Graffiti Limbo
A University of Virginia Professor Enlisted Students To Document The Messages—Profane, Hopeful, Despairing—Left On Library Carrels By Previous Generations.
— By April White | March 21, 2025 | Daily.Jstor.Org
Student graffiti art and messages inscribed on carrel walls in the new stacks, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, prior to the renovation of the building, 2020–2023. via JSTOR
The words were etched in four languages, scratched into the edge of the pale wood by at least a dozen different hands, perhaps over the course of decades. When researchers translated and contextualized the overlapping text—faded in some spots, deliberately scratched out in others—they discovered messages of pride and dismissal, hope and despair, deep musings and passing thoughts shared in poetic verse, lyrics, symbols, and now-indecipherable allusions. If the slender board had been 2,000 years old, the find might have been a Rosetta Stone, celebrated as the key to unlocking the stories of long-disappeared cultures. But in the stacks of the Alderman Library on the campus of the University of Virginia, the pencil and ink on the carrel shelf looked like nothing more than meaningless graffiti to almost everyone—except Professor Lise Dobrin and her students.
Title of Latvian song “Skaista Ir Jaunība,” by singer Ilmārs Dzenis, enclosed in a square. Country name Ecuador with class year, enclosed in rectangle; below this, part of a line from the Ecuadorian national anthem, translating to “thousands arise.” The word “HOPE.” Enclosed in a rectangle, and in cursive writing, line from song “Shut Up I Am Dreaming Of Places Where Lovers Have Wings,” by Sunset Rubdown. On bottom, unattributed line from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence;” response to this line of poetry calling it lame. Courtesy University of Virginia.
In the spring of 2019, the budding anthropologists of Dobrin’s Literacy and Orality course began to document the graffiti that had collected on the 176 study carrels in the nine-story Alderman Library “New Stacks” since the building’s construction in 1967. The idle doodles and stray observations inked onto the peg boards, painted concrete, and stained wood furniture were destroyed when the building was demolished in the summer of 2020 to make way for a new library. But those messages live on in a collection of nearly 2,500 student photographs shared by the University of Virginia via JSTOR, with a caveat: graffiti isn’t always polite and can be downright racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. (The students took seriously anthropologists’ responsibility to capture the world as it is, not as they wished it would be; personally identifiable information is edited out.)
Student graffiti art and messages inscribed on carrel walls in the new stacks, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, prior to the renovation of the building, 2020–2023. Courtesy University of Virginia.
Though the undertaking might seem absurd even to some who decorated the New Stacks, the students were contributing to a serious field of research dating back to the mid-1800s, when the word “graffiti”—derived from the Italian word for “something scratched”—was coined by archeologists to describe the markings found on ancient structures. Perhaps the best studied of these are the buildings of Pompeii where, researchers have concluded, graffiti was considered a respected form of writing. More than 11,000 wall inscriptions have been documented in the excavated portions of the city, many inside its grandest homes.
“You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time.” – Albert Einstein. Courtesy University of Virginia.
Social and cultural historian Rebecca R. Benefiel, who studied the words and pictures scrawled in Pompeii’s House of Maius Castricius, writes that graffiti is “a dialogue” and that those conversations—between different authors, between their text and their images, and between the messages and their location—are a “window” into aspects of the past that we might otherwise overlook. The students of UVA found the same, writing in a blog post, that the graffiti in the library carrels “reveals conversations playing out in slow motion between otherwise isolated crammers. It voices the anxieties and aspirations of contemporary college students striving to leave their mark on a large and sometimes impersonal institution.”
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn. burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”—Jack Kerouac, On the Road. Courtesy University of Virginia.
“Grades are nothing but ink on paper,” one person printed on the north wall of carrel 1M-1. “True,” added another in a loopy cursive. (Someone else in that same cubicle was worried about something even more menacing than GPA, repeatedly tracing over the words “THIS IS HAUNTED” on the upper shelf.) Advice for the academically anxious students could be found in the next carrel: “REMEMBER 2 STUDY YOUR PASSION” “I’m tired of thinking,” retorted a writer in carrel 4-10, quoting poet Li-Young Lee, “I long to taste the word with a kiss.”
“So many people enter and leave your life…you have to keep the door open so they can come in. But it also means you have to let them go”—Jonathan Safran Foer. Courtesy University of Virginia. Click on the image to explore the collection.
The words of countless other writers and thinkers, among them Albert Einstein, Jack Kerouac, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Zelda Fitzgerald, adorn the walls and shelves, as does what the student researchers believe to be an original verse: “each laugh a flower by my grave / each grin a battering ram at my door / though the walls under siege are mine to save / I think I’d be happier being yours.”
“I don’t suppose I really know you very well—but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek JUST fits the depression in your shoulder.”— Zelda Fitzgerald. Courtesy University of Virginia. Click on the image to explore the collection.
Graffitists claiming to be from the class of 1927 to the class of 2021 left behind all the things you would expect: declarations of love and of hate, odes to sex, drugs and alcohol, anonymous confessions, and sketches of the WWII-era meme Kilroy (“Mike was here”). And they left behind a lot of things you wouldn’t expect: movie reviews, weather reports, even a pressing question that has vexed physicists and philosophers—“are electrons even real?”
Unattributed opening line from song “White Room,” by Cream. Doodle with declaration that someone was here, modified to be in the present tense. Courtesy University of Virginia. Click on the image to explore the collection.
On the southwest wall of carrel 4-17, in neat penciled letters, the student anthropologists found a plea that could have been directed to them: “Save the Stacks!” And in more than one way, they did. UVA’s new Edgar Shannon Library opened in January 2024 with pristine carrels but Dean of Libraries John Unsworth promised some of the students involved in the graffiti documentation project that he had no plans to prevent the next generations of students from leaving their own marks. “I’d rather have people writing on the walls than in the books,” he said.
