Dr. Kate Ozment Selected for Junior Fellowship
The College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences (CLASS) assistant professor of English, Kate Ozment received the Junior Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (SoFCB) at Rare Book School.
Her acceptance into the junior fellowship program is due to Ozment’s work, which is focused on feminist bibliography and understudied women who have worked in her field.
“While “critical bibliography” is still a phrase that is being defined, my engagement with it is through an intersectionally feminist lens pulling from the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Toni Morrison, and Bell Hooks,” said Ozment.
The word bibliography itself may seem daunting, especially to students whose only experience with citations and bibliographies is shifting through an extensive list at the end of journals or articles and citing work for their papers. However, Ozment explains that it is much more than a reference page.
“What you cite, how you cite it, and how you position those citations is a rhetorical choice, and it can be a deeply political one. As a feminist, I go out of my way to cite other women and to center women of color within the body of my research, not just as a footnote or a tangential point,” said Ozment.
“Citations really matter,” said Ozment, that’s why there is even a specific movement for citing black women academics called #CiteaSista (https://citeasista.com/). Feminist citations do the work of making work by and about women visible,” Ozment continued.
Now, as she enters the program, Ozment aims to learn more from experts worldwide about the significance of text, images, and artifacts as material objects and share that knowledge with students.
“Our students deserve to see a curriculum that represents a rich diversity of textual histories. It is often assumed that materiality matter less in a digital world, but the opposite is true. As technology historian, Matt Kirschenbaum says, ‘the “cloud” is actually a room of servers, not an abstract concept.’
Ozment details the importance of learning the history of text technologies and bringing that knowledge back to the classroom.
“Technology like a pen, the printing press, or the codex (a book bound at the spine) has shaped how we communicate and think. Attention to the material means of communications are more important than ever, and bibliographers are well-positioned to do this work because of our disciplinary roots in the historical world.”
“Our overlapping of orality, manuscript, print, and digital technologies of communication, the play of old and new, the unequal demographics of who engages with what methods and why: all of this dramatically impacts of our daily lives and shapes how we can communicate and think about the rhetorical implications of communicating,” Ozment continued.
The fellowship will allow Ozment to host a symposium on campus. Ozment aims to bring hands-on experience to students and the community in which artisans recreate techniques with bookbinders and printers. “Each of these experiences frames how materiality is the infrastructure of communication, and the work of bibliographers makes visible what text technology is and how it works.
Ozment already re-creates these experiences with students through the Maker Studio. Students can work directly with 3D printers, a digital sewing machine, letterpress, and Light Box Tracer, among other technologies.
Ozment shares the excitement to teach students the importance surrounding our current communication shift from print to digital and being able to pass on what she learns through the SoFCB program.
“I often feel like I have the best job in the world because I get to put beautiful books in students’ hands and teach them how to make books themselves. We sometimes underestimate the power of “wonder” as a learning tool. We are building a program in text technologies at Cal Poly Pomona, and this fellowship is one of the ways that I am preparing myself to be central to that process.”