Library News for the Faculty

UCLA Library Hosts Fellows

Center for Oral History Research

In cooperation with UCLA's Institute of American Cultures and the four ethnic studies centers, the Library's Center for Oral History Research is cosponsoring four postdoctoral fellowships during the 2006-07 academic year. Each fellow is conducting oral history research in an ethnic community. During their time at UCLA, each is also teaching an advanced undergraduate or graduate course based on their research. In addition, they will participate in a faculty discussion group focused on oral history issues and will eventually present their work in a symposium, the proceedings of which will be published by the Institute of American Cultures.

Melissa K. Nelson, a visiting scholar with the American Indian Studies Center, is an assistant professor of American Indian studies at San Francisco State University. She is studying the ways the oral tradition of the Southern Paiute Salt Songs transmits cultural values and site-specific environmental knowledge.

Horacio Roque Ramirez, a visiting scholar with the Chicano Studies Research Center, is an assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at UC Santa Barbara. He conducts oral history research with lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender Latinas and Latinos and is working on a book entitled Communities of Desire: Memory and History from Queer Latinas and Latinos in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1960s-90s.

Irum Shiekh, a postdoc with the Asian American Studies Center, is an adjunct faculty member in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. She has conducted interviews with individuals who were arrested/deported in connection with the September 11 attacks and plans to publish those interviews in a book entitled Speaking Out: Voices of 9/11 Detainees and Deportees.

Daniel Widener, a visiting scholar with the Bunche Center for African American Studies, is an assistant professor of history at UC San Diego. He is completing a book entitled Something Else: Culture and Community in Black Los Angeles, 1942-92, which discusses black expressive culture and its role in contesting the social conditions of postwar Los Angeles.

Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)

The CLIR postdoctoral fellowship program in scholarly information resources offers a novel model for how to identify and train professionals to help address the challenges academic libraries face of attracting recruits to the ranks of academic librarianship and the ever-increasing demand from users for digital access to vast archival collections. Now in its third year, CLIR fellowships provide new scholars in the humanities with a unique opportunity to develop expertise in innovative forms of scholarly research and the information resources that support them, both traditional and digital. Individuals who have earned their doctorates in disciplines in the humanities, including history, within the past five years and who have an interest in developing meaningful linkages among scholarship, libraries, archives, and evolving digital tools can apply for one- or two-year appointments.

The UCLA Library welcomed its second class of fellows in Fall 2006. Marta Brunner, who earned her doctorate from the history of consciousness department at UC Santa Cruz in 2005, is working in the Charles E. Young Research Library's Collections, Research, and Instructional Services on collection development policy statements and a discipline-specific portal and with the Center for Oral History Resarch on a pilot project to digitize oral histories. Janet Kaaya, who earned her doctorate in information studies at UCLA in 2006, is working with the Research Library's Collections, Research, and Instructional Services on the identification, assessment, description, and dissemination of African-language information resources held at UCLA libraries. And Caroline Kelley, who expects her doctorate in modern languages at the University of Oxford in 2007 and completed a master's degree in women's studies at Oxford in 2002, is working in the Research Library's Collections, Research, and Instructional Services on a collection assessment of Francophone literature from the Maghreb and a discipline-specific portal; in the Center for Primary Research and Training processing a special collection; and with the Center for the Study of Women on an e-journal project.