Cover to Cover Archives - Page 7 of 16

Celebrating Diversity: Greek American Heritage Month

March is Greek and Greek American Heritage Month. We recognize the many contributions Greeks and Greek Americans have made and continue to make to our diverse society. New academic conversations and collaborations have begun. To find out more, we invite you to virtually stop by these online resources:

A new publication sparking great interest among the academic Greek American community is Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters an open online journal edited by Professor Yiorgos Anagnostou of Ohio State University.
Center for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at Queens College with a new director, Professor Gerasimus Katsan, European Languages & Literatures, Queens College.
The Hellenic American Project directed by Professor Nicholas Alexiou, Sociology Dept., Queens College, documenting through oral histories an understanding of the Greek American community.

Below are a few of our newer acquisitions. Other publications of interest may be found in Libguides for Modern Greek Language and Literature and Greek American Studies.

The Greek Orthodox Church in America by Alexander Kitroeff

Publication Date: 2020-06-15
“In this sweeping history, Alexander Kitroeff shows how the Greek Orthodox Church in America has functioned as much more than a religious institution, becoming the focal point in the lives of the country’s million-plus Greek immigrants and their descendants.”

Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture: An Itinerary by Gedgaudaite, Kristina

Publication Date: 2022
“…examines the memories that shaped Asia Minor refugee identity, focusing on the ways in which these memories continue to reverberate in contemporary Greek culture.”

Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics by Papanikolaou, Dēmētrēs

Publication Date: 2021
“This book establishes a cinematic and cultural history of Greece during the last difficult decade. It focuses on key films from the post-2009 ‘New’ or ‘Weird Wave’ of Greek cinema, proposing the Greek Weird Wave as a paradigmatic cinema movement of biopolitical realism.”

Films on the Greek American experience include:

The Journey: The Greek American Dream

Aavailable on: Internet, in English.
“A work of compelling visual and audial power,..This is public history of high professional caliber, a product of collaboration between award-winning filmmaker Maria Iliou and historian Alexander Kitroeff.”

Ludlow Greek Americans in the Colorado Coal War

Available on: Vimeo
The story of the Ludlow Massacre and the Ten Day War in 1914 Colorado with a special focus on the Greek strikers and their leader Louis Tikas.

Greek American Radicals: the Untold Story

Publication Date: 2013
Available on: Vimeo
“Focusing from the Great Depression to the demise of ethnic radicalism in the 50s, the documentary Greek-American Radicals: the Untold Story brings forth an alternative vision of Greek-American history that highlights the transformations and multiple interrelations between ethnicity, class and radicalism.”

Wiki-Week at Queens College (4th annual edit-a-thon!)

We are excited to invite announce that the Queens College Libraries will be holding a series of virtual edit-a-thons on the week of March 21. This will be our fourth annual edit-a-thon, and the second to be held virtually.

An edit-a-thon is an event where participants come together to edit Wikipedia.

This is for both complete newcomers and experienced Wikipedians. If you’ve never edited an article before, don’t worry! This is a friendly and approachable way to begin. Instruction and assistance are provided; we will teach you how to make edits and how to make your edits stick.

On the week of March 21, the library will host two edit-a-thons; please feel free to attend one or both! Each meeting will have a different theme, but of course, if you have begun to edit an article in the first event, you can always continue it in the second.

The details are as follows:

QC Wiki-Week: Edit-a-thon Part I (The Civil Rights Movement in New York)
- Monday, March 21
- 4:00-6:00 PM

REGISTER for Part I

QC Wiki-Week: Edit-a-thon Part II (Monuments, Landmarks, and Public Art in Queens)
- Wednesday, March 23
- 12:00-3:00 PM

REGISTER for Part II

We hope to see you there! While we can’t offer free refreshments in this online format, we can offer support and good company as we edit and create articles. Anyone from inside or outside the Queens College community is invited – faculty, students, staff, and others.

Celebrating Diversity: Women’s History Month Resources

Resources for Women’s History Month by Nancy Foasberg, Librarian for Women and Gender Studies

The QC Library celebrates Women’s History Month in March by gathering and presenting resources related to a specific aspect of women’s history. Last year’s guide focused on women’s suffrage and voting rights, a theme designated by the National Women’s History Alliance.

The Women’s History Month 2022 guide features resources related to the history of reproductive rights. While not only women need access to reproductive health care, the history of reproductive rights is essential to women’s history.

We also acknowledge the reproductive rights of transgender people and plan to highlight resources related to transgender health care in a future guide.

The guide covers a broad range of issues related to reproductive rights, including abortion, birth control, sex education, childbirth practices, and coercive “population control.”

Documentary film:The Abortion Hotline(2016). In Chile, where abortion remains illegal and punishable by imprisonment, we follow a group of young activists who put their lives at risk to run an underground abortion hotline.

Book: Reproductive Rights and the State: Getting the Birth Control, RU-48, and the Gardasil Vaccine to the U.S. Market (2013). Reproductive Rights and the State: Getting the Birth Control, RU-486, and Morning-After Pills and the Gardasil Vaccine to the U.S. Market tackles a subject that remains controversial more than 60 years after “the pill”; was approved for use in the United States. The first book to examine the politicization of the FDA approval process for reproductive drugs, this study maps the hard-fought battles over the four major drugs currently on the U.S. market.

Book: Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v Bell (2010). “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Few lines from Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent “feebleminded and socially inadequate” people from having children. Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned.

Book: The Search for an Abortionist: The Classic Study of How American Women Coped with Unwanted Pregnancy before Roe v. Wade (2014, reprinted from 1973). This eye-opening look at the abortion process prior to the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 is now more relevant than ever, with a new introduction by the author revisiting history that is still salient half a century later.

Primary Source Collection: Reproductive Rights: U.S. Supreme Court Cases. A list of significant cases of national prominence over the years. There are cases involving the reproductive rights of individuals, including the right to use contraception, plan a family, rear children, and gain access to reproductive healthcare. This site links to the full text of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

Treasures from Special Collections and Archives: Marie Maynard Daly Yearbook Photo

by Caitlin Colban-Waldron, Adjunct Archivist

In celebration of Women’s History Month, we share one of the most-requested items from QC’s Special Collections and Archives department: the 1942 yearbook photo of graduating senior Marie Daly. In the photo, her hair is set carefully and a string of pearls rests around her neck. She looks determined, gazing out of the frame. Around her on the page are a sea of white faces; at the time, few Black students were enrolled at the college.

In 1942’s yearbook (only the second ever graduating class at QC!), each senior portrait included an accompanying paragraph describing every student. Some were cheeky, some were resolute, some were optimistic. Marie Daly’s paragraph, though, was certain:

“A Queens College Scholar and one of those elite persons on the Dean’s list, MARIE DALY has an enviable record. She is a Chemistry major and a member of the Chemical Society. In her chosen career as a laboratory technician, she bears the mark of one likely to succeed.”

Marie Maynard Daly was a biochemist and the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in chemistry in the United States. One of three children, she was born in Queens on April 6, 1921. She started her groundbreaking educational career at Queens College as an undergraduate from 1938-1942, then earned a graduate degree in chemistry from New York University in 1944, and, finally, completed her PhD in chemistry in 1947 at Columbia University.

Daly’s professional life took her to many places: she was an instructor at Howard University, an American Cancer Society fellow at the Rockefeller Institute, a researcher and professor at Columbia and then Yeshiva University (where she retired from in 1986), and served at places like the American Heart Association and Health Research Council of New York. Her work primarily focused on the chemistry of a cell’s nucleus and how our health can be impacted at that tiny, cellular level. She did important research on the effects of cigarette smoke on the workings of lungs, sugar on the health of arteries, and discovered how cholesterol contributes to heart attacks and oxygen blockages in the circulatory system.

In 1988, she started a scholarship for minority students at Queens College who want to study science at Queens College and named it after her parents, Ivan and Helen, who instilled a love of learning in her from a young age–her father had once taken chemistry courses at Cornell University and her mother was a passionate reader. You can still apply for that scholarship today!

Marie Maynard Daly’s story continues to inspire researchers, students, and science lovers. SCA has received requests for more information about her from everyone from high school students to the American Chemical Society to both highlight her contributions to biochemistry and celebrates her status as a trailblazer for women and people of color alike. This senior portrait, taken at the very beginning of her exceptional career, speaks to the women who may be finding their way in the science field at Queens College even now. We’re proud to have her as an alumnus.

View Maynard’s 1942 yearbook and other digitized materials from our collections.

References:

QC Makerspace – Two Exhibitions of Maker-Made Math Art on Display

If you’re at Rosenthal Library this semester, be sure to pad your visit with some time to view two display cases containing maker-made math art.

The contents of both vitrines were fabricated by students of Christopher Hanusa, Professor of Mathematics, during the Fall’21 semester – students of MATH 128 “Mathematical Design” and MATH 250 “Mathematical Computing.” Both classes were also participants in the Make STEAM Q project, an initiative supported by the National Science Foundation.

The sign for MATH 128 (the featured image seen above) reads, “This artwork was created digitally using math and software and then was realized physically using machines in the Queens College Makerspace including the laser cutter, embroidery machine, AxiDraw plotter, and 3D printer.” These excellent artworks showcase the diversity of output options available in the Makerspace in Rosenthal Library. This cabinet also contains a “tattoo” (on fake skin) that must be seen to be believed!

*MATH 250 “Mathematical Computing” Exhibit*

Just down the hall, you’ll find the other display case for MATH 250. The sign reads, “The artwork was created algorithmically using the computational software Mathematica and then 3D printed in steel, nylon, sandstone, and base metals by Shapeways.” Some plastic prints were also done in the QC Makerspace. And we cannot emphasize enough how cool it is that these objects were created algorithmically. They were not ‘designed’ in the classic sense of the word – but instead created using algorithms and math!

I’m intentionally not showing close-ups of the art in order to encourage you to swing by and see it for yourself. Many of the details, the light refraction on metal, the markers layered by a robotic arm, must be seen in person to be truly appreciated. After you enter the library head through the atrium, around the staircase, and you’ll find the display cases in that corridor:

Queens College Libraries 3rd Floor Map to the Makerspace Exhibits

And if you’re curious to know more about our Makerspace facility check out our website and book an appointment!

QC Research Highlights: Exciting Research

Welcome to the March edition of QC Research Highlights! This mid-semester blog post seems as good a time as any to feature some odds and ends; exciting, interesting, or important research that doesn’t necessarily follow any particular theme. Enjoy!

All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works.

Math and Natural Sciences

Sung-Eun Choi (Family, Nutrition, and Exercise Science) researches taste perception, food sensory science, and the relationship between taste preferences and culture. She and co-author Jeff Garza wrote “Consumer Likings of Different Miracle Fruit Products on Different Sour Foods.” Miracle fruit is a plant which, when eaten along with sour foods, makes them taste sweet! As such, it has potential as a healthy sweetener. Dr. Choi and Mr. Garza wanted to test consumer reactions to miracle fruit, in order to understand whether it would be accepted as a sweetener by the public. Participants in the study ate miracle fruit products along with several popular sour foods (sour apples, goat cheese, lemonade, pickles, and plain yogurt) and evaluated whether they liked the flavor, texture, and aftertaste. Participants liked yogurt, goat cheese, and apples more when using miracle fruit as a sweetener, but they liked lemonade and pickles less.

Valentina Nikulina (Psychology) studies the developmental effects of childhood adversity. She and her co-authors (Anthony Carpi, Xuechen Li, and Cathy Spatz Widom, all from John Jay College) wrote “Childhood Maltreatment and Lead Levels in Middle Adulthood: A Prospective Examination of the Roles of Individual Socio-economic and Neighborhood Characteristics.” In this article, they studied whether children with histories of child abuse and neglect are also at increased risk for environmental hazards, specifically lead. This study matched participants around the age of 40 who had been maltreated as children with a control group who were similar in terms of social class and other characteristics (race, sex, and age), but who had not been maltreated. Lead exposure in the blood was not correlated to maltreatment, however, there was a correlation between maltreatment and exposure to lead dust, as well as poverty and neighborhood disadvantage.

Education

Sara B. Woolf (Education and Community Programs) teaches in the Graduate Programs for Special Education. One of her research interests is action research. Her article, “Exploring Pedagogies to Elevate Inquiry: Teaching Action Research in the Third Space,” documents the pedagogical strategies Dr. Woolf used to teach action research over the course of a semester, along with the impact of these strategies. Her teaching in this class is informed by third space theory, which allows students to reflexively examine cultural biases as a means of generating knowledge and working toward social progress. The article details how Dr. Woolf established trust in the classroom, increased students’ authority in the class, promoted authentic inquiry, and elicited student feedback. While students were initially uncomfortable or skeptical of this approach, over the course of the semester, they were better able to engage critically and to work collaboratively.

Arts and Humanities

Ala Alryyes (English) studies the literature of empire and exploration. His article, “Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: “Maps,” Natural Law, and the Enemy,” examines the role of navigation in Robinson Crusoe. Dr. Alryyes argues that Crusoe is a “user and interpreter of space and the knowledges of space.” He reads Defoe’s novel through the lenses of natural law and cartography, two imperialist discourses that allow Crusoe to accomplish nearly impossible feats of navigation while also upholding the European reader’s sense of mastery over geography. Ultimately, the novel “ties place, enmity, and selfhood.”

Gregory Sholette (Studio Art) teaches sculpture and social practice; his research is on activist art. In the short piece “Tactical Tutorial for the Post-Internet Era,” he defines “samiZine” as a portmanteau of “samizdat” (underground publications from the Soviet era, which were self-published and manually distributed to evade Soviet censorship) and “zine” (a different type of self-published work, with a history based partially in fan cultures, reproduced by photocopy). This piece cites some examples of samiZines and also, as the title says, a little bit of a “tactical tutorial” of anti-surveillance practices.

Social Sciences

Kristina Richardson (History) studies non-elite peoples of the medieval Middle East. In “Invisible Strangers, or Romani History Reconsidered” she examines how the “Strangers,” or Yenish, have been rather arbitrarily seen as separate from the Roma because they use a different language. Dr. Richardson is particularly interested in the conflation of language with ethnicity, which has obscured the relationship between the Roma and the Yenish. From this perspective, she critiques the racialized myth of language, in which languages may be seen as “pure” or “bastardized.” Additionally, she addresses Romani calls for aid during the Holocaust and how the modern understanding of Roma identity was reified. Dr. Richardson suggests that acknowledging the Strangers and the existence of mixed languages in and histories may pave the way for more complex understandings of European and Middle Eastern history.

James Lowry (Library and Information Studies) researches records management for government information, especially in international and post-colonial settings. He and his co-authors (Alicia Chilcott, Kirsty Fife, Jenny Moran, Arike Oke, Anna Sexton, and Jass Thethi) wrote “Against Whitewashing: The Recent History of Anti-Racist Action in the British Archives Sector.” This article offers an account of anti-racist action in the archival sector of the UK between 2017 and 2020. The article describes organizations including the Black Cultural Archives, “the major site of Black archival representation in the United Kingdom,” which collects Black archival materials and counteracts whitewashing in representations of UK history. The article discusses many other groups and activities, including the development of protocols for describing racist resources, the establishment of critical reading and discussion groups, and more. Finally, Dr. Lowry and co-authors dive into the repercussions of a racist incident on social media during the 2019 Archives and Records Association conference. Following this incident, there were more calls for specific action to address white supremacy within the profession; the article details some appropriate future steps.

Thank you to all the authors whose works are listed here!

This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all.

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.

Celebrating Diversity: Black History Month Resources!

Resources for Black History Month by James Tasato Mellone, Historical Cultural and Social Sciences Librarian

The QC Library celebrates Black History Month this February 2022 by acknowledging ongoing African-American achievements despite the continuance of racial injustice and racism against the Black American community, both locally and nationally.

Our Black History Month 2022 guide shows several intellectual and artistic creations which, if knowledge is power, may offer some hope for future racial justice. Perhaps such creations can also help us see that the African-American experience is the American experience writ small and large, and that Black Lives Matter.

As part of our Africana Studies research guide, the Black History Month 2022 guide provides a selection of streaming videos, ebooks, as well as streaming music, performances & stories in African American studies. Here are a few highlights from the guide.

The Black Panthers Vanguard of the Revolution film poster

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (PBS, I hr 53 min) “Revisit the turbulent 1960s, when a new revolutionary culture emerged with the Black Panther Party at the vanguard. Stanley Nelson tells the vibrant story of a pivotal movement that feels timely all over again.”

MLK/FBI (2020, 1hr 46min) “In this virtuosic film, award-winning editor, and director Sam Pollard lays out a detailed account of the FBI surveillance that dogged King’s activism throughout the ’50s and ’60s, fueled by the racist and red-baiting paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover…”

Half in Shadow The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay book cover

Half in Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay by Shanna Greene Benjamin (Publication Date: 2021) “Nellie Y. McKay (1930-2006) was a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters…best known for co-editing the canon-making Norton Anthology of African American Literature with Henry Louis Gates Jr….After her passing, new details about McKay’s life emerged, surprising everyone who knew her…”

Armstrong Now 2022: Artist-in-Residence Performances (Louis Armstrong House Museum, Queens College) “Features world renowned Black artists responding creatively to the newly digitized Armstrong Archives….”

Treasures from Special Collections and Archives: Oral History with Soribel Genao

Soribel Genao is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership in the Department of Educational and Community Programs at Queens College. The interview was conducted by Obden Mondésir on September 15, 2020. It touches on many subjects, including Genao’s upbringing in Manhattan and Brooklyn, her career at Queens College, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In this featured clip, she discusses the development of the Black and Latinx Faculty/Staff Association (BLFSA) at Queens College.

And we were on a Zoom call for two hours, just dissecting and understanding who we were, but the most beautiful part was, here we are on Zoom having the Black and brown faces of Queens College connect for the very first time in a very formal way.

You can watch the full interview on the Queens Memory Aviary portal. You can read the full BLFSA 2020 statement and call to action here.

Electronic Resource: Art & Architecture ePortal (A&AePortal)

by Scott Davis

Access Provider: Yale University Press
Description: The Art & Architecture ePortal provides access to 286 ebooks by leading arts publishers such as the National Gallery of Art, Yale University Press, The MIT Press, and more. The collection provides access to museum catalogues, surveys, catalogues raisonnés, and artist monographs covering the history of art, architecture, decorative arts, photography, and design. A&AePortal offers high quality, zoomable, images and an array of tools for citations, annotations and note taking, and a bookshelf feature for future readings.
Format: E-books
Access Portals: OneSearch, A-Z Database list

QC Research Highlights: 2021 in Review

Welcome to the New Year! As we move into the Spring 2022 semester, it’s time to reflect back on 2021.

Last year was a great year for CUNY Academic Works; over the course of the year, 526 different works were downloaded from the QC Publications and Research series, for a total of 37,769 downloads. These publications span all disciplines – education, biology, English, history, and many more. New works were frequently downloaded, of course, but many works of research going back to the beginning of Academic Works and even long before are still relevant, judging by the number of them that people accessed this year.

Since I opened this post with a little data, I’d like to use this month’s edition of QC Research Highlights to highlight some works that are doing interesting things with data! Each of these works is interested in finding and evaluating new ways of measuring and using data, whether that means getting new results from old data or developing modified scales for understanding the data. This type of research is exciting because it creates new possibilities for future research.

Let’s start with an article from three authors from Queens College’s School of Earth and Environmental Science: Christine Ramadhin, Chuixiang Yi, and George Hendrey. In their article, “Temperature Variance Portends and Indicates the Extent of Abrupt Climate Shifts,” the authors used a paleotemperature dataset documenting the changes in temperature over time. While this dataset has been used in many other studies, this article focuses on the variance in temperature, finding a correlation between high variance and quick temperature increase. Their data suggests that changes in temperature variance can predict abrupt climate changes.

Similarly, our next article is interested in finding new ways to query data produced elsewhere. Using data from the financial website Seeking Alpha, Cuiyuan Wang (formerly of the QC and Graduate Center Economics departments, currently at Trinity College), Tao Wang (Economics), and Changhe Yuan (Computer Science) ask: “Does Applying Deep Learning in Financial Sentiment Analysis Lead to Better Classification Performance?.” Seeking Alpha is a crowdsourced website where experts of various types express opinions on stocks. The authors used a deep learning model known as LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) to measure the accuracy of these opinions; the purpose of this experiment was to see whether this model was better than other tools which make similar assessments. They found that according to most metrics, LSTM outperformed more traditional measures.

My colleague Joan Xu (Library) studied information searching and user engagement in visual information searching: “Validating and Developing the User Engagement Scale in Web-based Visual Information Searching.” She considers the four-factor User Engagement Study model, a modified version of an earlier six-factor model, to measure users’ psychological involvement in visual searching, including in Google Image Searching and YouTube. She proposes a scale based on reward, focused attention, aesthetic appeal, and sense discovery. For visual searching specifically, sense discovery was shown to be important for cognitive-affective experience.