Posts by Elizabeth Nicole Settoducato

A pop-up exhibit (or rare book meet and greet, as we later came to call them) is an informal, short-term display of Special Collections materials. We take our items outside of the Reading Room because we want as many people as possible to engage with our collections and ask our staff questions. This year, we held six of these exhibits in three locations within the Hatcher & Shapiro Libraries and we're excited to tell you what we've learned from a year of ephemeral events.

The University of Michgan has a long history of student activism on campus, particularly around antiwar movements. An especially significant event was the Feburary 1970 protest against General Electric recruiting engineers on campus. The Labadie Collection’s Subject Vertical Files has documentation of this event which helps us understand the contexts of student activism in the past and present.

Rise of the Rocket Girls profiles multiple generations of women working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from the 1940s to present. The book highlights gender-based challenges as well as scientific ones, and accessibly explains engineering concepts. Readers who loved Hidden Figures will not be disappointed by this book.

The Shapiro Undergraduate Library is starting off the new year with a bicentennial-themed display of books about all 200 years of U-M's history. A critical part of that history, and a strong component of our display, is the inclusion of women at the university. In this post, we feature five of our many books about women at Michigan.

Cat Cora is known for being the first female Iron Chef, but this memoir (written with Karen Karbo) offers a heartfelt and compelling account of her whole life and the hardships she faced on her path to Michelin-starred success and culinary fame.