[piano music]
My name is Ashley Rose Young
and I'm a graduate student
in the history department at Duke.
[laughter]
I came to Duke in 2010
and over the past seven years
I've focused primarily on American food culture.
There are a bunch of collections that I love working with
here at the Rubenstein and one of my favorites
is the advertising cookbook collection.
[cranking noise]
[softly] You never know what you're going to find down here.
You think cookbooks are primarily about recipes
but really they're about an entire world of cooking.
You get at something so much more profound,
which is actually community and identity and a sense of place.
My grandfather was actually a street food vendor
in the 1940s and that's a topic that I focus on in my dissertation
and eventually my mother and her two sisters took over the family business
and I grew up working in that business.
Cooking at home and cooking with friends and family
is really a part of my identity and I bring that here to Duke as well.
There were history grad students who had taken on these internships
at the Rubenstein and I knew about that early on in my career
and I thought "That's what I want to do."
I want to work in a library again, I want to interact
with these amazing collections.
So, today we're looking at the J. Walter Thompson Domestic Advertisements Collection
and we're focusing particularly on two companies,
Kraft, and also 7 up,
because they give us an interpretation of consumption through different angles
whether it be humor, whether it be through nutrition
or even comparisons of how advertisements were made
to primarily white American audiences versus African-American audiences.
[Ashley:Hey Meg!] [Meg: Hey!]
I actually started curating exhibits while I've been here
and that has been amazing. I mean, my heart really lies
in creating public art and public exhibits.
And that all ties into my dream of actually interning
at the Smithsonian this summer
where I will be working in the American Food History Project
at the National Museum of American History.
So, to take the skills that I learned here
at Duke Libraries and transfer them to the Smithsonian
is a dream come true. It's really all I could wish for.
So, I'm thrilled to have that opportunity this summer
I'm grateful to the Rubenstein for actually giving me the chance
to acquire these skills, and to make me a needed and a marketable candidate
for an internship at the Smithsonian.
So,
thank you! [laughter]
Thank you, Duke Libraries!
No comments:
Post a Comment