Friends of the UNCG Libraries

“Dickens, Our Contemporary”—Wednesday, March 21, 3:30 p.m., Hodges Special Collections Reading Room, Jackson Library 2nd Floor Professor Eileen Gillooly, Associate Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University Professor Gillooly will discuss Dickens’s continuing transatlantic, trans-cultural, and trans-historical appeal, which, like Shakespeare’s, has much to do with the essentially dramatic quality of his imagination. She will consider the ethical and therapeutic power of role-playing for Dickens, for his characters, and for the reader in some scenes from his novels. Eileen Gillooly specializes in 19th-century British literature and culture; gender and psychoanalytic studies; 19th-century moral psychology; and 19th-century British colonial literature and culture. She is the author of Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1999)—which was awarded the Perkins Prize by the International Society ...

UNCG Distance Education Librarian Beth Filar-Williams has recently completed working with Iskander Rakhmatullaev of Tashkent, Uzbekistan on the first virtual internship program of the Digital Library Learning Program of the Erasmus Mundus of the European Commission. Throughout the month of February, intern Iskander Rakhmatullaev worked to convert the Instructional Technology Toolkit, which Filar-Williams developed as a website for UNCG librarians and library students, into a LibGuide . This toolkit was born out of an idea to create a place where library staff and students could learn more about new software tools for use at school, work and personal life, as well as collaborate and share these tools with others beyond librarianship. LibGuides which are more flexible and easy for collaborators to update, are being used for many classes at UNCG and other universities. Iskander identified two principal benefits to his internship. First, he says he learned more about the LibGuide tool,...

The University Libraries join with the campus and the literary community in mourning the death earlier this week of Robert Watson, a member of our faculty from 1953 until his retirement in 1987. Bob activated the MFA Writing Program at UNCG in 1964, and founded the Greensboro Review the next year. His papers are in our Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections. Here is his obituary .

The University Libraries and Center for Creative Writing in the Arts at UNCG welcome Matthew Pearl to Greensboro to participate in A Dickens of a Celebration commemorating the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens. Pearl’s first three novels, The Dante Club , The Poe Shadow , and The Last Dickens were New York Times bestsellers, have been translated into more than thirty languages, and have over one million copies in print combined. Critics have likened Pearl to E. L. Doctorow, and described him as “at the very forefront of contemporary novelists.” Reviews have proclaimed his writing as a "franchise on the cusp of mystery, literature and historical fiction" (Janet Maslin, “CBS Sunday Morning”), and said that Matthew is “a young author worth following,” adding “one can’t wait to see what he’ll do next.” The author will speak and sign copies of his books at 7 p.m. in the Virginia Dare Room in the Alumni House on the UNCG campus. The event is free and open to the public. In The Las...

The Entrepreneurial Librarian , edited by the "Mary team" of Mary Krautter of UNCG along with Mary Scanlon and Mary Beth Lock of Wake Forest University is now available. There are chapters by UNCG Librarians Joe Williams, Stephen Dew, Beth Filar Williams and Sarah Dorsey.

Friday, March 2, 2012; 7:30 p.m. Enjoy First Friday at the Greensboro Historical Museum, with a screening of the documentary “Saving the Hansen House.” It features UNCG’s Bob Hansen. Reception and Q&A with Dr. Bob Hansen and filmmakers Deni and Will McIntyre. Co-sponsored by the Friends of the UNCG Libraries and the Center for Creative Writing in the Arts in collaboration with the Greensboro Historical Museum. Note that the time is 7:30 p.m. Some previous communication incorrectly gave the time as 8:00 p.m. See also http://www.uncgfol.blogspot.com/2011/11/film-featuring-uncg-faculty-member-bob.html