Sancton, and Michael Tisserand. An interview with Weber was also included in Big Chief, Black Hawk, a film about New Orleans Black Masking Indians which was featured on PBS’ America Reframed documentary series.
On February 17, exhibit co-curators Kevin Williams and Faye Daigle presented a guided tour of TUSC’s recent exhibit Absolutely Unpredictable: Anne Rice in the City of Transgression. The tour was for Tulane library staff members and organized by Howard-Tilton Library’s Professional Development Committee. You can enjoy a video walk-through of the exhibit here.
Published: 4/10/2023
