Library Newsletter Fall 2017

NEWSLETTER FALL 2017 Message from the Dean of the Library and Learning Technologies Susan M. Ryan Despite the interruption of Hurricane Irma that closed the campus for ten days, Stetson students have hit the ground running this fall. We always look forward to August when the campus comes back to life and the rhythm of a new year begins. But summers in the library are anything but quiet – every summer we undergo facilities and/or technology upgrades, and rethink our strategies for providing library collections and services to the next crop of Hatters. (Check out the photos of our new Quiet Study Area, for example, below and right.) As always, it is an exciting time at the duPont-Ball Library! Quiet Study Area Now Open Students use our library in large numbers – and we love to see them here. But with all the coming and going, the group work, the hum of printers, and the click of keyboards, the library can get a little noisy, especially on the main floor. A few years ago, we created a “Quiet Zone” on the upper mezzanine that proved so popular that demand soon surpassed the area’s capacity. This summer we renovated a large portion of the ground floor, removing shelving, painting, and installing carpet and art work. Thanks to funding from the John Haire Family Library Endowment and the Student Government Association, we added new seating, tables, and eight colorful giant beanbags. Students love the space, and the ground level completely shuts out the noise from the busy main floor. We have had a big “thumbs up” on the space, and we will be adding more seating this semester. ___________________________________________ Faculty Members Honored The library has a tradition of honoring faculty members at our annual August reception who have been recently tenured and/or promoted. We ask each faculty member to choose a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in their personal or professional lives and we add that book to our collection with a commemorative bookplate. Wendy Anderson, tenured as Professor of Environmental Science and Studies: Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson. “I read this book in my early faculty career 18 years ago as a young woman. I was inspired by the stories of women’s academic careers: how each woman featured in this book had navigated the challenges and opportunities of her career, embraced its messiness, depended on friendships and professional networks, and made heartbreaking sacrifices along the way. I reread this book four years ago as a middle-aged woman as I was preparing to pry myself from the university I had served for 16 years to leap into a new place and chapter. Reading it anew, I was refreshed and emboldened by Dr. Bateson’s frankness about women’s experiences in academia, which, at that point, were reflections of my own. Moving into this next chapter of age and career and parenting, I knew I would have even greater opportunities to do important work in the world and in the institution I serve.” Jon Carrick, tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of Management: “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People [by Stephan R. Covey] provided me insights that have helped me take on some of my biggest challenges. It gave me a framework for leveraging resources, dealing with problems, and maximizing opportunities. The book is geared towards people in business, but the lessons from it can be to people in any field.” Valrie Chambers, tenured as Associate Professor of Accounting: “One influential book that I have enjoyed is an older one by Denise Shekerjian called Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas are Born. This book looks at bright people from many different disciplines to find common threads of inspiration. I am encouraged by the diversity displayed by geniuses in field, talent, demographics and thought. The common thread for geniuses was [having] a teacher or mentor who, while often not the most technically strong in that field, inspired the geniuses to love their area of expertise. As teachers, we can inspire geniuses – perhaps more than we can even teach them.” Jason Evans, tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Studies. “One book that has profoundly influenced my evolution as a teacher and scholar is Archie Carr’s A Naturalist in Florida: A Celebration of Eden. I grew up exploring the seemingly endless expanses of flatwoods and swamps in eastern Orange county in central Florida. Over just a few short years, I watched as these natural ecosystems were transformed into the seemingly endless expanse of strip malls and subdivisions of the greater Orlando area. These experiences of joy and then loss of the natural world undoubtedly influenced my decision to dedicate my life to the study of environmental science. Like many others, Archie Carr became one of my primary guides and sages for this life path when I first read his book as a young graduate student. In no uncertain terms, the book is clearly the masterwork of a man who, in the words of Marjorie Carr (Archie’s wife, the book’s editor, and an equally giant figure in the history of Florida conservation), ‘knew more about Florida wildlife and wilderness than any other person, today or in times gone by.’ Karen Haymon Long fittingly describes the book as one ‘that changes your life and colors the way you see the world, maybe forever.’ Time and time again I have returned to the book’s joyous celebrations of frog songs and amphibious ‘jubilees,’ its descriptions of hydrologic behavior in Florida springs, and, my personal favorite, the precise renderings of food chain structure in water hyacinth stands. For sure, the book also contains an underlying recognition and sadness about the long-term degradation of the state’s ecosystems, which Archie couldn’t help but observe and, in partnership with Marjorie, fight valiantly against. However, he consciously uses the book ‘to talk mostly about what joy remains in the Florida landscape,’ while just occasionally sneaking ‘in some factual tooth-gnashing every now and then when the readers might really be reading.’ Even with the occasional ‘tooth-gnashing,’ the book concludes with an optimistic and restorative vision of ecological ethics that is uplifting, hopeful, and profound at a scale well beyond us here in Florida. Please give it a read, but, even more importantly, go outside and enjoy the life and beauty that’s all around you.” Alan Green, tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of Economics: “Stranger in a Strange Land [by Robert Heinlein], a science fiction classic I read in high school, opened my eyes to different modes of thinking and started me on the path to becoming a social scientist. The book presents humanity from the perspective of a complete outsider, a vantage point that casts into sharp relief many of the social structures people see as sacrosanct. It helped me to understand that there are many more worldviews than the ones I knew and grew up with. As I continued to study and grow intellectually, I realized that social constructs govern most human behavior and that these rules, or institutions, as they are referred to in my area of research, can change over time. Robert Heinlein helped me to see that our world and interactions with each other are thus what we make them, a fundamental worldview that to this day informs both my teaching and research.” Ekaterina Kudryavtseva, tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of Art History: “T.J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea was published after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Written in a beautifully lucid prose, it deals with the engagement of art and radical politics. This book helped me to think about the failure of providing a viable alternative to capitalism without mourning and dancing on the grave of the communism idea. It also taught me to appreciate the absolute brilliance of art born during the period of radical political lunacy.” Dejan Magoc, tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of Health Sciences: “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience [by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi] is a remarkable piece of literature that helped me recognize how to truly enjoy every moment of my life while achieving goals and reaching new levels of personal and professional success. It made me realize that reaching full potential is possible only when we disappear as a person by becoming entirely immersed in our activities and challenged by the experience of losing self-consciousness.” Gregory Sapp: Promoted to Professor of Religious Studies: “[Immanuel] Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (in spite of its faults), showed me that what I think I know is what I think I know. That is, my perception of the world is just that – my perception. Kant pushed me to see the role that the self plays in knowing. I then came to see that my particular biological makeup plus my particular history shapes how I interpret ‘reality’ so that what I think I know is based largely on me. Thus, rather than believing my ‘knowledge’ to be absolute and that all who disagree with me are “wrong,” I am willing, even eager, to hear from others as to how they experience phenomena so I can gain a more well-rounded understanding of the world and how it works.” Leander Seah, tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of History: On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West. “I first came across this book by Ien Ang around 2003 to 2004 while I was working on my Master of Arts dissertation, ‘Historicizing Hybridity and Globalization: The South Seas Society in Singapore, 1940-2000.’ In this book, Ang, who is a renowned Cultural Studies scholar, makes a case for the notion of ‘hybridity’ in dealing with issues of ethnicity and Chineseness. These issues feature prominently in the book manuscript that I am currently revising, Conceptualizing Chinese Identity: China, the Nanyang, and Trans-Regionalism. I have found Ang’s work to be useful also because it rightly challenges the flawed, China-centric concept of ‘Chinese diaspora’ that has dominated the English-language scholarship on one of my major research areas, the migration of ethnic Chinese worldwide. Furthermore, my interest in Ang’s book reflects the fact that much of my scholarship has been interdisciplinary in nature, even as I have remained rooted in an empirical, Rankean (Leopols von Ranke) approach towards historical writing based on facts, archival research, and the use of primary sources.” Debra Touchton, promoted to Professor of Education: Madam Secretary: A Biography of Madeleine Albright by Thomas Blood. Nathan Wolek, promoted to Professor of Digital Arts: The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads. “My academic pursuit of music technology began in 1996 with an undergraduate course here at Stetson called ‘Computer Music.’ Prior to that, I had never really considered that these two words (computers + music?) could be joined together to describe a field of study. I also naively thought that there wouldn’t be that much reading, because of course, this must be a brand new topic, right? Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the bookstore to find this massive required text, The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads. These pages traced the decades of work that I was totally unaware of in 1996, and clearly explain so many key topics. In the 20 years since then, ‘the Roads’ (a shorthand most people in music technology know) has worn very well as a reference volume on my shelf, and I have had the good fortune to meet many of the people whose work is catalogued in this book. My students are probably glad that I don’t currently require this text for any of my classes, but I often point them to something in this book for more details on a given topic.” ___________________________________________ FACULTY AUTHORS Also celebrated at the library’s August reception were those faculty members who wrote a book in the past year: Susanne Eules (Adjunct, Modern Languages); Chris Ferguson (Psychology); Mayhill Flower (History – cover at left); Melinda Hall (Philosophy – cover below); Katya Kudryavtseva (Art History, Creative Arts); Eric Kurlander (History – cover below); Kandy Queen-Sutherland (Religious Studies); and Greg Sapp (Religious Studies). Congratulations! duPont-Ball Library • Stetson University • 421 N. Woodland Blvd., Unit 8418 • DeLand, FL 32723 (386)822-7183 • stetson.edu/library • facebook.com/StetsonLibrary