The latest exhibition in the Main Gallery of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library takes an alphabetical approach to UVA Library’s collections. “The ABCs of the UVA Library,” curated by UVA Library staff members, displays approximately 200 Library items grouped into 48 topics. Each topic corresponds to a letter of the alphabet, ranging from architecture (A) to zines (Z).
“This exhibition showcases the rich and assorted collections of the University of Virginia Library, highlighting the Library staff who make those materials discoverable and accessible,” said Holly Robertson, Curator of University Library Exhibitions, who organized “ABCs” along with Exhibitions Coordinator Jacquelyn Kim. Nearly 50 Library staff members served as curators, and the exhibition itself is just as wide-ranging, with display locations not only in the Special Collections gallery but also in Shannon, Clemons, Fine Arts, and Brown libraries as well.
The University of Virginia Library has six locations, an array of cozy study spaces, millions of items available for checkout or browsing, and new resources arriving each day. And did you know we also offer events throughout the year ranging from exhibitions to concerts for UVA and the Charlottesville community ?
Join us at the Library this fall for reading groups, writing cafés, crafting workshops, and open educational resource sessions. All Library events are free.
Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15 to October 15 each year, celebrates the contributions of Hispanic and Latino communities in the U.S. To celebrate this month, we’re recommending a few books and films that highlight different aspects of the Hispanic/Latino experience. All are available through the UVA Library via the links provided. Note that the first two novels mentioned here can be found in the Popular Books collection on the fourth floor of Shannon Library, which features several hundred recent fiction and non-fiction titles, primarily for pleasure reading.
In 1990, American historian Sue Peabody was researching her dissertation on enslaved peoples’ pre-revolutionary freedom lawsuits in France when she came upon an intriguing story. In 1817 on Île Bourbon (now Réunion), a French-colonized island in the Indian Ocean, a 31-year-old enslaved man named Furcy Madeleine brought legal proceedings before the Saint-Denis District Court against his master Joseph Lory. Furcy’s suit contested his status as a slave and claimed his “ingenuity” — his freedom of birth.
Peabody, now a Distinguished Professor of History at Washington State University, set the history aside at the time because the trial’s ruling did not take place until half a century after the French Revolution. But in 2007, her interest in the case was reignited when she saw that a set of documents concerning the lawsuit had been purchased at auction in 2005 by the Departmental Archives of Réunion. Intrigued, she contacted a historian at the Université de La Réunion, who invited her to attend a colloquium for historians of the Indian Ocean in 2008. At that conference, she met French legal historian Jérémy Boutier.
In August, the Virginia Film Festival welcomed director Bill Banowsky in conversation following a showing of his film, “A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant.” The film features archival footage and hundreds of Oliphant works, and the showing was a homecoming of sorts, since the University of Virginia Library houses Oliphant’s archive, which was critical in the making of the film.
Marking the public opening of the film this month, Banowsky said:
Whether you’re a new student or a returning faculty member, we at UVA Library are ready to help you make the most of your Fall 2025 semester. The Library has everything to help you succeed — books, comfortable study spaces, locations all over Grounds, and staff who are ready to help with research, teaching, publishing, and more.
Check out this overview of the UVA Library system and its offerings. We hope you’ll visit one of our six locations soon — see more about that below!
Library spaces
The UVA Library has six locations, each with different subject specialties:
“Artificial intelligence systems are thirsty,” writes Leo S. Lo in a recent column for The Conversation, an independent news organization.
Lo, the incoming University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Virginia, established the Task Force on AI Competencies for Library Workers for the Association of College and Research Libraries, where he serves as president. In addition to his role as Dean of Libraries, Lo will also serve as Advisor to the Provost for AI Literacy and as a Professor of Education at UVA.
The University of Virginia has appointed Lisa Blackmore as Faculty Director of UVA Library’s Digital Humanities Center and Professor of Spanish in the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Blackmore, formerly a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex in England, begins her role at UVA on August 21.
Since 2018, Blackmore has been the founder/director of entre—ríos [Between Rivers] an international digital platform focusing on bodies of water in Latin America. Her research is in the field of environmental humanities, with a focus on cultural histories of human-river relations, ecocritical analysis of art and literature, and creative collaborations between art, science, and communities.
For Disability Pride Month 2025 — marking the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) — Carla Arton, Keith Weimer, Erin Dickey, Christine Ruotolo, and Bethany Mickel from the UVA Library are proud to spotlight a selection of works that have made the journey from page to screen, offering powerful representations of disability in both written and visual forms. This year’s theme — “adaptation” — invites us to reflect on how stories of disability are told, retold, and transformed when moving from text to film.
Writing about disability is, in itself, a layered act of translation. Whether through memoir, biography, or fiction, the written word attempts to capture the lived experience of disabled individuals — sensory realities, internal landscapes, and social dynamics that often resist simplification. When these stories are then adapted into film, another layer of interpretation is added. What is chosen to be visualized, dramatized, or omitted can deeply shape how audiences come to understand disability — sometimes reinforcing familiar tropes, other times challenging them.
The University of Virginia Library’s collection contains everything from the earliest printed materials to the Tibetan Book of the Dead to student-made advertisements for something called the “experimental university.”
These items, along with roughly 200 others, are now on display for a yearlong exhibition, “The ABCs of the UVA Library,” hosted in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.
Haphazard highlights, scrap paper bookmarks and schoolboy scribbles are often passed off as mere library book litter, but they can offer peeks into the past.
John Unsworth retired this month as university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Virginia after more than nine years in the role. We chatted with him about his career and the profession.
Heather Riser and Gayle Cooper, two librarians at Special Collections, helped confirm that eight books archivist Amanda Greenwood found had been in the Rotunda at the time of the fire.
Marking the public opening of the film this month, Banowsky said: 