Happy New Year! After finishing off a wonderful array of programming for 2018, we’re looking forward to the events we have in store for 2019, and hope you are too!

Our winter/spring programming begins on January 26 with our Bibliography Week lecture, “‘The Horrors of My Secret Toil’: What Frankenstein Demands of Curators”, with speaker, Elizabeth Denlinger. She will consider Mary Shelley’s fictional experiment with dead bodies and their place in the scientific world of Shelley’s time, as well as exploring the ethical implications of making a spectacle of human bodies — in the novel, in movies, and in exhibitions.

Please join the Academy on January 30 for the “Tenth Annual History of Medicine and Public Health Night, Part I“. This special evening of selected short talks will address varied topics in the history of medicine and public health from milk pasteurization to the eradication of rinderpest in East Africa.

February 4-8 is Color Our Collections Week! Begun by the Academy Library in 2016, Color Our Collections Week brings you free coloring sheets based on materials in our Library as well as other cultural institutions from around the world. Users are invited to download and print the coloring sheets via the website www.colorourcollections.org and share their filled-in images with hashtag #ColorOurCollections.

Who is remembered, commemorated, and forgotten? Join us on February 6 for “Remembering the Dead“, a Germ City event where activist and artist Avram Finkelstein and essayist Garnette Cadogan consider the complicated social and institutional responses to infectious disease with the Tenement Museum’s David Favaloro.

The “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis” was an unethical medical research study conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service on hundreds of African-American men from 1932-1972. “Could Tuskegee Happen Today?”, the inaugural event in the Academy’s Race & Health series, to be held on February 26, will share first-person accounts from survivors, combined with expert perspectives and audience discussion, to address the history and legacy of the study and why it remains relevant today. 

On April 3, we will be presenting “Facing the Future: Predicting and Preparing for Disease Outbreaks“. At this Germ City event, science reporter Sonia Shah will speak with experts Dr. Amy Fairchild, Dr. Larry Madoff, and Lauren Flicker about how prepared we are for future pandemics.

Save the date for April 11, our annual Celebration of the Library: “How the Voice Made Us Human”! This year’s speaker is award-winning journalist and author of As Nature Made Him John Colapinto, who will discuss his current book project on the history of the voice.

Lastly, be on the lookout: newly-added dates for our incredibly popular walking tours on Roosevelt Island and Ellis Island are coming soon!

Check back here for special guest posts by some of our speakers in the coming months, and we hope to see you soon!

If you’d like all this information in handy brochure form, click here.