Brown University Library

12/16/2025

Library hours and services for December:

For the most up-to-date information about Brown University operations, please visit Brown.edu.

The Rockefeller Library will remain open from Monday through Friday, December 15 to 19, and Monday, December 22 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day.

Live chat will be in operation during the same time period (brown.libanswers.com/)

All current Brown ID holders have swipe card access at the Rock during these days and times.

Most library services will be available at the Rock:

- Circulation will be operating, however, BorrowDirect requests will not be processed until we return in January. If you already had materials on hold at the Rock from BorrowDirect, you can still pick them up at the Rock.

- Interlibrary loan services are available for online articles only until Thursday, December 18. Book requests will be processed in January.

Though the Orwig Music Library will be closed, Brown community members who need Orwig items may email [email protected] to make arrangements for access.

In addition to ID swipe access at the Rock, medical students, faculty, and staff (only) have 24/7 access by ID swipe to the Champlin Memorial (Medical) Library in The Warren Alpert Medical School building.

All other University Library locations will be closed until we return from winter break in January.

If you have any questions or concerns, email [email protected].

Our hearts and thoughts are with everyone affected by the tragic shooting on campus, and we wish everyone peace, comfort, and healing during this difficult time.

10/04/2025

The friends and family of Michael Denneny and the Brown University Library will host two symposiums in honor of the life and archive — gifted to the John Hay Library — of the late Michael Denneny, the first openly gay editor at a major publishing house. Both events are free and open to the public. Registration is required. (Links below and in bio.)

*Monday, Oct. 6 @ 6 to 7:30 p.m. ET*
VIRTUAL SYMPOSIUM
"Becoming Real: Introducing the Archive of Gay Publishing Pioneer Michael L. Denneny"
REGISTER at go.brown.edu/denneny-virtual

SPEAKERS:
- Bill Goldstein, moderator – Writer and founding editor of the books site at NYTimes.com
- Gina Carroll – Author, TEDx Talk speaker, founder of the writing, editing, and authorship services company Story House
- Keith Kahla – Executive Editor, St. Martin’s Press
- Michael Lee – Researcher, educator, and author of When The Band Played On: The Life of Randy Shilts, America’s Trailblazing Gay Journalist
- Douglas Sadownick – Author and founder of the the LGBT Specialization in Clinical Psychology at Antioch University
- Jason Villemez – Writer and editor

*Thursday, Oct. 9 @ 4 to 7 p.m.*
HYBRID SYMPOSIUM
"Life, S*x, and Death after Stonewall: A Symposium on the Work of Michael L. Denneny"
REGISTER at go.brown.edu/denneny-symposium

SPEAKERS:
- David Groff, keynote speaker: Poet, author, editor, educator and co-founder of the Publishing Triangle
- Domenic DeSocio: Assistant Professor of Instruction, Department of German, Northwestern University
- Ernesto Mestre-Reed: Novelist, educator, and long-time friend of Michael Denneny
- Blake Smith: Writer and scholar
- MariaHadessa Tallie AM’20 Ph.D.’25: Interdisciplinary artist, poet, award-winning children’s book author, and Ntozake Shange scholar

MICHAEL L. DENNENY
Called a “dean of gay publishing” by The Washington Post, Michael Denneny was the first openly gay editor at a major publishing house. A star pupil of Origins of Totalitarianism author Hannah Arendt, Michael lived out her belief that speech is a form of action by championing authors from communities historically underrepresented in his industry. Authors he signed and edited ranged from Ntozake Shange to Larry Kramer to Randy Shilts.

Not content to operate only within the traditional publishing world, he co-founded the groundbreaking publications Christopher Street magazine and New York Native newspaper to create venues for the gay community to grapple in words with crises from Anita Bryant to AIDS, as well as with the process of LGBTQ+ self-definition that accelerated after Stonewall.

MICHAEL DENNENY ARCHIVE
The Michael Denneny archive at the John Hay Library includes drafts of Denneny’s own writing, from his graduate research under philosopher Hannah Arendt to work on his final book On Christopher Street: Life, S*x, and Death after Stonewall (University of Chicago, 2023), along with correspondence with friends and writers including Ntosake Shange, John Preston, and others, personal photographs, and ephemera related to late 20th-century New York gay nightlife.

05/30/2025

Brown University Digital Publications won SILVER at the EPIC Awards presented by the Society for Scholarly Publishing in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity, or Accessibility (DEIA) Initiatives category.

Allison Levy, Director of BUDP, holds the trophy at the awards ceremony.

This significant industry recognition highlights “Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing: Resources and Roadmaps,” a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities designed to support scholars from all career levels and across humanistic disciplines who wish to develop multimodal scholarship but may lack the necessary resources and capacity at their home institutions. The institute addressed equity issues endemic to academic publishing by establishing models for enhanced support for underrepresented voices to enrich and expand scholarly discourse through their contributions.

Details at library.brown.edu/create/libnews/budp-finalist-epic-award/

12/29/2024

Through a grant from the Fund for the Education of the Children of Providence, the Library has invested in PPSD libraries. Brown Deputy Librarian Nora Dimmock: "by investing in school libraries, the goal is to strengthen reading and writing proficiency, enhance critical thinking, and expand digital literacy and research skills among Providence students."

Support from the Fund for the Education of the Children of Providence has reinvigorated PPSD high school libraries with expanded collections, updated spaces, and new learning opportunities for students and teachers.

11/26/2024

Brown students: Enjoy free pizza while preparing for finals!

> Monday, December 9 at ORWIG Music Library @ 8 p.m.
> Tuesday, December 10 at the ROCK @ 9 p.m.
> Wednesday, December 11 at the SCILI (Friedman Study Center) @ 9 p.m.

Pizza nights are brought to you by the Library and .

Best of luck with finals!

This is your Library. You belong here.

library.brown.edu/create/libnews/pizza-nights-fall-2024/

11/06/2024

Heather Cole, Head of Special Collections Instruction and Curator of Literary & Popular Culture Collections at the John Hay Library, speaks with Motif magazine about Joy Harjo's papers.

EvErybody has a heartache —  This silence in the noise of the terminal is a mountain of bison skulls. Nobody knows, nobody sees —  Unless the indigenous are dancing powwow all decked out in flash and beauty We just don’t exist. We’ve been dispersed to an outlaw cowboy tale.

10/07/2024

Brown University Digital Publications has launched the multimodal edition of "Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual" (https://on-seeing-mortevivum.org/), the inaugural title in the "On Seeing" series published by the MIT Press. Authored by Kimberly Juanita Brown, inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College, "Mortevivum" is a powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness.

With subject matter that may be triggering, particularly images of violence and harm done to Black bodies, the open access multimodal edition employs a Consentful Tech framework, or the intentional development and use of technology to create safety, to prioritize care, and to foreground consent in order to mitigate trauma.

The multimodal edition also offers readers a Community Engagement Toolkit, a guide to having open conversations about antiblackness, visual culture, and death. Other uniquely digital content includes video recordings of author Kimberly Juanita Brown in dialogue with Brown University professors Kim Gallon, Juliet Ho**er, Kevin Quashie, and Avery Willis Hoffman; and with Vievee Elaure Francis of Dartmouth College.

Publications in the On Seeing series foreground the political agency, critical insight, and social impact inscribed in visuality and representation. The MIT Press will publish each On Seeing volume as a print book, ebook, and open access multimodal edition created by Brown University Digital Publications. The next title in the series is Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning.

More information at library.brown.edu/create/libnews/multimodal-mortevivum/

09/19/2024

The Brown University Library, the Sarah Doyle Center, Pembroke Center, and the LGBTQ Center are thrilled to welcome Bishakh Som to campus on September 26th for a lecture on Trans/Migrations: Journeys Through Art, Architecture, Comics, and Gender.

Through charting her history of cultural and geographical displacements, Bishakh Som will propose that such continuous movements have been integral to reckoning with herself not only as part of a South Asian diaspora but also as a transgender femme. She will trace how ideas of travel, migration, language, and longing for a sense of home/belonging have been crucial to her art-making as it has itself migrated from its roots in comics, through architecture and painting to now roosting firmly back in comics, a medium which has allowed her to integrate these previous endeavors into one practice.

To learn more visit: https://events.brown.edu/sdwc/event/291127-transmigrations-journeys-through-art-archit

07/31/2024

Fifteen humanities scholars from across the nation gathered in Brown University’s John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library this week with a shared mission: Explore best practices for authoring and publishing a first-rate, digital-first monograph and leave with the skills to create their own.

The Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing institute introduces scholars, many of whom are from historically Black and other minority-serving institutions, to best practices in online scholarly publishing.

07/15/2024

The John Hay Library acquires the papers of Joy Harjo, former U.S. Poet Laureate and 2024 Brown honorary degree recipient.

Harjo’s writing drafts, correspondence, scripts and teaching materials will significantly enhance the University’s scholarly resources from Native and Indigenous writers and performers.