The Buchanan Library Fellowship program supports hands-on student learning opportunities that build desirable skills and deepen students’ understanding of resources and services in the Vanderbilt libraries. With a focus on undergraduate instruction, the program connects faculty and professional librarians with students to work on experiential library projects and present their work at the end of their fellowship. Fellows learn new skills, earn a stipend of $1,000, and participate in experiences that add to their expertise and resumes. Projects may involve curating a physical or online exhibition, creating multimedia such as podcasts or videos, contributing new research via academic outputs (e.g. research poster, academic databases, or writing an article) or expanding technology and data skills. Through the Buchanan Library Fellowship program, the Vanderbilt libraries promote student research and experiential learning. Since 2010, the fellowship program has awarded fellowships to over 250 students.
Program Outcomes
- Build resume with completed innovative project
- Engage in inquiry-based and experiential learning related to a variety of topics in libraries and information science
- Evaluate information from diverse perspectives in order to shape their own knowledge base
- Work with leading experts in the library field
- Demonstrate persistence, adaptability, and reflection as components of inquiry
- Contribute to scholarly conversations by becoming a creator or critic
- Synthesize and communicate information to a wider audience
- Build lasting relationships with information professionals
Application Instructions
To be considered for a Buchanan Library Fellow position, candidates must be undergraduate students enrolled at Vanderbilt University in good academic standing. Required documents include:
- Completed application form including statement of interest
- Curriculum vitae including name, address, email, and telephone
Previously selected Buchanan Fellows may not reapply for a new project.
Applications for spring 2025 are due Jan. 15. Students will receive a formal notice of their status by Jan. 21.
Spring 2025 Fellowships
Archives to Classrooms: Creating Digital Learning Tools for K-12 Education
In this fellowship, students will research and explore Vanderbilt’s rich archival collections in Special Collections and University Archives to create valuable digital educational resources for K-12 teachers. Over the course of the fellowship, students will have the opportunity to meet with outreach archivists at Tennessee State Library and Museum and with a middle school social studies teacher. Working collaboratively, students will select historic primary sources from Vanderbilt’s archives and develop grade-appropriate learning activities for teachers to incorporate in the classroom. Students will gain hands-on experience with AI tools such as Claude and Magic Bus, digital access platforms like JStor Forum and Aviary, and educational pedagogies such as scaffolding and game theory. After completion of the fellowship, students will gain skills in digital storytelling, data analysis, collaborative project management, and the final creation of K-12 educational archival materials. This project not only provides students with real-world experience in educational content development but also provides practical resources for teachers to make historical materials more accessible and engaging. Students will meet weekly, and can expect to spend approximately five hours per week on the fellowship (including class meetings and research in the Special Collections). Sign up to make history come alive for young learners!
Mentor: Jacqueline Devereaux
Art and Fine Bindings: Artist-Inspired Books, Papers, and Decorative Bindings
This fellowship invites students to explore the exciting world of book arts, focusing on the intersection of art, craftsmanship, and literature. Fellows will engage in hands-on learning and creative expression and explore bookmaking techniques by studying examples of historic bindings from the 16th through the 21st centuries in the holdings of Vanderbilt’s Special Collections Library. Papers made from wood, plants, and other materials will be examined to test their properties and usability as writing surfaces and book coverings. Along the way, students will learn about various types of inks, fabrics, threads, and paints which can be used to create an artist book of their own. Finally, the fellows will curate an exhibit which showcases exceptional books from Vanderbilt’s Special Collections Library as well as their own artist-inspired handmade books. While on this artistic journey, fellows will create social media posts about the books which have inspired their creative process as well as a stage-by-stage documentation of their own artists books from conception to final product. At the end of the fellowship, students will create a video which reflects on their fellowship experience and its influence on their creative process.
Mentor: Teresa Gray
As Seen on TV: American Culture through Advertisements
The Vanderbilt Libraries houses decades of television advertisements in the TV News Archive related to a multitude of products, ranging from pharmaceuticals to clothing to furniture. This fellowship will provide students the opportunity to dig into the archive and develop a set of clips that they will use to create part of an exhibit analyzing a facet of American culture and life through historic and current advertisements. For example, a student may curate and analyze clips based on their interest in the evolution of women’s fashion advertisements as more women entered the workforce. Fellows are encouraged to pursue a topic that interests them and analyze their findings through a disciplinary lens that would lend itself to a captivating, engaging exhibit. As we delve into the archive, fellows will complete readings pertaining to exhibit curation and design while learning about primary sources, archival description, research, and processing. Fellows will aid in the creation of an exhibit by generating labels and item descriptions, and will create a “narrative” of their analysis. This exhibit will reach students and faculty and increase understanding of the potential research that can be completed using the TV News Archive. To complete this fellowship, students will be expected to commit approximately 3-5 hours of their time per week, which includes a weekly 1 hour meeting with mentors and other fellows. The date and time of the weekly meeting will be organized based upon the selected fellows’ schedules.
Mentors: Brenna Bierman; Giselle Hengst
Engaging with Place: Disorientation to Art and Landmarks
The Vanderbilt campus is in need of a round of self-study. A beginning is evident in the recent efforts to add new context to the Vaughn Home, to identify the Native graduate students who came here to study law and theology, and to disinter the buried histories of Roger Williams University. What these works share in common is a commitment to the first half century of Vanderbilt’s history. We find that more attention is due to the subsequent century. In this fellowship, students will take cultural resources dotting the campus landscape and to develop design interventions that will make Vanderbilt’s recent history more legible to contemporary students, alumni, visitors, faculty, and staff. What we propose is a disorientation, similar to an orientation, but our aim is to counter any cleanly linear narrative leading merely to progress and reconciliation. Instead, we are far more interested in elements of the university’s past that remain unresolved and then doing the research needed to make better sense of enduring campus controversies. Through this project, students will strengthen their research, communication, and collaboration skills; learn to perform cultural and historical analysis, engage in ethical and reflective thinking, create design interventions; and learn how to apply these skills to their work at Vanderbilt and beyond. Fellows will create a physical or digital guidebook(s) or zine(s), as well as the possibility of design interventions built or otherwise accreted into the physical plant of the campus and/or new narratives to be shared online and with the campus tour guides. We also hope that our work will encourage the university to consider investing more time and resources into thoughtfully engaging with its past, helping to ensure that important, sometimes difficult aspects of its history are acknowledged and openly discussed.
Mentors: Stephanie Morgan; Peter Chesney
Headlines vs. Guidelines: The COVID-19 Communication Breakdown
For nearly a century, Americans have turned to television news as a primary source of information, especially during periods of uncertainty. In 2020, viewership of TV News spiked dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, despite the increase in information consumption, many Americans were confused and frustrated by official guidance about testing, masking, vaccinating and school openings. Journalists and scientists both choose their words carefully, so what exactly was happening to the messages? This fellowship is guided by the hypothesis that news media filters scientific communications in a way that exploits their “newsworthiness” and results in miscommunication, misinformation, and panic. Using the Vanderbilt Television News Archive’s collection of national evening news coverage during 2020-21, fellows will support faculty research exploring this central question. This fellowship seeks students interested in gaining hands-on experience working with a digital collection, and those interested in learning more about the challenges associated with media preservation and research. The fellows’ primary task will be adding speaker labels to the transcripts of news segments about the pandemic, contributing to an invaluable dataset of labelled speech. The dataset will be used to conduct sentiment analysis in order to compare how journalists and scientists present information to the public. Fellows can expect to meet in-person at the beginning and end of the semester, and will be expected to work remotely on the labelling project for 3-5 hours per week.
Mentors: Giselle Hengst; Jim Duran; Dana Currier; Shellie Richards
LGBTQ History Exhibit
In the past year, Vanderbilt’s Special Collections and University Archives have greatly increased our LGBTQ archival collections, improved the description and access to existing collections, and began building meaningful relationships with local community members. To continue the success, we are opening an LGBTQ history exhibit in Central Library in April 2025 and hosting a complementary public reception. Fellows on this project will work closely with mentor Sarah Calise, Curator of Community Histories and the leading scholar of Nashville’s LGBTQ history, particularly through her organization Nashville Queer History. Fellows will be integral to the design, creation, installation and promotion of this physical exhibit and its digital version, gaining specific skills in exhibit design, artifact handling, writing concise and complex narratives, working with community partners, planning a public program and promoting the exhibit and opening reception. Fellows will have the opportunity to each curate their own exhibit case of the seven cases available. While prior knowledge of American LGBTQ history is not required, having an interest or knowledge in such history is preferred.
Mentor: Sarah Calise
Mapping Robinson Crusoe
This fellowship puts Daniel Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe, in changing ideas of place in the eighteenth-century Anglophone worlds, providing fellows with the opportunity to engage with how place was once conceived from how it was later conceived, and why this shift matters for how we read Defoe or British travel literary writ large. This fellowship aims to trace Crusoe’s traveling trajectory along the three interlocking developments in geography: the revolution of infrastructure, the circulation of goods, and the mapping of the world with reference to Defoe’s contemporary cartographer Herman Moll and his own A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. This research project illuminates the material, visual, and cognitive culture of a telling phrase of Robinson Crusoe, “It is as impossible, as needless, to set down the innumerable Crowd of Thought that whirl’d through that great thorow-fare of the Brain.” Fellows will learn how Robinson Crusoe participates not only in reinventing a community, devising tropes, characters, and settings for interaction, but it also provides a critique of its communal, communicative truth claim, one which re-imagines, for instance, an on-going and large-scale convergence of laissez-faire, information, and culture. We will also think through the cognitive mapping of spatial navigation by John O’Keefe, the Nobel prize winner in physiology or medicine in 2014. The culminating project of this fellowship will be the interactive technology of story map. This fellowship is open to students interested in scholarly practices that cut cross established fields of inquiry for radiant intertextuality.
Mentors: Jeong Oh Kim; Ryan King; Stacy Curry-Johnson
Rhythm Readers: Early Literacy and Music Appreciation Using Children’s Books
The Rhythm Readers program aims to foster early literacy and music appreciation in elementary students through engaging story time sessions that combine children’s books with live musical demonstrations by student musicians. By integrating music into reading curriculum, the program seeks to enhance learning, social skills, and overall engagement in young children, aligning with research-backed best practices for multi-literacy education. Students participating in this fellowship will engage with Vanderbilt Libraries’ juvenile literature collection to create a 30-minute, interdisciplinary lesson plan that includes a story time, musical performance, and other learning outcomes dependent on the chosen title. Fellows will implement lesson plans for 1st grade students at Eakin Elementary School library. Additionally, students will define story book titles using metadata or tags, and they will upload their lesson plan to the TN Arts Commission Arts Integration database for other music, library, or language educators to freely use in the classroom. Fellows should expect to meet once per week with library mentors and hold a Rhythm Readers session the week of March 17-21, 2025 at Eakin Elementary School during the lunch hour. A free background check will be required of students to complete to work with children at Eakin.
Mentors: Kate Linton; Emily Bush; Sha Howard
The University Museum of Art Laboratory: Turning Art into Poetry & Music
Vanderbilt University Museum of Art (VUMA) is a globally minded laboratory where the spirit of curiosity meets visual expression to engage with the most critical human issues, build empathy, and inspire wonder across Vanderbilt University and throughout middle Tennessee. VUMA stewards 12,000 works of art for engaged looking through exhibitions, class visits, and independent research. Fellows will create new poems and musical compositions in response to selections from the VUMA collections. All new works will be performed live at Porch Fest, Saturday April 5, 2025, the annual Peabody-VUMA Festival of the arts. This fellowship builds work cycles on a three-week model to choose, analyze and create new poems or musical compositions inspired by close reading of artworks. Fellows will hone their research skills, research selected art works, create ekphrastic poetry (musical compositions welcome too), and learn research skills using primary sources. While ancient Greeks defined ekphrasis as poetry written about art, we use it in the modern sense of looking and describing in close detail. Recent poems by Ocean Voung, Victoria Chang, Anne Sexton and May Swenson exemplify modern ekphrasis, describing artworks blended with historic events and deep emotional response to both. As part of their weekly peer editing process, fellows will build communication and interpretation skills as they refine their works. They will perform their work live at the Peabody Porch Fest Saturday April 5, 2025 and create a zine for the audience about their process.
Mentors: Mary Anne Caton; Holling Smith-Borne