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OSU Libraries and Press and CALYX Press receive major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities

CALYX Press and Oregon State University Libraries and Press have been awarded a grant of $96,437 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize at-risk literature published through CALYX Press, a local feminist press founded in 1976.

This grant enables important literary works from the last 50 years of the feminist movement to be transformed into openly licensed e-book formats. The project’s goal is to foster wider readership and a renewed interest in the impact of the small independent press on national and international feminist movements. Taking advantage of contemporary e-book technology, the project will digitize and distribute out-of-print texts by authors now central to contemporary feminist literature.

“Feminist presses of the last 50 years, including CALYX Press, have been a fundamental part of the cultural discourse,” says Alicia Bublitz, managing editor of CALYX Press, “and we are dedicated to preserving those voices in a digital world. The work of these presses is disappearing, and maintaining their foundational texts is essential for scholarship, history and art. This project is an acknowledgment of our great debt to these often controversial, always passionate, and incredibly powerful leaders.” 

Dr. Korey Jackson, Gray Family Chair for Innovative Library Services, and Jane Nichols, instruction and emerging technologies librarian, both of OSU Libraries and Press, offered this statement: “We combine CALYX’s independent lens and feminist literary connections with our dedicated infrastructure, forward-thinking personnel, and support for open access. Our hope is to inspire new audiences and foster new readers of feminist literature by making these texts openly available.”

About CALYX Press: CALYX, Inc. of Corvallis, Oregon was founded to publish art and literature by women. As one of the nation's oldest feminist presses, it has published diverse authors including Julia Alvarez, Chitra Divakaruni, Barbara Kingsolver, Sharon Olds, Linda Hogan, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. CALYX publishes the award-winning CALYX Journal twice a year. 

Library faculty seminar: Reimagining the Archival Finding Aid (12/11)

The next library faculty seminar will be held on December 11 at 10 a.m. in the Willamette Rooms on the Valley Library’s third floor. Anne Bahde from the library’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center will present “Reimagining the Archival Finding Aid using Digital Humanities Visualization Techniques.” Hope to see you there. 

Here’s the description of the seminar’s content: Traditional archival finding aids have long been criticized for their usability challenges. This presentation will demonstrate a reimagined model of this genre incorporating network graphs, timelines and maps to encourage and enable exploration of archival collections. Preliminary results of user focus groups and surveys will be presented along with ideas for further enhancements to the archival research experience.

Library faculty seminar: Reimagining the Archival Finding Aid (12/11)

The next library faculty seminar will be held on December 11 at 10 a.m. in the Willamette Rooms on the Valley Library’s third floor. Anne Bahde from the library’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center will present “Reimagining the Archival Finding Aid using Digital Humanities Visualization Techniques.” Hope to see you there. 

Here’s the description of the seminar’s content: Traditional archival finding aids have long been criticized for their usability challenges. This presentation will demonstrate a reimagined model of this genre incorporating network graphs, timelines and maps to encourage and enable exploration of archival collections. Preliminary results of user focus groups and surveys will be presented along with ideas for further enhancements to the archival research experience.

Library faculty seminar: Reimagining the Archival Finding Aid (12/11)

The next library faculty seminar will be held on December 11 at 10 a.m. in the Willamette Rooms on the Valley Library’s third floor. Anne Bahde from the library’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center will present “Reimagining the Archival Finding Aid using Digital Humanities Visualization Techniques.” Hope to see you there. 

Here’s the description of the seminar’s content: Traditional archival finding aids have long been criticized for their usability challenges. This presentation will demonstrate a reimagined model of this genre incorporating network graphs, timelines and maps to encourage and enable exploration of archival collections. Preliminary results of user focus groups and surveys will be presented along with ideas for further enhancements to the archival research experience.

Atomic bombs and climate change lecture on 12/10

Please mark your calendars for the latest in the library’s series of Resident Scholar presentations, which will take place next week. Justin McBrien, a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Virginia, will discuss his research in a lecture titled “Making Climate Change: The ‘Atom Weather’ Controversy and the Question of Human Planetary Agency, 1945-1970.”  

This event will be Thursday, December 10 at 2:00 p.m. in the Reading Room of the Special Collections and Archives Research Center on the library’s fifth floor. A summary of McBrien’s talk is below. Hope to see you there. 

This presentation examines the public debate in the US during the 1940s-1960s over the potential of the nuclear explosions to affect large-scale climatic changes. The “atom weather” controversy prefigured the awareness that humans have enormous environmental impacts with the power to save or destroy life on earth. By suggesting that nuclear explosions could inadvertently trigger extreme weather and rapid climate change, believers in atom weather were early articulators of the concept of the global biosphere as a chaotic system vulnerable to disturbances. 

By the mid-1950s, a considerable proportion of the American public blamed nuclear testing for droughts, frosts and tornado outbreaks. Meteorological experts studying fallout circulation dismissed the possibility that nuclear explosions could rival nature’s most powerful forces. They assumed that the global atmosphere was a stable system that could absorb any disturbances or pollutants that humanity might produce. Yet in their attempts to justify the continuation of nuclear testing and mollify public fears, these experts began to promote the bomb’s potential to modify the climate. They advocated for ambitious programs to use “peaceful explosions” for the “good of mankind” in continental-scale “geographical engineering” schemes. 

This rhetoric seemed only to exacerbate public fears of the bomb’s potential to precipitate environmental catastrophes. Even atmospheric experts who had previously denied possibility of bomb-induced “weather modification” began to speculate about their potential to trigger an Ice Age. When testing went underground in the 1960s, these same scientists turned their attention from the circulation of radioactive fallout to that of a variety of human-caused pollutants. Their studies led to the conclusion that the public had the right idea all along, though not the right culprit: it was not nuclear testing but industrial pollution that was inadvertently modifying the global climate system. 

Atomic bombs and climate change lecture on 12/10

Please mark your calendars for the latest in the library’s series of Resident Scholar presentations, which will take place next week. Justin McBrien, a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Virginia, will discuss his research in a lecture titled “Making Climate Change: The ‘Atom Weather’ Controversy and the Question of Human Planetary Agency, 1945-1970.”  

This event will be Thursday, December 10 at 2:00 p.m. in the Reading Room of the Special Collections and Archives Research Center on the library’s fifth floor. A summary of McBrien’s talk is below. Hope to see you there. 

This presentation examines the public debate in the US during the 1940s-1960s over the potential of the nuclear explosions to affect large-scale climatic changes. The “atom weather” controversy prefigured the awareness that humans have enormous environmental impacts with the power to save or destroy life on earth. By suggesting that nuclear explosions could inadvertently trigger extreme weather and rapid climate change, believers in atom weather were early articulators of the concept of the global biosphere as a chaotic system vulnerable to disturbances. 

By the mid-1950s, a considerable proportion of the American public blamed nuclear testing for droughts, frosts and tornado outbreaks. Meteorological experts studying fallout circulation dismissed the possibility that nuclear explosions could rival nature’s most powerful forces. They assumed that the global atmosphere was a stable system that could absorb any disturbances or pollutants that humanity might produce. Yet in their attempts to justify the continuation of nuclear testing and mollify public fears, these experts began to promote the bomb’s potential to modify the climate. They advocated for ambitious programs to use “peaceful explosions” for the “good of mankind” in continental-scale “geographical engineering” schemes. 

This rhetoric seemed only to exacerbate public fears of the bomb’s potential to precipitate environmental catastrophes. Even atmospheric experts who had previously denied possibility of bomb-induced “weather modification” began to speculate about their potential to trigger an Ice Age. When testing went underground in the 1960s, these same scientists turned their attention from the circulation of radioactive fallout to that of a variety of human-caused pollutants. Their studies led to the conclusion that the public had the right idea all along, though not the right culprit: it was not nuclear testing but industrial pollution that was inadvertently modifying the global climate system. 

Atomic bombs and climate change lecture on 12/10

Please mark your calendars for the latest in the library’s series of Resident Scholar presentations, which will take place next week. Justin McBrien, a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Virginia, will discuss his research in a lecture titled “Making Climate Change: The ‘Atom Weather’ Controversy and the Question of Human Planetary Agency, 1945-1970.”  

This event will be Thursday, December 10 at 2:00 p.m. in the Reading Room of the Special Collections and Archives Research Center on the library’s fifth floor. A summary of McBrien’s talk is below. Hope to see you there. 

This presentation examines the public debate in the US during the 1940s-1960s over the potential of the nuclear explosions to affect large-scale climatic changes. The “atom weather” controversy prefigured the awareness that humans have enormous environmental impacts with the power to save or destroy life on earth. By suggesting that nuclear explosions could inadvertently trigger extreme weather and rapid climate change, believers in atom weather were early articulators of the concept of the global biosphere as a chaotic system vulnerable to disturbances. 

By the mid-1950s, a considerable proportion of the American public blamed nuclear testing for droughts, frosts and tornado outbreaks. Meteorological experts studying fallout circulation dismissed the possibility that nuclear explosions could rival nature’s most powerful forces. They assumed that the global atmosphere was a stable system that could absorb any disturbances or pollutants that humanity might produce. Yet in their attempts to justify the continuation of nuclear testing and mollify public fears, these experts began to promote the bomb’s potential to modify the climate. They advocated for ambitious programs to use “peaceful explosions” for the “good of mankind” in continental-scale “geographical engineering” schemes. 

This rhetoric seemed only to exacerbate public fears of the bomb’s potential to precipitate environmental catastrophes. Even atmospheric experts who had previously denied possibility of bomb-induced “weather modification” began to speculate about their potential to trigger an Ice Age. When testing went underground in the 1960s, these same scientists turned their attention from the circulation of radioactive fallout to that of a variety of human-caused pollutants. Their studies led to the conclusion that the public had the right idea all along, though not the right culprit: it was not nuclear testing but industrial pollution that was inadvertently modifying the global climate system. 

Atomic bombs and climate change lecture on 12/10

Please mark your calendars for the latest in the library’s series of Resident Scholar presentations, which will take place next week. Justin McBrien, a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Virginia, will discuss his research in a lecture titled “Making Climate Change: The ‘Atom Weather’ Controversy and the Question of Human Planetary Agency, 1945-1970.”  

This event will be Thursday, December 10 at 2:00 p.m. in the Reading Room of the Special Collections and Archives Research Center on the library’s fifth floor. A summary of McBrien’s talk is below. Hope to see you there. 

This presentation examines the public debate in the US during the 1940s-1960s over the potential of the nuclear explosions to affect large-scale climatic changes. The “atom weather” controversy prefigured the awareness that humans have enormous environmental impacts with the power to save or destroy life on earth. By suggesting that nuclear explosions could inadvertently trigger extreme weather and rapid climate change, believers in atom weather were early articulators of the concept of the global biosphere as a chaotic system vulnerable to disturbances. 

By the mid-1950s, a considerable proportion of the American public blamed nuclear testing for droughts, frosts and tornado outbreaks. Meteorological experts studying fallout circulation dismissed the possibility that nuclear explosions could rival nature’s most powerful forces. They assumed that the global atmosphere was a stable system that could absorb any disturbances or pollutants that humanity might produce. Yet in their attempts to justify the continuation of nuclear testing and mollify public fears, these experts began to promote the bomb’s potential to modify the climate. They advocated for ambitious programs to use “peaceful explosions” for the “good of mankind” in continental-scale “geographical engineering” schemes. 

This rhetoric seemed only to exacerbate public fears of the bomb’s potential to precipitate environmental catastrophes. Even atmospheric experts who had previously denied possibility of bomb-induced “weather modification” began to speculate about their potential to trigger an Ice Age. When testing went underground in the 1960s, these same scientists turned their attention from the circulation of radioactive fallout to that of a variety of human-caused pollutants. Their studies led to the conclusion that the public had the right idea all along, though not the right culprit: it was not nuclear testing but industrial pollution that was inadvertently modifying the global climate system. 

Recycling/composting demos on 12/2 and 12/3

Come by for short demos (10 minutes) on Wednesday (12/2) and Thursday (12/3) at noon and 3:00 p.m. in the Library Learning Commons (near the Info Desk on the second floor). Dead Week and Finals Week in the Valley Library means lots of students -- and lots of food. Do your part, and learn how to properly sort your waste into the compost, recycling and trash bins.

Recycling/composting demos on 12/2 and 12/3

Come by for short demos (10 minutes) on Wednesday (12/2) and Thursday (12/3) at noon and 3:00 p.m. in the Library Learning Commons (near the Info Desk on the second floor). Dead Week and Finals Week in the Valley Library means lots of students -- and lots of food. Do your part, and learn how to properly sort your waste into the compost, recycling and trash bins.

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