Undine Smith Moore: The Dean of Black Women Composers

Samantha Ege is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southhampton in the United Kingdom. She is a 2024 Rose Library Visiting Research Fellow in the area of African American History and Culture. When you spend any amount of time with the materials of Undine Smith Moore (1904–1989), aka the Dean of Black women Read More …

Following the Return Migration of Black Americans to the U.S. South

Summer Perritt is a History PhD candidate at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Her work looks at the return migration of Black Americans to the U.S. South in the post-civil rights period. Her project consists of oral history interviews with migrants as well as traditional archival sources such as those collected by the Stuart A. Read More …

Operation SEEK: Finding New Pathways for Collegiate & Carceral Cross-Education in the Archive of artist Benny Andrews (1930-2006) 

Sinclair Spratley is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History & Archeology at Columbia University. She is the 2024 recipient of the Benny Andrews Award, which provides funding for researchers exploring the collection of visual artist, teacher, activist, critic, and writer Benny Andrews. I had the privilege of spending time in the vast Read More …

“More Is Gained Than Lost”: The Papers of Samella S. Lewis

Audrey Florey is a Ph.D. candidate in Visual Studies at the University of Missouri with an emphasis in American art history. Her dissertation examines the work of women artist-educators who dedicated their life to establishing and cultivating a diverse array of art programs within numerous cultural institutions across the United States. Beginning in the late Read More …

Tom Dent and the Literature of Black Suppression

Justin Haynes is an associate professor of English at Randolph-Macon College. He was awarded a Billops-Hatch fellowship in support of his research on carnivals in the Americas. He is the 2021-2023 Nicholas Jenkins Barnett Fellow in fiction at Emory University. Tom Dent’s creative writing and essays focus on centering cultural Blackness in his hometown of Read More …

She Puts Things In: Toni Morrison and the Legacy of Black Women Writers

    In partnership with Emory University’s Rose Library and the Exhibitions team of Woodruff Library, Georgia Public Library Service is launching a tour of She Gathers Me: Networks Among Black Women Writers to libraries statewide. Curated by Gabrielle Dudley, the  six panel exhibit will tour Georgia Public Libraries until 2022. The exhibit features luminaries Read More …

In Memoriam: Camille Billops, An Avant-garde Artist to be Recognized and Reckoned With

Every creative, cultural and racial experience has to do with my work.  I sift and look and taste. Camille Billops (1977) The passing of Camille Billops (1933-2019) comes as a shock to the system.  She will forever be remembered as a force in the art world, especially as an advocate for the preservation of the Read More …

Examining the “Fluidity of Citizenship”: My Residency at the Stuart A. Rose Library, Emory University

In fall 2017, independent scholar Dorrie Wilson conducted research in Rose Library’s Michel Fabre archives of African American Arts and Letters and the James Baldwin Letters to David Moses. Michel Fabre and Me: The Rose Library residency was my first opportunity to work with a renowned collection of African-Americana on my independent research project: “The City Read More …

Panel presentation on African American research

“Reading the Silences: Finding African Americans in the Archives” Emory University’s Archives Research Program will host a panel discussion on Monday, February 8 at 6:30 on Level 10 of the Woodruff Library. The panel will explore research into the lives African Americans. Researching an underdocumented community can be frustrating; evidence is often found in unexpected Read More …

Processing Fun: Pearl Cleage, Writings by Others series

“Revealing Her Story: Documenting African American Women Intellectuals” is a two-year project funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to arrange and describe the personal papers of nine African American women writers, artists and musicians. Collections included in the project are the Pearl Cleage papers; additions to the Delilah Jackson papers; the Samella Read More …

Processing Fun: Undine Smith Moore’s Teaching Files

“Revealing Her Story: Documenting African American Women Intellectuals” is a two-year project funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to arrange and describe the personal papers of nine African American women writers, artists and musicians. Collections included in the project are the Pearl Cleage papers; additions to the Delilah Jackson papers; the Samella Read More …

Realism, Symbolism, and Identity: The John Biggers Papers

In the late 1990s, as the long career of painter, sculptor, and university professor John Biggers was drawing to a close, the artist received letters from admirers commenting on his life’s work. A native of Gastonia, North Carolina, Biggers spent most of his career in Houston, Texas. There, he founded the Art Department at Texas Read More …