When the Rotunda burned down in October of 1895 — faulty wiring was to blame — University of Virginia officials immediately pushed to rebuild, and in 1896, after a false start with McDonald Brothers of Louisville, Kentucky, the Board of Visitors hired prominent New York architects McKim, Mead & White. Stanford White, the artistic force of the firm, was the lead architect on the Rotunda redesign. The University also hired the firm to design three new buildings to enclose the South Lawn. These buildings, also designed by White, came to be Rouss, Cocke, and Cabell Halls, and White also went on to design Garrett Hall as well as Carr’s Hill, the UVA president’s home.
Late last month, UVA Today published a story on “must-read books for the summer” recommended by UVA Library staff. The suggestions ranged from a book about how Taylor Swift reinvented pop music (by a UVA alumnus) to Jane Austen’s arguably least-known work. That piece stayed on UVA Today’s list of “most popular” stories for two weeks and was even shared by UVA President Jim Ryan on Instagram.
To read more about these books, click the image below to access the UVA Today story.
Cecelia Parks, Undergraduate Student Success Librarian; Anne Causey, Reference Librarian; and Kiowa Hammons, Director of Copyright & Scholarly Communication Services, recommend nine books and films exploring the history, present, and future of trans people.
See the full list in Virgo, plus a few books that did not make the final cut!
The Edgar Shannon Library has been open a little more than a year, and in that time, it’s welcomed several hundred thousand visitors and hosted hundreds of events, workshops, and presentations. For a broad look at Shannon Library, check out our Overview and What’s in Shannon Library? videos.
For a closer look, enjoy the photos below. Photographers Tom Daly and Sanjay Suchak found some unusual angles, interesting patterns, and unexpected views of the library, capturing unique details of Shannon Library over its first year of operation.
The fifth-floor stacks in the newly renovated Shannon Library. (Photo by Tom Daly)
HBRA Architects received a national architecture award last week for their work on the Edgar Shannon Library at the University of Virginia. Traditional Building magazine honored the firm with its 2025 Palladio Award in the category of Commercial – New Design & Construction – more than 30,000 square feet.
Many people are familiar with Jewish culture — through food, humor, holidays, or history. But fewer have explored what it means to live a Jewish life, especially in the United States. For religiously observant Jews, that can include honoring the Sabbath each week, studying sacred texts, following Jewish religious law, and practicing daily traditions that bring meaning and connection.
Two fourth-year UVA Library student workers, Andrew Spencer and SuLing Llanes-Trexler, were profiled in UVA Today this week in a story about their unlikely friendship.
The Library’s exhibitions program allows us to serve the UVA community and beyond as an evolving space for discovery and celebration of our shared cultural heritage, by showcasing to the public the rare and unique materials available to the University’s faculty, students, and visiting researchers in a controlled environment, and celebrating them in creative and edifying ways. Exhibitions also allow us to take advantage of partnerships with other institutions and guest curators to bring fresh insight and new treasures to our galleries.
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.
