Students explore Yale Library special collections to curate new exhibitions

  • Standing case with four doors open showing students working at tables and two on right show. photos of students Catherine and Daniel
October 23, 2024

Two new student-curated exhibits—spanning centuries, from ancient Greece to 19th-century India —are on view through April 20 in Sterling Memorial Library’s Exhibition Corridor. Curators Daniel Zhang ’26 and Catherine Kausikan ’25 will provide tours of their exhibitions and answer questions at an opening reception on Wed., Oct. 30, at 4 p.m.

“The Scarcity of Desire: Sappho’s Encounter with the Modernist Imagination”

“The Scarcity of Desire: Sappho’s Encounter with the Modernist Imagination,” curated by Daniel Zhang, interrogates Modernist interpretations of the work of  Sappho, an elusive yet influential female poet of antiquity. How did the spare poetic corpus of this lyric poet, popular in the 6th-century BCE and beyond, become so integral to our modern vocabulary of desire? To shed light on this question, this exhibition engages authors who, centuries after Sappho’s death, have praised her contributions—among them, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Audre Lorde, James Joyce, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha—although most of her writings survive only as fragments.

Zhang is a student of Classics, and this exhibition was inspired by Prof. Pauline LeVen’s course, “Sappho and the Lyric.” Prof. LeVen was Zhang’s faculty advisor for this exhibit.

“Who Shot the Tiger? Performing Imperialism in India” 

“Who Shot the Tiger? Performing Imperialism in India” was curated by Catherine Kausikan, a student of English and Art History. This exhibition explores the recurring image of tiger hunts in 19th-century British visual culture. Colonial depictions of tiger hunts—an activity appropriated from Indian courtly tradition—enforced British imperial power through representations of violence. This exhibit, which draws on objects in Yale Library‘s collections, raises the provocative question of the archive’s complicity in imperialism by perpetuating that violence, through looking, reading, and imagining. Kausikan’s exhibit asks viewers to “decolonize” these images of empire and transform them through radical reimagination.

Kausikan traces her interest in tigers to Prof. Jennifer Raab and Paul Messier’s course “Material Histories of Photography”; to the guidance of Brent Bianchi, librarian for South and Southeast Asian Studies and Kausikan‘s faculty advisor for this exhibit; and to Prof. Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, who introduced her to “Tippoo’s Tiger,” a wooden sculpture of a tiger mauling a European solider, which was made for the ruler of South India, ca. 1780s or 1790s. A print representation of the sculpture appears in one of the books on display in the exhibit.

Read about the 2023 student-curated research exhibits.

Learn about more past student-curated exhibits.

—Deborah Cannarella