The Grant Hagan Society, the Department of Music’s graduate-student led affinity group for people of color, would like to invite you to our event, “Underrepresented in the Archives,” a roundtable discussion with Jonathan Manton (Gilmore Music Library), Melissa Barton (Beinecke Library), Michelle Peralta (Manuscripts and Archives), and Suzanne Lovejoy (Gilmore Music Library).

• When: Friday, November 6th, 2 – 3:30 pm EST
• Where: Zoom link by registration
• Who: open to all, especially students in music and related fields

This event brings together humanities-area research faculty and graduate students together with archival specialists to discuss how archival practices have privileged whiteness and maleness in the music-historical record. We will discuss predominant methods in compiling and organizing archival resources for how they participate in the underrepresentation of BIPOC, women, and non-binary individuals. Utilizing particular examples from Yale’s archival collections, we will consider what possibilities exist for heightening the presence of these underrepresented communities through scholarly engagements with these archives.

We hope to see you there! 

Panelist biographies

Melissa Barton

Melissa Barton is Curator of Drama and Prose for the Yale Collection of American Literature, which includes the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters, at Beinecke Library. At Beinecke Melissa has curated exhibits including “Casting Shadows: Integration on the American Stage,” “Richard Wright’s Native Son on Stage and Screen,” and “Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaissance and The Beinecke Library,” which was visited by thousands of people over its three-month run in 2017. Melissa wrote the accompanying catalog Gather Out of Star-Dust: A Harlem Renaissance Album, co-published by Beinecke and Yale University Press. Melissa writes and presents frequently about teaching with collections. Her own research focuses on histories of Black theater and performance, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. Her scholarship has appeared in TDR and will be included in African American Literature in Transition: 1940-1950, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Jonathan Manton

Jonathan Manton is Music Librarian for Digital and Access Services at the Gilmore Music Library. In this role he oversees a wide range of Digital Services, including digitization, digital preservation and digital access initiatives. He also manages archival arrangement and description projects and practices for the library. Before joining Yale, Jonathan was Sound Archives Librarian at Stanford University’s Archive of Recorded Sound and, before that, Technical Support Officer for the Britten Thematic Catalogue Project at the Britten-Pears Foundation in the United Kingdom.

Michelle Peralta

Michelle M. Peralta (she/her) is the Resident Archivist for Yale Special Collections in Manuscripts and Archives. From California, she earned a Master of Library and Information Science from San José State University, and a Master of Arts in history and a Bachelor of Arts in humanities from San Diego State University. Her interests include community archives, outreach and instruction, and representation in archives and special collections.

Suzanne Lovejoy

Suzanne Eggleston Lovejoy is the Music Librarian for Reference and Instruction in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. In addition to providing research support and teaching, she oversees a project to digitize the music manuscripts of Charles Ives. Suzanne is also an organist and pianist.  Her research interests have grown from her work with archival collections at Yale, including the music of Benny Goodman, Charles Ives, J. Rosamond Johnson, and Cole Porter. She curated an exhibit, “They Sang and Took the Sword: Music of World War I,” which features music by Yale composers as well as popular songs from the war years. She holds degrees in Music and Library Science from Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.