Our new exhibit in Fenwick is officially open! From February 2nd through April 2nd, you can view Kat Thompson’s Looking For My People at the Fenwick Gallery.

Kat Thompson, “Looking for My People,” 2022

About the Artist:

Kat Thompson is an artist based in Virginia who works in photography, textile, sculptural collage, and installation. She confronts her dual American and Jamaican identity through projects that depict traces of her family’s journey using personal and found materials. Her focus is to uncover stories that mirror parts of ourselves back to us, including our histories, current realities, and future possibilities. Thompson is an alumna of George Mason University where she received her BFA in Photography. She is currently completing her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Thompson is an alumna of George Mason University where she received her BFA in Photography. She is currently in the process of completing her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. In 2021, Thompson was awarded a Young Alumni Creative Development Grant from Mason’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, and she previously had a solo exhibition in the Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery.

More details at: fenwickgallery.gmu.edu/exhibitions/looking-for-my-people/

Effective January 1, 2023, Mason researchers will have more opportunities to publish journal articles Open Access (OA) at no cost. VIVA, Virginia’s academic library consortium, is launching three new read and publish agreements, so-named because they cover subscription (or read) access to journals plus OA publishing costs (article processing fees or APCs) for those journals.  

Agreements with Cambridge University Press and the International Water Association run through December 31, 2025. A pilot, two-year agreement with Institute of Physics ends December 31, 2024. 

VIVA already has OA agreements with Wiley, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and Rockefeller University Press. For more information about APC discounts through VIVA, visit this page.  

To benefit from VIVA’s OA agreements, a Mason author must be listed as the corresponding author using their gmu.edu email address. These agreements cover most, but not all, journals from each publisher. 

In addition to participating in VIVA’s read and publish agreements, Mason Libraries offers an Open Access Publishing Fund to offset the cost of OA publishing. The Libraries also supports OA publishing through contributions to MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D2O) book publishing program, and through institutional support for ArXiv, the Directory of OA Journals, and Ergo: A Journal of Open Access Philosophy. 

Questions? 

Contact the Collections Strategy Department at libcoll@gmu.edu, or reach out to your subject librarian. 

From October 15 to December 15, 12 mason units have designated a 24-hour period as a one-day fundraising event.
The Libraries’ Season of Giving Day is Wednesday, November 16.

The Libraries has chosen three funds as priorities for their Season of Giving Day on Wednesday, November 16. Through the Libraries’ Student Research Endowment, Student Assistant Scholarship Endowment, and the Center for Mason Legacies, the Libraries is able to provide opportunities for students to help them gain valuable skills for their future careers. Working with the Libraries – as student assistants, graduate research assistants, or interns – provides students with collaborative research opportunities, financial support, and experience. These opportunities support student success at Mason and enhance their academic careers and resumes. We believe student research skills gained at Mason benefit the lives of many in the future. Help the Libraries support student research and success at George Mason today!

The Student Assistant Scholarship Endowment enables the Libraries to recognize and support student assistants who have demonstrated outstanding work performance in the University Libraries while meeting the academic requirements of their coursework at Mason. The purpose of the endowment is to award scholarships each year to assist undergraduate student employees with their educational expenses at the university.

The Libraries’ Student Research Endowment provides recognition and monetary support for Mason students by funding a Graduate Student Fellowship and an Undergraduate Student Research Prize each academic year.

Gifts to the Center for Mason Legacies fund allow the Libraries to provide stipends for graduate and undergraduate student assistants, offer internship opportunities, enable public programing and community outreach, and establish future initiatives in support of the center’s mission to examine the legacy of George Mason IV and his enduring impact on American politics, Northern Virginia development, and higher education.

Give to the Libraries

A new round of VIVA Open Adopt Grants is now open and faculty have until Wednesday, Dec. 7, to apply. VIVA Open Adopt Grants provide awards of $2,000 to individual instructors to support the time it takes to integrate existing open or no-cost materials into a syllabus, and to ensure that the results of those efforts are widely available to Virginia educators. VIVA Open Adopt Grants will be awarded to individual faculty members hoping to adopt an already existing open resource. Team and departmental adoptions, as well as projects seeking to adapt or create new Open Educational Resources, should apply for the next round of the larger scale VVIVA Open Course Grants. Informational webinars will be held on the below dates and registration is required.

Wednesday, Nov. 2 (10:00 a.m.)
Wednesday, Nov. 30 (11:00 a.m.)

Details are available on VIVA’s website

Questions? Email to Emilie Algenio, Open Educational Resources and Scholarly Communications Lead, University Libraries

Dean of Libraries and University Librarian John G. Zenelis has announced the award recipients for the 2022-23 Fenwick Fellowships: Huwy-min Lucia Liu, assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology, and Jesse Kirkpatrick, research associate professor, department of philosophy and acting director, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy.

The Fenwick Fellowship is awarded annually to one or two Mason tenured, tenure-track, or multi-year appointment term faculty members to pursue a research project that uses and enhances the University Libraries’ resources while advancing knowledge in their fields. The recipients are provided with a fully equipped and furnished research office in Fenwick Library and an award of $5,000 to support the recipient’s research project. The term for the fellowship is one academic year; Professors Liu and Kirkpatrick will present on the outcomes of their projects in spring 2024 at the annual Fenwick Fellow Lecture hosted by the University Libraries.

Liu’s, social science research project, Governing Nature in China: The Emergence of the Chinese National Park System, will focus on social change in authoritarian and socialist regimes. Specifically, she explores how ordinary Chinese people navigate through and respond to structural changes through topics on citizenship, identity, governance, and activism.

Kirkpatrick’s digital humanities research project, The Cultural, Economic, and Institutional Determinants of AI Infrastructures and their Consequences in Global Contexts, focuses on the ethics of peace and security, with an emphasis on the ethical, social, and policy implications of emerging technologies. His research is interdisciplinary, cutting across such fields as Philosophy, Political Science, Public Policy, and the Life and Computer Sciences. At its core, it aims to explore two central, interrelated themes: (1) how a suite of technologies, singularly and in convergence, impact peace and security, and (2) what the ethical, social, and policy implications of these impacts may be. Representative areas of technology that Jesse’s research has addressed include, AI and autonomy, biotechnology, and tele-operated systems.

Dean Zenelis commented, “Each year the Fenwick Fellows program receives a number of creative and innovative proposals from Mason faculty members, and I am grateful for the work of the review committee in selecting this year’s recipients. It is rewarding to read in the proposals of this year’s fellows of their intent to work with two important centers within the Libraries – the Social Sciences and the Digital Scholarship Center. The breath of the research offered in these proposals … is reflective of the Libraries’ range of collections and expertise. We look forward to hearing about the project results next year when Professors Liu and Kirkpatrick share their findings.”