Anything and All Things of Interest to Women: The Sarah Westphal Collection

Join us in celebrating the newly acquired Sarah Westphal Collection and the opening of an exhibition of works from the collection: "Anything and All Things of Interest to Women: The Sarah Westphal Collection."

Speakers will include Jean Fox O'Barr, Duke University Distinguished Service Professor; Ann Marie Rasmussen, Professor and Diefenbaker Memorial Chair in German Literary Studies, University of Waterloo; Thomas Robisheaux, Duke University History Department

Sarah Westphal, who received her PhD from Yale in 1983, was a member of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature and an affiliate of the Program in Women's Studies at Duke from 1983-1986. In addition to her long academic career as a scholar of medieval German literature, Westphal has spent thirty-five years amassing a collection of over six hundred books written, printed, illustrated, or published by women from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Westphal's particular interest is women in Britain and continental Europe in the eighteenth-century. The collection includes both monumental works such as a beautifully bound first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) to previously unrecorded works and unique manuscript collections.