Craig Breaden

Craig Breaden is the Audiovisual Archivist at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, where he coordinates the management of audiovisual resources in over 500 archival collections. He began his full-time archival career in 2006 at the University of Georgia, coming to Duke in 2012. Craig has long been interested in oral histories and other kinds of field recordings, and their power to transform historical narratives. Beginning in 2007 he worked with Art Rosenbaum on, among other projects, Rosenbaum’s Grammy-winning The Art of Field Recording; in 2015 Craig and the preservation team at Duke Libraries secured a 2-year grant from CLIR for the digitization of wax cylinders and lacquer discs in the papers of Frank Clyde Brown, Duke professor and groundbreaking folk song collector. Craig is currently working on the digitization and description of tapes in the papers of Anne and Frank Warner, folk song collectors whose recording of Frank Proffitt singing Tom Dooley helped spark the folk revival of the 1950s and 60s. He is also on the leadership team of the Duke Bass Connections project studying intersections of care, empathy, and race in the papers of Rosetta Reitz and Rosetta Records.

Bio November 2024