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.”

On behalf of the selection committee, John Zenelis, Dean of Libraries and University Librarian, has announced the award recipient Graduate for the 2022-23 Graduate Student Research Fellowship. This year’s Selection Committee was comprised of Alyssa Fahringer, Digital Scholarship Consultant (Chair); Jennifer Disano, Executive Director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and Carl Leak, Life Sciences Librarian and Interim Head of Mercer Library.

This fellowship was made possible by “The Student Research Endowment for the Libraries,’ which was a funding initiative of the Libraries Advisory Board. This is the inaugural year for this award, and we are excited to be recognizing the research of Bernard Atieme, a PhD candidate in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

Atieme’s dissertation will examine the motivations of rank-and-file party members that perpetuate election violence in Ghana. He plans to use the fellowship funds to travel to Ghana and interview research subjects using qualitative research methods.

When Atieme returns, he will require the assistance and expertise available in the Digital Scholarship Center in learning how to use qualitative research software as well as determining how to manage, analyze, visualize, and present the data collected.

Congratulations to Mr. Atieme as the first recipient of the University Libraries’ graduate student
research fellowship award, along with our best wishes for continued academic success!

FAIRFAX, VA – July 13, 2022: The George Mason University Libraries’ Center for Mason Legacies (CML) is pleased to announce that they were one of five 2022 recipients of the LYRASIS Catalyst Fund.

The Center for Mason Legacies and its George Mason University faculty researchers George Oberle, LaNitra Berger, Benedict Carton, and Wendi Manuel-Scott have been awarded $39,500 by the LYRASIS Catalyst Fund. This generous grant will advance an interdisciplinary project based in the University Libraries and College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The winning proposal, “Geographies of Inequity: Exploring the Hidden Lives Next Door,” draws on CML’s “Black Lives Next Door,” launched in 2021 with OSCAR support. Two other CML projects have been instrumental in shaping “Geographies of Inequity”: the Enslaved Children of George Mason, an undergraduate research initiative which started in 2016, and Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial, a work of public history recently unveiled on the Fairfax campus. Wendi Manuel-Scott is excited to have “CML use the LYRASIS grant to create an interdisciplinary social justice methodology that incorporates digital humanities and historical research in local communities, and fully engages our students in valuable transformative work.”

CML’s proposed “Geographies of Inequity” has also received the Catalyst Fund’s Sandy Nyberg Award, which recognizes “the highest levels of innovation” in publishing, writing, preservation, and other categories. Dean of the University Libraries, John Zenelis, noted “the collaborative and creative energy that materializes when faculty and librarians work together results in substantative educational experiences for students.” The 2021-2022 Catalyst Fund grant competition was international in scope. The finalists included Cambridge University, University of Virginia, Université du Québec à Montréal, and University of North Carolina System.

ABOUT THE CATALYST FUND AWARD

The Catalyst Fund is an award program that provides support for new ideas and innovative projects from the LYRASIS membership. It is administered by the LYRASIS Leaders Circle to expand opportunities to explore, test, refine, and collaborate on innovations with potential for community-wide impact.

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES & THE CENTER FOR MASON LEGACIES The University Libraries, as a core academic function of George Mason University, serves as both a repository of and digital portal to the wider universe of knowledge. The Libraries fosters innovation, originality, and imagination by qualitatively managing access to scholarship and information, providing expert consultation in the research process, actively teaching the effective and critical use of information, and disseminating research and scholarship through publishing endeavors. The Center for Mason Legacies is an interdisciplinary and collaborative research center established by the University Libraries and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The mission of the Center is

to preserve and examine the legacy of George Mason IV (1725-1792), his ancestors and heirs, and the people he enslaved. To accomplish this, student researchers are engaged in studying the past and present influences of our university’s namesake though a combination of scholarly research, public history, teaching innovation, and community outreach.