Alum Wins Joan Nestle Prize
Congratulations to department alum Dex Dexter ‘24, the 2025 recipient of the LGBTQ+ History Association’s Joan Nestle Prize!
The Joan Nestle Prize recognizes an outstanding example of undergraduate research and writing on LGBTQ+ history, which this year was Dexter’s senior thesis, “Writing a Road Home: North Carolina’s Gay and Lesbian Periodicals and the Creation of Proud Gay and Southern Communities.”
“The paper displayed exemplary research and was impressively written, using structuring vignettes and rich readings of archival sources to invite the reader into lesbian literary communities, radical fairie publications, and responses to anti-gay violence and the HIV/AIDS crisis of the early 1980s,” the LGBTQ+ History Association wrote in its announcement.
Getting started with Zotero |
| “This workshop is being offered remotely via Zoom only. Registrants will receive a Zoom link; those on the waitlist will not receive a Zoom link unless they are bumped up to a registered spot. The day after the workshop, registrants and those on the waitlist will receive a link to the workshop recording. |
| Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research. Attend this session to learn how to manage your citations to make constructing your bibliography much easier. You’ll be able to import citations from research databases like Academic Search Premier or Scopus; use with word processing programs to insert citations into papers; create a correctly formatted bibliography; and use Groups to collaborate with other people. This class is structured for new to beginning users.” |
MSU professor uses comics, digital humanities to explore Afrofuturist stories |
| “Michigan State University is home to the largest publicly available comic collection in the world. For English professor Julien Chambliss, this is one of the reasons he chose to come to MSU. |
| Comics have always been a part of Chambliss’ life, but he didn’t use them in a scholarly manner until his first teaching job at the University of Florida, where he was assigned to teach a course on modern America and decided to build the course around comics… |
| But it would be inaccurate to say comics are his only focus here at MSU. He also works in the digital humanities, which he said involves “using computers, computer tools (and) digital tools to explore humane questions.” As an interdisciplinary professor, Chambliss’ “humane questions” tend to relate to Black speculative practice and Afrofuturism, which he also teaches about.” |
| Make sure to contact the LAUNCH if there are any skills you want to learn, need support with your own digital history projects, or are interested in our podcast! |
| Thanks for reading, |
| The LAUNCH Team (Cameron, Ha Lien, Dani, & Nicholas) |