News, announcements, updates, and happenings in the UVA Library

On the second floor of Shannon Library, two massive mixed-media collages hanging side by side are catching the attention of passers-by. The art installation, titled “Free to Be, a Collective Virginia Landscape,” is the work of Maria Villanueva, an Assistant Professor of Art who arrived at UVA in August. Using layered transfers of photographs, gouache and watercolor paints, and colored pencils, Villanueva mixes Charlottesville’s urban spaces with the lush landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains, interspersing local birds, people, and texts into the visual narrative, all presented on giant scrolls.

University Librarian John Unsworth, who oversaw a four-year renovation to the main UVA library and a two-year pandemic that shut down the libraries and all of Grounds, has announced he will retire at the end of the academic year.

Read the full announcement from UVA Today.

In nature, bright colors are often indicative of danger — poisonous spiders and insects (and their imitators) often adorn themselves with electric coloring as a warning to potential predators. Turns out, some books inadvertently do the same.

In the mid-1800s, arsenic became popular as a compound used in book making. Its allure comes from the fact that arsenic, when combined with copper, has the ability to create brilliant emerald greens, which were then used in ornate covers and illustrations. The problem? We now know that long-term or large-scale exposure can lead to skin and lung irritation, and even cancer.

By day, Associate Librarian Josh Thorud teaches audio/video and digital art instructional sessions to students and helps faculty design courses that involve media literacy, AI, and digital storytelling.

When he’s not at work in UVA Library’s Robertson Media Center, Thorud focuses his attention on his own media projects, namely screenwriting and film editing. These projects have taken him around the world to various film and art festivals. Late last year, a film he edited (directed by UVA studio art professor Federico Cuatlacuatl) won the Arte Laguna Special Prize, in Venice, Italy.

In the first installment of our new “Staff Spotlight” series, we spoke with Thorud about how he brings his creative skills into his work at UVA Library.

This Black History Month, librarians on the Arts & Humanities team invite you to explore stories of the African American experience from the past two centuries.  

Featured in this post are two collections of primary sources for historical research, a biography of a Union Army soldier, and a history of the Freedman’s Bank by UVA history professor Justene Hill Edwards.

Dec. 10, 1938 -  Herbert Friedman, a day shy of 14 years old, boarded a train in Austria bound for England. It was the eve of World War II, and he was one of nearly 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, who were rescued from Nazi-controlled territory across Europe.

A UVA Today story tells the tale in more detail, as Friedman eventually made his way from London to the United States, where he studied to be a pharmacist, fought for the U.S. in World War II and the Korean War, and started a family.

Eighty-seven years after Friedman’s departure from Austria, his personal effects — including the number assigned to him on that fateful train — were gifted to UVA Library by his sons.

This week, the UVA Library received the 2025 Library Excellence in Access and Diversity (LEAD) Award from Insight Into Diversity magazine, the largest and oldest diversity and inclusion publication in higher education. The LEAD Award honors academic libraries’ programs and initiatives that encourage and support inclusive excellence and belonging across their campus. These include, but are not limited to research, technology, accessibility, exhibitions, and community outreach. The Library will be featured, along with 33 other recipients, in the March 2025 issue of Insight Into Diversity magazine.

The Athenian “Agora” of the classical period of the 4th and 5th centuries BCE — the business, legal, and political center of the city — has been much studied by archaeologists. But its history in the middle Byzantine era, from roughly the 9th to the 12th century CE, has been relatively overlooked. Associate Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology Fotini Kondyli is working to change that. Kondyli bemoans the reputation of Byzantine Athens as an “insignificant town that lacks monumental structures and any urban planning … a backwater of the Byzantine empire,” and with the help of the Library’s Digital Humanities (DH) Center, she makes the case that the city during the Byzantine period was vibrant, densely populated, and much more prosperous than previously imagined.   

The Cavalier Daily — the University of Virginia’s student newspaper — has been recording UVA history and student life for 134 years, since it was founded in 1890 under the name College Topics. Now, more than 7,500 pages of that history are available online, as staff from the UVA Library’s Preservation Services and Digital Production Group worked with the Library of Virginia to add the first 25 years of College Topics to Virginia Chronicle. Virginia Chronicle is a resource from the Library of Virginia that provides free access to digitized images of over 4 million newspaper pages. The College Topics archive, from Vol. I, No. 1 of January 15, 1890 to Vol. XXVII, No. 64 of June 14, 1916, represents a run of 1,270 issues and 7,663 pages.