In 2024, Julia Mathas, then an Editorial Assistant at the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), was conducting research on the literary magazine’s history in anticipation of its centennial anniversary the following year. While looking for a file on Ezra Pound in the correspondence archives of VQR’s longest-serving editor, Charlotte Kohler, Mathas stumbled upon a folder labelled “Sylvia Plath.” Within it she found a signed 1958 letter from Plath asking the editors to consider three of her poems for publication.
“I was shocked,” Mathas said about finding the Plath note among Kohler’s alphabetized correspondence files, as none of the current editors had any idea Plath had once submitted to the magazine. “As it turned out, Kohler rejected Plath’s poems, which is why no one knew she ever wrote to us. Unless the author appeared in VQR, there’s no official record of them engaging with VQR.”
International Open Access Week begins on October 20th, with events happening across universities to educate and spread the word about the potential benefits of open access.
The theme of 2025 Open Access Week is “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, addressing questions about information control and how we as authors and creatives can make our works available to the public without compromising values or integrity.
Shannon and Brown Libraries will be hosting hybrid brown bag lunch sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss OA topics. Register and bring a lunch (or watch online) and enjoy some lively presentations and discussions about open access!
The University of Virginia Library was pleased to welcome Leo Lo as University Librarian and Dean of Libraries in September of this year. The Cavalier Daily, UVA’s student-run news outlet, talked to Dr. Lo in early October about his hopes for the future and experience so far at UVA.
Leo Lo, photographed in Shannon Library. Photo by Ken Fabia for The Cavalier Daily.
The concept is simple: gather together on Wednesday afternoons and read in peaceful silence in Shannon Library’s light-filled Memorial Hall. Silent Reading Study Break, a new weekly event created by librarians Haley Gillilan and Mandy Rizki, along with the Library Student Council, is the University of Virginia Library’s way of carving out time for reading.
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:
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.
The theme of 2025 Open Access Week is “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, addressing questions about information control and how we as authors and creatives can make our works available to the public without compromising values or integrity.
Marking the public opening of the film this month, Banowsky said: