SU Library Special Collections Director Sean Quimby to present ‘American Phobia: Collecting in the History of Fear’

SU Library Special Collections Director Sean Quimby to present ‘American Phobia: Collecting in the History of Fear’September 07, 2007Pamela McLaughlinpwmclaug@syr.edu

Syracuse University Library Special Collection Research Center Director Sean Quimby will present the first Syracuse University Library Associates lecture of the 2007-08 year on Thursday, Sept. 27, at 4 p.m. in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons in E.S. Bird Library. The talk will be followed by a reception celebrating the opening of the Sacco and Vanzetti exhibition on the sixth floor of Bird Library.

Quimby’s talk will consider the role of fear in American life and address the questions: What are Americans really afraid of? In the post-9/11 world, we have grown accustomed to periodic “terror” alerts, but how did fear figure into the printed discourses of generations past? Quimby will detail the Special Collections Research Center’s ongoing project to build research collections that may help answer these questions. He will also discuss how burgeoning recent scholarship and available historical resources — religious tracts, popular psychology texts and eugenics manifestos, as well as self-help, child-rearing and comportment manuals — can help begin to trace the lineage of fear in America.

Quimby holds graduate degrees from the Hagley Fellows Program in the History of Industrialization at the University of Delaware and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In fall 2006, he came to SU from Stanford University, where he served as a manuscripts librarian.

This talk, sponsored by Syracuse University Library Associates, is free and open to the public. Pay parking is available in the Marion lot on Waverly Avenue.