Tara McPherson (right)
To honor the memory and extend the legacy of long-time ARL staff member Julia Blixrud, ARL has established the Julia C. Blixrud Memorial Fund. This fund supports a scholarship for one master of library and information science (MLIS) student or recent graduate to attend the ARL Fall Forum, held in Washington, DC, in early October each year. In addition to the scholarship, ARL has founded the annual Julia C. Blixrud Memorial Lecture to be delivered at the Fall Forum by an individual who is innovative and active in areas of interest to the ARL community. The scholarship and lecture will be presented for the first time this year.
The 2015 recipient of the Julia C. Blixrud Scholarship is Liz Hamilton, permissions manager and assistant to the director at Northwestern University Press. The presenter of the 2015 Julia C. Blixrud Memorial Lecture is Tara McPherson, associate professor of critical studies in the University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinematic Arts and director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies in the USC Libraries.
Liz Hamilton, 2015 Julia C. Blixrud Scholarship Awardee
Liz Hamilton earned her MLIS degree from Dominican University in 2015, where she received the Graduate School of Library and Information Science Outstanding Graduate Award. She also holds a BA in religion from Oberlin College. She completed a practicum in the Northwestern University Library Digital Collections department as part of her MLIS studies and has worked for the Northwestern University Press since 2011.
Northwestern University Press director, Jane F. Bunker, said, “Ms. Hamilton’s career goals involve carving a niche for herself in the new partnership paradigm between libraries and university presses. She is passionate about building bridges between these worlds, particularly as regards copyright education for faculty, students, authors, librarians, and publishers. There is no doubt in my mind that she will go on to ever greater things in the scholarly communications ecosystem, and the Julia C. Blixrud Scholarship will help her to do it.”
View the infographic that Hamilton submitted with her scholarship application, “How Do Library and University Press Collaborations Advance Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences?” (PDF).
Tara McPherson, 2015 Julia C. Blixrud Memorial Lecturer
Tara McPherson is an associate professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinematic Arts and director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies in the USC Libraries. Her research engages the cultural dimensions of media—including the intersection of gender, race, affect, and place—and focuses on the digital humanities, early software histories, and the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship. She is author of the award-winning Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South and the forthcoming Feminist in a Software Lab, as well as editor or co-editor of several collections.
“The ARL Board of Directors is pleased that Tara McPherson will deliver the first Julia C. Blixrud Memorial Lecture,” said Sue Baughman, ARL deputy executive director. “Dr. McPherson is a premier digital humanist whose cutting edge thinking and leadership have had a tremendous impact on the field.”
Acknowledgements
ARL executive director Elliott Shore expressed ARL’s gratitude for the community’s support of the Julia C. Blixrud Memorial Fund. “ARL thanks the numerous individuals and organizations who have so generously given to the Julia C. Blixrud Memorial Fund, enabling us to offer this scholarship in her name,” Shore said. “The Fall Forum embodies Julia’s passion for ideas, breadth of expertise, and collegiality, and the scholarship reflects her commitment to the development of the profession.”
More Information
To learn more about the scholarship, the lecture, and how you can contribute to the memorial fund, visit the Julia C. Blixrud Memorial Fund, Lecture, and Scholarship webpage or e-mail JCBfund@arl.org.
About ARL
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries in the US and Canada. ARL’s mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at https://www.arl.org/.
