This paper argues that Richard Wright’s stories “Down by the Riverside” and “Silt” revise the ecological horror depicted in H.P. Lovecraft’s stories such as “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Whisperer in Darkness”. The paper first examines how pulp fiction shaped discourse around the 1927 Mississippi River flood, then considers ecologica…[Read more]

COVID-19 created an urgent need for the Elihu Burritt Library to adapt their traditional library services to the “new normal.” Librarians from all departments worked together to find creative ways to maintain a high level of service while respecting safety protocol and work-from-home conditions. At the heart of every decision was a strong des…[Read more]

This dissertation explores a key period in the development of science as an everyday thing as reflected in the important cultures of letters containing the pulp magazines Amazing
Stories and Black Mask and the novel Arrowsmith, respectively science fiction, hardboiled detective fiction, and the realist novel. These genres’ cultural (…[Read more]

Jacques Derrida famously asked in “The Law of Genre” (1980), “Can one identify a work of art…if it does not bear the mark of a genre?” As metadata elements, genres are both highly useful and highly unstable; the field lacks consistent and widely agreed-upon definitions of genres, and texts can evince traits of many genres in different ways and…[Read more]

Laura holds a privileged place in detective fiction and film noir, yet Vera Caspary’s novel has received little critical attention. This paper asserts that Caspary’s novel, written within a context of a hypermasculine culture, constitutes a significant feminist revision of the genre that disrupts the hardboiled/scientific binary. By sel…[Read more]

Histories of science fiction often assume that women were absent from the genre’s early years in pulp magazines, or that their contributions took the form of more romantic or sentimental stories. This paper analyzes Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories (1926-1929) and argues that while women were underrepresented, they were crucial in moving the gen…[Read more]

Results – Students and librarians both considered the consultation process to be successful in advancing learning objectives and research skills. All students reported that the consultations met their expectations, and most reported that the skills acquired were applicable to their projects and significantly improved the quality of their work. L…[Read more]