Doctoral candidate Dianah T. Kacunguzi will present her research at the 10th Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in in Libraries International Conference (QQML 2018), which will be held on May 22-25 in Chania, Greece.

Master's student Sara Benson, copyright librarian and assistant professor at the University Library, and Harriett Green, affiliated faculty member and head of scholarly communication and publishing at the University Library, have been invited to present at the 2017 Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI 2017).

The field of library and information science (LIS) has a long history of research on the preservation of materials in libraries and archives. However, that research has focused almost exclusively on tangible aspects of cultural heritage. Associate Professor Jerome McDonough, Associate Professor Lori Kendall, and Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn have released a white paper as part of their work on the Preserving Intangible Cultural Heritage project.

Professor Emeritus Abdul Alkalimat will give the keynote presentation at the 30th Symposium on African American Culture and Philosophy, which will be held from December 1-3 at Purdue University. This year's symposium will explore the "humanity" in the digital humanities as well as Africana/Black studies' perspectives.

Associate Professor Carol Tilley is the co-author of a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Comics, a newly published book edited by Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin. In the chapter, "Teaching and Learning with Comics," Tilley and Robert G. Weiner, a humanities librarian at Texas Tech University, examine how comics have been used as an instructional tool.

Doctoral candidate Melissa Villa-Nicholas successfully defended her dissertation, "Latinas in Telecommunications: Intersectional Experiences in the Bell System," on June 30.

Associate Professor Jerome McDonough and Rhiannon Bettivia, who recently defended her dissertation at GSLIS, will participate in the third biennial conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, which will be held June 3-8 in Montreal. The theme of the conference is, “What Does Heritage Change?”

Thanks to research conducted by Associate Professor Carol Tilley, the work of one of the most influential anti-comics voices has been debunked. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s evidence of the negative effects of comic readership on young people hasn’t been taken seriously by scholars in decades, but a new discovery by Tilley shows that even when Wertham’s claims were taken as fact by many—in the 1940s and 1950s—a small but vocal group was already questioning his methods.

A new book by alumnus David Hunter (PhD '89), The Lives of George Frideric Handel, is part biography and part genre case study. The famous composer’s life has been documented in numerous biographies, which Hunter scrutinized to differentiate history from interpretation. His findings led to this new work, which was published recently by Boydell Press.

Associate Professor Bonnie Mak will travel to the United Arab Emirates in March to take part in a workshop at New York University’s Abu Dhabi Institute. “Charisma of the Book: Global Perspectives for the 21st Century,” will be held March 12-14.

William H. Dutton, Quello Professor of Media and Information Policy at Michigan State University, will deliver the Spring 2016 Windsor Lecture at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, March 14, in GSLIS Room 126. His lecture is titled, "Information Power Shifts and the Fifth Estate." A reception will be held in the GSLIS east foyer immediately following the lecture.

Library Trends, GSLIS’s scholarly publication edited by Professor Alistair Black, issued a two-part special issue in 2014-2015 commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain. “Libraries in a Post-Communist World: A Quarter of a Century of Development in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia,” was published as issues two and four of Volume 63 and guest edited by Hermina…

GSLIS Associate Professor Catherine Blake is a co-principal investigator on a newly announced, five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, “A Big Data-Theoretic Approach to Quantify Organizational Failure Mechanisms in Probabilistic Risk Assessment.” Led by Zahra Mohaghegh, assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at Illinois, the $899,000 project is funded by two NSF programs: Science of Organizations (SoO) and Big Data Science and Engineering (BIGDATA)

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been awarded a grant of more than $25,500 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the efforts of GSLIS Associate Professors Jerome McDonough and Lori Kendall and Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn to cultivate a new research community focused specifically on the preservation of intangible cultural heritage.

This October, GSLIS will welcome to campus Cuban librarian and educator Marta Terry González, a George A. Miller Visiting Professor. Her visit was organized by GSLIS Associate Professor Kate Williams, who coauthored Terry’s biography with GSLIS Professor Emeritus Abdul Alkalimat. “Cuba and the United States are working out a new state-to-state relationship, and all kinds of new collaborations…

Professor Michael Twidale has joined a research collaboration based at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) that seeks to discover correlations between the treatment of convicts sentenced to transportation from Europe to Tasmania in the first half of the nineteenth century and health trends among their descendants.   UTAS Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart is leading the research group in the…

How do heritages travel? How is trans-Atlantic tourism shaped by heritage? To what extent have traditions crossed and recrossed the Atlantic? Professor Alistair Black and fellow scholars from both sides of the Atlantic will gather in Liverpool, UK, July 13-16 to discuss these questions. Trans-Atlantic Dialogues on Cultural Hertiage: Heritage, Tourism, and Traditions is hosted jointly by the…

Associate Professor Bonnie Mak has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), a global network of book historians. Mak’s eight-year appointment (2015-2023) will be confirmed at the society’s annual meeting and conference held July 7-10 in Longueuil and Montreal, Canada. Established in the early 1990s, the SHARP…

Associate Professor Carol Tilley will join thousands of her fellow comic book fans in San Diego July 9-12 for Comic-Con International, one of the largest comics and entertainment events in the world. Tilley will share her expertise in comics and comics history through her participation in the following panel discussions: "Lost (and Found) Comics Studies of the Past," with authors Brad Ricca…

Three members of the GSLIS community will participate in Digital Humanities 2015 (DH2015), the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. The event will be held June 29 - July 3 at the University of Western Sydney. Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie will participate in a panel discussion titled, "Digital Dunhuang: Enhancing Virtual…