Information literacy grants awarded for Spring 2026
Four faculty members—Lindsay Brown (English), Kenzie Burns (Civil and Environmental Engineering), Michael Carter (Economics), and Abu Rizvi (Economics) have been awarded information literacy grants for Spring 2026. Each will receive a $1,500 stipend. The grant program is jointly sponsored by the Library and the Office of the Provost.
In Professor Lindsay Brown’s ENG 206 Literary History, students will be introduced to the English literary canon, interrogate it, and disrupt it with a class anti-anthology. They will first perform an “autopsy” of a standard canonical anthology of English literature to understand what a canon consists of and how canons are formed, maintained, and contested and to imagine what an anti-anthology might look like. Working in groups, students will analyze, research, and present on their assigned syllabus text, focusing on its public reception, translation history, and questions of canonization. For the class anti-anthology, each student will choose a major text from the syllabus and write an entry for it. The class will collaboratively create a table of contents and a preface explaining what the anthology does—and refuses to do— and why, as well as what it includes. Professor Brown and Lijuan Xu will collaborate on her class.
Students in Professor Kenzie Burns’s CE 203 Envisioning a Sustainable World will also engage in textual interrogation to examine both the perspectives represented and those that are absent. For the semester-long project, they will investigate the data center that houses the server for a website and research its environmental, economic, and social impacts on the local community. Students will discuss where the information comes from and identify and examine those whose voices are absent. They will present their research using a format of their choice and appropriate for their audience—the public living near the data center. Throughout the semester, students will practice reinterpreting and revisualizing scientific information for different audiences. They will also hear from guest speakers from Easton-based organizations about the importance of making scientific information accessible to its audience. Research and instruction librarian Cory Budden will partner with Professor Burns.
Professor Michael Carter will require students in his ECON 342 Public Finance to critically analyze the most recent major legislative revision to public spending through a legal, political, social, and economic context. In addition to reading the law and understand how it relates to the existing laws, students will review the different versions of the bill and discuss what has changed and why. Students will use popular media coverage at the time of the bill’s drafting and debate to understand the issues in debate as well as how media coverage may have affected the changes and shaped the bill’s reception. They will then research related scholarly literature and forecast how the law will impact the overall economy. All these components will culminate in a web page where students will share their interpretations and analysis of the bill in a way that is accessible to the general public. Research and instruction librarian Courtney Dalton will be the librarian for the class.
For his ECON 309 Justice and the Economy class, Professor Abu Rizvi plans to incorporate information literacy through class readings, discussions, and sequenced assignments. The assignments will require students to research, synthesize, and critique the differing perspectives on justice and investigate how to explain the debates to a nonspecialist audience. Students will also identify which perspectives are missing and reflect on their own values and beliefs. After having completed several critical reading essays, they will work in groups to create a podcast on topics such as reparations and global inequality for a nonspecialist audience. Each group will develop their episode using a variety of sources. It must also include at least one perspective that has been missing from the public discourse. Head of Collections Strategies Ben Jahre will be the class librarian.
If you have any questions about the grant program and how librarians can support your classes, please contact Lijuan Xu, Director of Research and Instruction.