The 2024 Ready for the World Music Series featured lectures, exhibits, master classes, and performances of the classical music of Turkey.
Partnerships—both on and off campus—amplify the University Libraries’ impact. A few co-sponsored events from 2024 prove the point.
Big Orange STEM Saturday
More than 120 high school students attended the Big Orange STEM Saturday Conference on January 27 at the John C. Hodges Library. BOSS, organized by the Libraries’ office of Community Learning and Engagement, is a daylong conference that lets students explore careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Visiting students represented 20 high schools from nine East Tennessee counties.
The program’s mission is to bring information on STEM careers to students from historically underrepresented communities and expose them to university life. Reaching out to this often-underserved population inspires future Volunteers to join the university’s diverse community.
The conference is presented annually for students participating in UT’s College Access and Persistence Services program. CAPS works with college-bound low-income and first-generation students to help them overcome social, academic, financial, and cultural barriers to higher education.
The conference theme was “Adventures and Explorations.” Students explored topics such as artificial intelligence, game-based learning, moon exploration, and the nature of the universe. The keynote speaker was UT alum Camille Bergin, an influencer who uses her social media brand, the Galactic Gal, to educate others about space and inspire young girls and women to pursue STEM careers.
Between sessions, students mingled with representatives from UT programs such as the Kao Innovation and Collaboration Studio, Pre-College Research Excellence Programs, and the Medbery Makerspace. Exhibitors provided unique hands-on displays for students, from programmable robots to virtual reality simulations.
Ready for the World Music Series – Turkey
Performers and organizers of the 2024 Ready for the World Music Series.
The Ready for the World Music Series is held annually by the Natalie L. Haslam College of Music and co-hosted by UT Libraries. The series brings renowned artists to campus to perform and talk about musical styles from regions around the world, emphasizing each region’s contribution to Western classical music. It offers an immersive experience with musical performances, lectures, art exhibits, and refreshments that reflect the culinary traditions of the featured region.
Miroslav Hristov, professor of violin, is the founder and director of the series. Each year, music librarian Nathalie Hristov joins her husband in planning the event.
Over two days, February 25 and 26, campus and community members enjoyed the rich and diverse music, art, and culture of Turkey.
UT Libraries mounted informative displays for festivalgoers to enjoy. Nathalie Hristov prepared a display on using library resources to explore the music, literature, and culture of Turkey. A display by the UT Libraries’ Belonging and Engagement Committee explained the committee’s mission of promoting civility and awareness of diversity issues. The all-volunteer library staff group participates in campus events and hosts an ongoing discussion series on topics related to social justice.
Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture – Carolyn Finney
Cultural geographer Carolyn Finney speaks to Friends of the Knox County Public Library and the John C. Hodges Society of the University of Tennessee Libraries.
The national narrative on the environment is incomplete, Carolyn Finney told a packed hall at the East Tennessee History Center on February 29, because non-White voices have been largely excluded from the conversation.
Finney, a storyteller, author, and cultural geographer, delivered the 2024 Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture, an annual presentation hosted by the Friends of the Knox County Public Library and the John C. Hodges Society of the University of Tennessee Libraries. Speakers at the Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture represent a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and work, but all have a deep connection to one or more of Stokely’s passions: Appalachia, the environment, and racial and gender equity.
While in graduate school working on the dissertation that evolved into her book Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, Finney noted, “I couldn’t find a single story about Black people and the environment on the library shelves—except for environmental justice stories where something bad has happened to a community of Black people. . . . Where are the nature stories? Where are the adventure stories? Where are the conservation stories?”
Finney recounted a number of personal stories. She told the audience about growing up in an exclusive all-White upper-class neighborhood outside New York City, where her parents were the caretakers of an estate. After retiring and moving away, her parents received a letter saying that a conservation easement had been placed on the property and it would be protected in perpetuity. While the letter “thanks the new owner for his conservation mindedness, there is nothing in the letter thanking my parents, who had cared for that land for nearly 50 years full time—which meant just like that they were gone from the environmental history.
“Land is never just about land. It’s about economic and political power. It is about legacy. It is about the right to say you belong.
“Whose stories do we tell? And who gets to tell those stories?” Finney asked. Many stories, she said, have simply been erased from the dominant national narrative. “Let’s not forget: All this land was stolen!”
Boundless: Artists in the Archives – Amythyst Kiah
Singer-songwriter Amythyst Kiah
The UT Libraries’ performance series Boundless: Artists in the Archives invites musicians and other artists to visit the Libraries’ archives and create original works inspired by what they discover there.
UT Libraries partnered with Big Ears, Knoxville’s world-renowned music festival, to host the 2024 Boundless artist. Singer-songwriter Amythyst Kiah, who was in town to perform at Big Ears, gave a free Boundless performance at the Knoxville Museum of Art on the eve of the festival.
Kiah performed a number of songs from her repertoire and talked about her creative process before introducing the song she had composed especially for the March 20 occasion.
Exploring UT’s archives, Kiah had been captivated by firsthand accounts of the deadly wildfires that swept through Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains in 2016. Those accounts are part of Rising from the Ashes, an oral history project conducted in the wake of the Chimney Tops 2 wildfires and preserved by the Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives.
“When I saw the title Rising from the Ashes, before I even finished reading, I immediately was intrigued,” Kiah told the audience.
“When I started reading all of the interviews . . . from people that lost businesses, that lost homes, people that worked at the Red Cross, or anybody that volunteered. . . . No matter how much someone had lost, in the interview they always talked about other people, how other people are doing. There’s something really empowering about a community of people coming together and still taking care of one another even when you have every reason to kick and scream and curse at the sky.
“The interview that really pulled me in—the first one that pulled me in—was the interview with Andrew Miller, who’s a biologist,” Kiah said. “He and his team went out in the field and found black morels, which are post-fire mushrooms. They only occur after a forest fire. And their main purpose is to rejuvenate the earth, to create new life.”
The morels became a metaphor for the resurrection of the Gatlinburg community and inspired the intro and outro of “From the Charred Remains.”
In the midst of the forest blackened and bare Emerging from a fire’s kiss Resilience wrapped in a veil, ashen gray A promise is shorn from the charred remains
Intro to “From the Charred Remains” by Amythyst Kiah
