Monthly Archives: October 2024

Happy 10th Anniversary of the Library Book Club!

10 years ago Hilary Kraus, Kari Mofford, and Alexis Teagarden started the Dystopian Book Club. Hilary and Kari went on to a new theme in 2016, the Science Fiction Book Club, and Olivia Piepmeier joined us to help organize and publicize the meetings.  During COVID, we tried to make things a bit more flexible with readers choosing their own titles with a common theme.  Now the group chooses the theme periodically, and we all vote to rank title suggestions and work through the list until we decide we need a new theme.

We will be choosing a new theme for Spring 2025 and we love to welcome new members, so please contact Kari Mofford if you would like to join us!

Here is the entire list of titles (and themes) throughout the years.  We have read A LOT of books… which ones were your favorites? Let us know by leaving a comment below!

Dystopian: 2014-2015

  • 2014
    • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  • 2015
    • Spring
      • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
      • The Giver by Lois Lowry
      • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
    • Summer – Women Sleuths Theme
      • Nancy Drew (Original Series) – Reader’s pick
      • Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood
      • Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers
    • Fall Titles
      • Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
      • Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Science Fiction: 2016-2019

  • 2016
    • Spring
      • Watchmen by author Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons
      • The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
    • Magical Summer Theme
      • Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
      • Peter & the Starcatchers by Dave Barry & Ridley Pearson
      • So You Want to be a Wizard? by Diane Duane
    • Fall
      • More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
      • The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin
  • 2017
    • Spring
      • Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
      • The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
    • Summer: Fantasy on Film
      • A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
      • American Gods by Neil Gaiman
      • The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
    • Fall
      • Lumberjanes Volume 1: Beware the Kitten Holy by ND Stevenson, Grace Ellis, Shannon Watters, and Gus A. Allen
      • A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
      • The Martian by Andy Weir
  • 2018
    • Spring
      • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
      • Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
      • Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel
    • Summer: A Cinderella Summer
      • Cinder by Marissa Meyer
      • Ash by Malinda Lo, and the Original Grimm’s Fairy Tale
    • Fall
      • Timeline by Michael Crichton
      • Blackout by Connie Willis
      • Trillium by Jeff Lemire
  • 2019
    • Spring
      • Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
      • His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
      • Dread Nation by Justina Ireland
    • Summer: A Summer of Comics
      • Here by Richard McGuire
      • Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal
      • On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden
    • Fall: Space Exploration/Adventure
      • Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
      • Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Climate and Travel: 2020-2021

  • Spring 2020: Climate Change
    • Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller
    • The End We Start From by Megan Hunter (Cancelled)
    • A Friend of the Earth by T. Coraghessan Boyle (Virtual)
  • Summer 2020: Choose your own title
  • Fall 2020 – Spring 2021: Travel: Choose a book with geographical theme
    • October = Antarctica
    • November = South America
    • December = Asia
    • January = North America
    • February = Africa
    • March = Australia
    • April = Europe

Adventures, Quests, and Treasure Hunts: 2021

  • Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton
  • The Secret Treasure of Oak Island: The Amazing True Story of a Centuries-Old Treasure Hunt by D’Arcy O’Connor
  • Princess Bride by William Goldman
  • Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Animals: 2022-2023

  • Hollow Kingdom Kira Jane Buxton
  • Watership Down Richard Adams
  • The Bear by Andrew Kivak
  • West With Giraffes: A Novel by Lynda Rutledge

Fantasy: 2023-2024

  • Circe by Madeline Miller
  • Fifth Season NK Jemisin
  • Book of Night by Holly Black
  • Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
  • The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow
  • Tea with the Black Dragon by R.A. MacAvoy
  • The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
  • The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
  • Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemisin
  • Fairy Tale by Stephen King  (December 2024)

Open Access Week Feature: OA Journals Founded at UMassD

International Open Access Week (October 21-27, 2024) is a time to recognize Open Access (OA), and to inspire scholars to engage in this publishing model in scholarship and research. OA means information that is available digitally without cost or access barriers. Today on the blog, we highlight two OA journals with UMass Dartmouth roots:

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is an Open Access Journal that was founded by UMassD faculty members Catherine Villanueva Gardner, Anna M. Klobucka, and Jeannette E. Riley in 2011. Anupama Arora, PhD, Professor of English & Communication and Women’s and Gender Studies, currently serves as co-Executive Editor with Jeannette E. Riley of the University of Rhode Island. A few other UMassD faculty are currently listed as co-editors.

The Journal of Feminist Scholarship (JFS) is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes twice a year on topics that encourage a discussion of feminist thought for the twenty-first century. In addition to its regular issues, it publishes an interview series with important national and international feminist artists, practitioners, and scholars of color who have reshaped their fields. JFS has become highly regarded with frequent submissions, downloads, and citations in national and international fora. The journal is a great resource for researching feminist scholarship across the disciplines, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which means that researchers are free to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles.

Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies

Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies (PLCS) is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed hybrid (online and print) journal that publishes original research about the literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world from a broad range of academic, critical and theoretical approaches. Mario Pereira and Anna M. Klobucka currently serve as co-editors. PLCS is published semi-annually by Tagus Press in the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Tagus Press is the publishing division of the UMassD Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, an outreach unit committed to the study of the language, literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world. With the help of the Claire T. Carney Library, the journal is available publicly through Open Journal Systems (OJS), which aims to facilitate open access, peer-reviewed publishing.

Are you interested in locating more OA Journals? Take a look at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY

Open Access Week Feature: A UMD Collaboration in an OA Journal

International Open Access Week (October 21-27, 2024) is a time to recognize free and accessible research and scholarship and to inspire scholars to engage in the advantageous OA model in publishing. The term Open Access refers to scholarly material that is available digitally free of charge and without other access barriers. Today we will highlight a UMass Dartmouth faculty member who has published along with a UMass Dartmouth student under a Creative Commons license in an Open Access journal.

Nicholas Zambrotta is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Psychology department whose research interests include morality, political polarization, and social support and health related behaviors. In early 2024 Zambrotta published an article called “Attitude Changes Among College Students Post-Pandemic” with Alex Goncalo who was working on his BS in Finance. Goncalo has since earned his MS, and has gone on to pursue his PhD in Finance at the University of South Florida. Their study “measured happiness, optimism, and psychological well-being in a sample of 182 college students via an electronic Qualtrics questionnaire to identify predictors of state optimism and examine potential differences in these variables between class rankings.” The results of their survey and analysis can be read and shared (with attribution) by any researcher thanks to the OA model of their selected publication, Modern Psychological Studies.

The journal is managed by undergraduate students at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, and not only is it student-led, but Modern Psychological Studies focuses on publishing quality articles by undergraduate students. Regarding the review process, Goncalo says, “Their rigorous review process was enlightening, which contributed greatly to this undeniably invaluable experience.” Authors who choose to publish with MPS actually retain their copyright under a Non-Exclusive Distribution License. This arrangement protects freedoms of the authors, while the Creative Commons licenses applied to each article ensure that all researchers can benefit from the work. 

Kudos to Zambrotta and Goncalo on their OA publication

Image by Nick Shockey, licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en, available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Access_symbol.png

International Open Access Week 2024

Open Access (OA) is a publishing model that values access over commercialization and makes scholarly material like research articles and books available to the public at no cost. International Open Access Week (October 21 – 27, 2024) is a time to recognize the importance of OA and to raise awareness. When information is readily available to all researchers, it can be more widely read, cited, and expanded. Are you interested in learning more about Open Access and breaking down paywalls? Consider attending these OA Week webinars hosted in Massachusetts: