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December 6th, 2019
We talked with author Pavel Soukup about his book with Purdue University Press, Jan Hus: The Life and Death of a Preacher.
The book records the life of medieval Czech university master and popular preacher Jan Hus, who was one of medieval Europe’s most prominent reformers.
Q: Who was Jan Hus?
Pavel Soukup: Jan Hus was a late medieval Czech university master and popular preacher in Prague, an adherent of the teachings of the English thinker John Wyclif, and a proponent of Church reform. Through his dedicated pursuit of what he understood as his mission, this medieval intellectual generated conflict, and eventually brought execution upon himself. In 1415, he was condemned at the Council of Constance and burned at the stake as a heretic. Thanks to his contemporary influence and his posthumous fame in the Hussite movement and beyond, Hus has become one of the best known figures of the Czech past, and one of the most prominent reformers of medieval Europe as a whole.
Q: It must provide a challenge to write about someone with the notoriety of Hus. Was there anything new you intended on adding to the conversation around him?
Soukup: The new facts I was able to add Hus’s biography are rather detailed findings that matter mostly to specialists. More important was my ambition to provide a comparative perspective on Hus. I did not want to see him as a titan with no peer, but rather as a member of a large group of reform-minded medieval intellectuals. What puzzles us is the fact that many of these reformers belonged to Hus’s opponents and some most prominent of them were among the judges who sent him to death. It is only through comparing their grounds, aims and approaches, that we can understand the religious split and the emergence of the Hussite dissent. While much work remains to be done, my book identifies the key areas in which this comparison should be done, and provides answers to the question of why an ecclesiastical reformer was condemned by a reform church council.
Q: Why did you choose to write about Jan Hus now?
Soukup: The book was written upon request by the German publisher of the original version. Otherwise, I would not think of writing about a person of such prominence in Czech historical research and public debate. Nevertheless, I accepted the invitation immediately. I understood it as both a chance and a challenge. Writing about Hus, one finds himself part of a long and venerable tradition. Czech patriotic discourse always spoke about Hus in impassioned, affected language. Today, big words like ‘truth’ and ‘martyrdom’ make us somewhat bashful. While literature on Hus certainly needs more sober language, the central themes of Hus’s story remain topical. Hus had to make hard choices facing repressive institutions, and the former Czech president Václav Havel had a point when he emphasized the principal of individual responsibility that cannot be delegated to anyone else.
Q: You say that the central themes of Hus’s life remain topical. What are some of these main themes?
Soukup: Jan Hus is often seen as someone who chose death instead of betraying the truth. This stance might be questioned by pointing to the subjectivity of personal convictions, especially when they are rooted in religious beliefs. Yet it is precisely these days, in the age of disinformation, that we need to care again about truth and reliability. Another theme crucial for grasping Hus is his public activity which led to the emergence of a group of determined followers who, not much later, started a religious revolution. I devoted the key chapters of the book to communication, media, and propaganda, as well as to preaching and political networking of Hus. Given the importance of communication networks and social media in today’s world, I believe that the social impact of communicative behavior represents a highly relevant topic of cultural-historical studies.
You can get 50% off Jan Hus during our Central European Studies Sale, just enter discount code CES50 when ordering directly through our website. The sale ends on December 1.
Filed under: UncategorizedDecember 3rd, 2019
By Rebecca Richardson, Assistant Dean for Collections and Access, Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies.
As part of our ongoing effort to provide the highest quality media content for Purdue students and faculty, while endeavoring to be good stewards of university resources, Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies (PULSIS) will soon join institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and Duke in adopting a new “mediated” policy with the streaming video service Kanopy beginning January 1, 2020.
Kanopy is a streaming video platform that provides a wide variety of documentary, independent, and award-winning films for educational use. It is not a subscription service; rather, pricing is based upon the number of views per individual title, with expensive annual licensing fees incurred once a film has been viewed for 30 seconds just four times. At $150 per title, PULSIS spent $73,512 on Kanopy in 2018. In 2019, these costs ballooned to $137,000 in the first 10 months alone. This is an exorbitant amount of money to pay for media that we do not get to retain in our permanent collections. With academic and student recreational use both contributing to Kanopy’s rising expenditures, we can no longer sustain an unlimited-use model.
Beginning January 1, Kanopy will be restricted to instructional use and select learning-based opportunities only. We will continue to allow the Criterion, PBS, and Media Education Foundation collections to remain unmediated in their entirety, but instructors interested in other unlicensed titles will be prompted to request access directly through the Kanopy platform. License expirations will vary by title, and instructors who require access to a Kanopy title for a course will need to check on its availability before the start of each semester. Kanopy is one of many exceptional video resources available through the PULSIS, and we encourage all of our patrons to explore our extensive collections of media across a wide variety of platforms and formats.
A Libguide (Library Guide) at http://guides.lib.purdue.edu/streamingvideo provides an in-depth look at the video streaming platforms available to the Purdue University community.
For inquiries or more information about upcoming changes to Kanopy, please contact Assistant Dean Richardson at rarichar@purdue.edu.
Filed under: collections, generalNovember 25th, 2019
Six Purdue University students’ research projects were honored at the 2019 Purdue University GIS Day Conference. The students’ projects were reviewed by a panel of faculty and staff judges during the one-day event, which was held November 8 in Stewart Center. First-, second- and third-place winners received $100, $75, and $50 respectively.
The winning students and their projects are listed below.
Undergraduate Student Winners
Graduate Students
Each year, the Purdue University GIS Day Conference is organized by Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies (PULSIS) Associate Professor and GIS Specialist Nicole Kong and GIS Instructional Coordinator Shirley Li, as well as a multidisciplinary team of faculty and staff from PULSIS and other departments on campus. Learn more at www.lib.purdue.edu/gis.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter, faculty_staff, general, GIS, PSETNovember 21st, 2019
Humanities, Social Science and Education Library’s Featured Database will give you a very brief introduction to the basic features of one of our specialized subscription databases. This month we’re featuring Academic Search Premier, brought to you by EBSCO Industries, Inc.
Link: https://guides.lib.purdue.edu/db/db142
Access the databases off-campus with your Purdue login and password.
Focus: Academic Search Premier is a general academic index that indexes more than 8,200 magazines and journals from every academic discipline and provides the full-text of more than 4,600.
Tutorial: Click here see the basics of using Academic Search Premier.
Why you should know this database: Academic Search Premier is an extensive, multidisciplinary database that covers a wide variety of subject areas. Topics include Engineering, Religion, Technology, and Women’s Studies. This makes it a great platform for starting your research.
Quick Tip: On the Detailed Record page, you will see a link for find similar results. This will bring up a new list of articles that share similar subjects and keywords.
Related Resources:
Some other databases you might want to explore, are:
ProQuest Research Library: https://guides.lib.purdue.edu/db/db156
JSTOR: https://guides.lib.purdue.edu/db/db347
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This Featured Database comes to you from the Humanities, Social Science and Education Library. If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact hsselib@purdue.edu. Also let us know if you know of a colleague who would benefit from this, or future Featured Databases.
Since usage statistics are an important barometer when databases are up for renewal, tell us your favorite database, and we will gladly promote it. Send an email to hsselib@purdue.edu.
Filed under: database, general, HSSE, HSSE Featured DatabasesNovember 21st, 2019
When the Integrative Data Science Initiative (IDSI) was announced, Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies (PULSIS) Associate Professor Clarence Maybee saw the initiative as an opportunity to create a sustainable and scalable course-development process for integrating data science into undergraduate courses.
In Fall 2019, such a process was supported when Maybee’s and his team’s project proposal, “IMPACT Data Science Education: Preparing Undergraduates to Lead into the Future,” was funded through the IDSI’s second round of research funding.
“Knowing that Purdue is interested in graduating undergraduate students with data science skills, which will enable them to lead into the future, we brought together the programs on campus already doing this type of work. Many of us leading the Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation program, commonly known as IMPACT, have been working with Purdue instructors since 2011 to make courses more engaging and student-centered. The Data Science Consulting Service works with instructors specifically to help them integrate data science into Purdue courses,” Maybee explained. “IMPACT and the Data Science Consulting Service are the right partners to develop a program that works with Purdue instructors to integrate data science into undergraduate courses,” he added.
For the project, Maybee, who is the principal investigator, and his team are looking for six Purdue University faculty members to design innovative and engaging data science coursework. This is a rolling application process and will be open until the six participants are selected, Maybee added.
“These faculty members will participate in the IMPACT program and additional activities during spring 2020. The coursework they design will enable their students to use data science methods and techniques in their fields,” he explained. “In addition to receiving the IMPACT funding, participants will receive $2,500 each for participating in IMPACT Data Science Education.”
According to Maybee, in addition to taking part in IMPACT, the participants will:
Faculty interested in applying to participate in IMPACT Data Science Education will need to complete the form for the project and the application to participate in IMPACT. Both application forms can be accessed at http://sites.lib.purdue.edu/dse/.
For more information, contact Maybee at cmaybee@purdue.edu or Yixuan Sun, grad assistant, at yixuan-sun@purdue.edu.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter, faculty_staff, generalNovember 18th, 2019
Every semester end, Hicks Study Breaks offer students the opportunity to relax and de-stress during prep and finals weeks. This fall semester, Hicks Study Breaks will start Monday, December 2.
All events are free and open to all Purdue students and will be held in the Hicks Undergraduate Library’s main common area.
Prep Week
Finals Week
November 18th, 2019
Purdue University Press is offering a 40% discount on over 20 selected titles as part of our Winter Gift Catalog so you can celebrate your favorite holiday by gifting a book to a friend, loved one, or yourself. The books in the catalog are arranged in six different areas of interest:
To receive the 40% discount, use code GIFT40 at checkout when ordering directly from our website. The sale will continue through the end of 2019. Further details are available in the full catalog.
Happy Holidays from the Purdue University Press staff!
Selections from the Winter Gift Catalog:
Filed under: generalNovember 15th, 2019
Purdue University students who take social science or humanities courses will learn more from digital scholarship concepts and ideas incorporated into these courses in the coming months and years.
Thanks to Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities Matt Hannah, Professor of English and African-American Studies Venetria Patton, and the Integrative Data Science Initiative (IDSI) at Purdue, College of Liberal Arts faculty—who have had a desire to redesign an existing humanities or social science course to include digital scholarship—have been awarded small seed grants via Hannah’s and Patton’s “Engaging in the Digital Humanities” IDSI project.
In 2018, their proposal was awarded funds as part of “the first investment towards achieving the goals of the Integrative Data Science Initiative.”
According to Hannah, most of the faculty will work closely with him to strategize and implement key changes in an effort to expand digital scholarship into new arenas. In addition to the several faculty members who were awarded seed grants, Hannah was able to fund five graduate students working in some area of digital scholarship to attend conferences and present original work.
“I was delighted by the range and scope of the proposals,” Hannah said. “I am excited about the future of Digital Humanities at Purdue.”
Graduate students and faculty members awarded grant funds are listed below.
For more information, contact Hannah at hannah8@purdue.edu.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter, faculty_staff, general, HSSEB, press_release, UncategorizedNovember 11th, 2019
In anticipation of the current issue of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, we spoke with poet and novelist Ellen Galford about her writing, as well as topics in Jewish studies more broadly. Galford composed three original poems for issue 37, volume 3, a special issue titled “Narrative Spaces at the Margins of British Jewish Culture(s).”
You can access Shofar through your institutional log-in via Project Muse or JSTOR, visit the Shofar website, or follow Shofar on Twitter @ShofarJournal.
Q: You’ve written fiction and poetry on Jewish themes and topics in the past, and for this special issue of Shofar you’ve written three poems: “The Museum of Margins,” “Mixed Marriage,” and “Curator.” Do you find that one form (poetry or prose) lends itself especially well to exploring certain aspects of Jewish identity or history?
Ellen Galford: There’s an old saying that God’s real reason for creating humankind was to satisfy His/Her/Their (??) voracious appetite for stories. When an image or a theme starts jabbing me between the shoulder blades, I don’t ask it whether it would like to be a poem or a piece of prose when it grows up. Either way, it’s going to be a story that I hope will keep a reader, divine or human, entertained.
Prose has prevailed throughout most of my writing life—screeds of bespoke nonfiction texts for the day job, fiction for the sake of love and politics and taking my imagination wherever it wanted to go. But it was only after novels about lesbian bad girls in Jacobean London, folklore and feminism in the twentieth-century Outer Hebrides, and a satirical slap at the Thatcher government that I came out of the closet as a Jewish writer with novel number four. And at that point prose—with its leisurely story arcs and ample room for any number of digressions—opened the door into the surreal, heretical Jewish world inside my head.
After I stepped across that particular threshold, I came out of the closet as a writer of poetry, too. For years I’d felt uneasy about showing my poems to anyone (apart from a few very personal pieces with specific readers in mind). But maybe it’s because I’ve travelled far enough along in my own personal timeline to acquire a bit of chutzpah and just go for it. Sometimes writing poetry feels like wrestling with an angel (or a pack of noisy demons) all night long. Call it some kind of cockamamie optimism, but I don’t think there is any theme or topic, Jewish or otherwise, that a poem can’t tackle. Making it good enough is another story.
Q: You were originally born in New Jersey but spent much of your life in Scotland. Do your American origins shape your experience in Scotland? Additionally, does your Jewish identity inform the ways you understand national identity, the ways you might personally locate yourself within national or global communities or as a writer?
Galford: I’ve lived in Scotland for a very long time. When I left the US, Nixon was still president. I am what’s sometimes defined as “Scottish by formation.” Politically I view the world through a leftish, internationalist Scottish lens, appalled by Brexit and hoping that we’ll get our independence while I’m still around to see it. But any time I start up a conversation with a stranger, the first question will be “Where’s that accent from?” As soon as I open my mouth, it becomes clear that my origins lie much closer to the banks of the River Hudson than to those of the River Clyde. And although I tend to look at whatever is happening in America as “foreign news,” I know that culturally I am also very much a product of my New York/New Jersey upbringing. Middle-aged taxi-drivers are particularly impressed when I tell them that the TV mafia saga The Sopranos was based on the suburb where I grew up.
Many years ago I did a reading at a feminist bookshop in Massachusetts to mark the US publication of The Dyke and the Dybbuk. The shop manager confessed that “We can’t decide where to put you. The lesbian shelf? The historical fiction shelf? The fantasy shelf? American feminist fiction or European?” I suggested very tentatively that if she ordered a few extra copies she could put them in all the right places.
Like everybody else I know, I belong to several different tribes, some of them Jewish (you can be 98.6 percent secular and still want to learn Talmud). We’ve all made journeys, some of them generations-long, to reach the places where we feel at home, changing and maybe even reinventing ourselves in the process. This certainly informs my thinking not only about national identity but about the ways people define themselves over time in terms of religion, gender, sexuality, political perspective, and so forth. And I can’t understand how any Jew with even the vaguest sense of history can collude with the builders of walls.
Q: Many scholars in the upcoming special issue discuss the ways historians, sociologists, and artists have in the past often limited their explorations of British Jewishness to England. Do you think Jewishness is experienced differently in Scotland than it is in England? How would you describe the relationship between Scottish identity and Jewishness?
Galford: Scotland is a small country (5 million people) with a tiny population of Jews. The Jewish spectrum runs from traditional Orthodox through progressive Liberal to those who wouldn’t put their foot into any shul at all. Most of us live in Glasgow or Edinburgh but we also turn up in remote Highland glens, out on the islands and in tiny fishing villages along the Fife coast. We don’t all know each other.
Heaven forbid I should speak for everybody, but I think I’d be safe in saying that Jewish Scotland is in no way a smaller, rainier version of Jewish London or Jewish Manchester. In Scotland you’d have to be very determined indeed to live in what one might call a separatist Jewish environment, devoid of friends, partners, colleagues, or neighbors from outside the tribe. And Scotland, as we are forever reminding the rest of the world, isn’t England. Our educational systems, legal systems, historical perspectives, and social attitudes differ in many ways. One current sore point is that the Scottish electorate voted by a substantial majority to remain in the European Union, and there is a widespread feeling that we are being dragged out against our will by our southern neighbours.
I’m trying hard to avoid sloppy generalizations here, but I do think that the reasons for this include a much more positive attitude to immigration. This is partly because it is widely understood that Scotland needs more people—demographically and economically—to flourish. But there is also an underlying internationalism. Scots, like Jews, have experienced all manner of displacements and diasporas, forced and voluntary alike. You’d be hard-pressed to find a native-born Scot without family connections in Canada, Australia, the United States, or elsewhere. Like Jews, Scots of all breeds and creeds have long memories, and know what it feels like to look over your shoulder and see the place you came from disappearing from sight.
Q: In two of the poems you’ve written for this special issue, “The Museum of Margins” and “Curator,” you reference the museum space, a library, “draughty corridors,” and “tattered photos.” These poems revolve around the past, including not simply spaces to preserve history (museum, library) but also memories. How would you describe the relationship between place, memory, and the act of writing in your work?
Galford: The one word answer to this question would be: Inseparable. But to make a short story a wee bit longer, I’d say that I’m an inveterate time-traveller. I’m obsessed with places and the sense of place, random objects and the mysteries behind them. If they had an Olympic event in Urban Flâneuring, I’d be a good bet for a gold medal. Yet even though I try hard to stay in the here and now, I find myself drifting across timelines. Sometimes this involves leaping across space as well as time, wandering through my own memories, personal or inherited. And living in Edinburgh, with a medieval castle and a long-dead volcano at its heart, means that any ordinary morning dog walk can take me through many centuries of local history and into deep geological time.
I think these tendencies are probably hard-wired into every Jewish writer’s DNA. They definitely run in the family. My father was a history teacher and my mother a librarian. Both were inveterate sentimentalists and the curators (not always willingly) of a massive horde of family photographs, battered kitchen utensils with a tale attached to every dent and scratch, a cellar and attic crammed with files and boxes of ephemera bearing the fingerprints of at least four generations.
Q: You mentioned that you’ve recently been studying Yiddish and experimenting with Yiddish poetry. What motivated you to learn Yiddish? Is your experience significantly different when writing in Yiddish rather than English?
Galford: It’s only in the past dozen years or so that I’ve begun studying Yiddish in any formal way, but its words and cadences have provided the background music to my life since the day I was born. My maternal grandmother, who lived with us throughout my childhood, was the first American-born child of a large (and talkative) family that emigrated from Riga to New Jersey in the mid-1880s. She and her nine siblings grew up speaking English as their first language but shifted easily into the mameloshn when any passing child drifted into earshot of a juicy conversation. The next two generations followed the old familiar pattern: My mother used a few Yiddish phrases; I knew only a random collection of Yiddish words.
I joined a Yiddish class to reclaim that inheritance and learn the language properly but it’s the literature that keeps me going. I had no particular intention to write poetry in Yiddish (doing it in English seems challenging enough) but sometimes Yiddish words and phrases slip on to the page. The finished poems are, of necessity, short and simple. I’m not the whizz-bang linguist I was in my youth. Despite the best efforts of our wonderful teacher, my grasp of grammar and retention of vocabulary still have a long way to go. It’s probably an act of sheer hubris/chutzpah to try writing Yiddish poetry at all.
Q: Your novel The Dyke and the Dybbuk was the winner of a Lambda Award for Gay and Lesbian Literature, and you’ve written about and been involved with LGBTQ communities in the past. What would you say are the key intersections between LGBTQ identity and Jewish identity? (For you personally or for the communities more broadly).
Galford: I grew up in the pre-Stonewall era of Compulsory Heterosexuality—a time of toxic stereotypes, parents cutting ties with their “deviant” offspring or sending them to shrinks for a “cure.” It took many of us, me included, a longer time than it might now, and quite a few wrong turnings, before we found our ways into who we are. Today’s Jewish and queer communities would have been beyond our wildest imaginings: out and proud gay and lesbian rabbis (indeed, any female rabbis at all), discreet support groups for those in flight from fundamentalist communities (Jewish or otherwise), the etiquette around preferred pronouns.
For all the positive developments, we’ve not quite reached the Promised Land. We can’t even agree what that Promised Land should be or who should have the right to be there. A long history of vicious persecutions, whether at the hands of anti-Semites or homophobes or fascist dictatorships, doesn’t automatically make us all lovely souls. In the particular communities I inhabit—the LGBTQ and the Jewish worlds as well as that turbulent political sphere called “the Left”—there are still those with more appetite for widening schisms than for finding common ground. Case in point: It can sometimes feel more problematical to come out as Jewish than it once felt to come out as a lesbian. This gives me an uncomfortable and very personal sense of déjà vu. But nobody reading this needs me to tell them that we’re living in dangerous times.
Filed under: UncategorizedNovember 5th, 2019
Parrish Library’s Featured Database will give you a very brief introduction to the basic features of one of our specialized subscription databases. This time we’re featuring Small Business Reference Center, brought to you by EBSCO Industries, Inc.
Link: The List of Business Databases is the alphabetical list of the databases specially selected for those in a business program of study. Access the databases off-campus with your Purdue login and password.
Focus: Offers exclusive full text for many top consumer business reference books, as well as the necessary tools and instruction to address a wide-range of small business topics.
Tutorial: Click Getting Started with Small Business Reference Center to see the basics of using Small Business Reference Center.
Start with this hint: Use the Advanced search options to combine keywords for a more precise search.
Why you should know this database: Small Business Reference Center provides business videos, a help and advice section, and information on how to create business plans.
Related Resources
Some other resources you might want to explore, are:
This Featured Database comes to you from the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics. If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact parrlib@purdue.edu. Also let us know if you know of a colleague who would benefit from this, or future Featured Databases.
Since usage statistics are an important barometer when databases are up for renewal, tell us your favorite database, and we will gladly promote it. Send an email to parrlib@purdue.edu.
Filed under: database, general, MGMT