The Modern Scholar Podcast

Dr. Sharon Morris is an Instructional Designer at Colorado Mountain College. She has a Master’s in Library and Information Science and a Ph.D. in Managerial Leadership in Libraries. Dr. Morris has co-designed state-level library leadership institutes, and served as an instructor, in Colorado, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. She also serves on the Leadership Team and is a core instructor for the Research Institute for Public Libraries. Dr. Morris is Adjunct Faculty at the University of Denver, Library and Information Science program, where she teaches Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness. She also provides workshops on leadership topics at national conferences, library staff days, and other library venues.

Kieran Hixon is the Rural and Small Libraries Consultant at the Colorado State Library. Kieran has served as President of the Association for Small and Rural Libraries and as a board member there, and is the leader of the Outstanding in their Field library leadership institute. Kieran has over 10 years experience offering professional development, both in-person and online, for rural libraries throughout the United States.

I first had the pleasure of meeting both Sharon and Kieran a few years ago when they facilitated a special session of the Arkansas State Library’s ALL-In Leadership Institute that I was participating in, and it was great to reconnect on this episode today!

Relinda Ruth is the Director of Educational Resources and OER Specialist at the University of Arkansas-Cossatot Community College. She is responsible for the Educational Resource Center (ERC) at three campuses, which includes Kimball Library, all tutoring services, the college’s award-winning textbook rental & OER program, along with textbook procurement. She was instrumental in building the state’s first two-year-college internal textbook rental program and growing the college’s OER initiative in 2015. In 2020, UA Cossatot was awarded a Title III SIP 2.2 million-dollar grant, and Relinda serves as the Title III Director. As the college’s OER Specialist, she is responsible for the development and implementation of policies relating to open licensing, OER initiatives and practices, and provides guidance on Creative Commons licensing and OER content. She compiles open resources and provides OER usage training for faculty. Relinda leads the college’s OER Team, raises awareness of open education activities and practices, and as a leading contact for OER in Arkansas, she encourages broad participation across the state through conferences, also chairing the ARKLink OER Task Force. From 2019-21, Relinda served a two-year term on the six-member steering committee for the Open Education Network, and she is certified for specialization in open licensing and the Commons through Creative Commons.

Stephanie Pierce is Director of User Services and Director of the Physics Library at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, AR. In addition to managing one of three branch libraries, she serves on the Open Educational Resources Team and Open Access Interest Group to promote and advocate participation in the various open initiatives on campus. Her research interests include utilizing text-mining to assess open textbooks for inclusivity and diversity; library space design; digital scholarship; Women in STEM; open scholarship; and OER advocacy/professional development.

Neil Oatsvall hails from and resides on the East Coast but he spent over a decade landlocked in the middle of the country. He did his undergraduate work at the University of North Carolina in Asian Studies (Japanese language) and history, and received his doctorate in history from the University of Kansas. Currently, Neil teaches high school history at the Triangle Math and Science Academy in Cary, NC. He has published in various outlets, including Agricultural History, Environment and History, and Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies. His book manuscript, Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945-1960, is forthcoming with the University of Alabama Press.

Derek Reveron is Chair and Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He specializes in strategy development, non-state security challenges, intelligence, and U.S. defense policy. He has authored or edited fourteen books. Dr. Reveron is a faculty affiliate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University where he co-teaches a course on contemporary national security challenges at the Kennedy School of Government. The views expressed by Dr. Reveron are his alone and do not necessarily represent the positions of the Naval War College, the U.S. Navy, or the Department of Defense.

John E. Savage is the An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Brown University. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Computing Machinery, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He served as a Jefferson Science Fellow in the U.S. State Department, a Fellow at the EastWest Institute, and a member of the Rhode Island Cybersecurity Commission. Dr. Savage has published over one hundred research articles, two books on theoretical computer science, co-authored a book on computer literacy, and co-edited a book on Very Large Scale Integration and parallel systems. He has given more than one hundred and eighty-five invited presentations worldwide.

Together Dr. Reveron and Dr. Savage are the co-authors of Security in the Cyber Age: An Introduction to Policy and Technology which was recently released from Cambridge University Press, and is the subject of our conversation today.

Dr. Luke Truxal is an American military historian who focuses on the application of American air power during the Second World War. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Texas in 2011 and 2018. His teaching fields include Europe in the twentieth century, United States history, United States military history, and United States political history in the twentieth century.

Truxal’s main research interest is the air war in Europe from 1942 to 1945. He is the author of Uniting against the Reich: The American Air War in Europe (Kentucky 2023). He is also an assistant editor for the scholarly web journal Balloons to Drones. He previously published “Bombing the Romanian Rail Network,” in the Spring 2018 issue of Air Power History. He is currently researching the air war over Romania from 1942 to 1944 with a particular emphasis on American and Soviet coordination and joint operations.