News & Blog

Students at UCF work on all kinds of interesting creative projects and research. UCF Libraries has the privilege of being able to house physical and digital copies of decades of research done by students and faculty.  

STARS is UCF’s Showcase of Text, Archives, Research & Scholarship, and is home to scholarship and creative works done by students and faculty across disciplines. STARS provides an option for contributors to share their work while retaining their copyright. Most items in STARS are freely available to users around the world. Materials can be browsed College, Department, or individual collection: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/communities.html. 

Users can browse all Theses and Dissertations completed at UCF, including everything from a political science paper about the 2020 Presidential primaries and the Democratic Party’s influence to a Communication paper on the effects of social media on mental health. College and Department level collections are also available, as well as a browsable collection of Advisors and Chairs. 

We’ve also curated a list of some of the many interesting works by students in the History Department, Creative Writing program, College of Sciences, and College of Nursing below:  

History 

Pestilence and Poverty: The Great Influenza Pandemic and Underdevelopment in the New South, 1918-1919 by Andrew Kishuni 

Farm Women as Producers & Consumers in the 20th Century U.S. South by Joseph J. Kaminski 

Rebuilt and Remade: The Florida Citrus Industry, 1909-1939 by James Padgett  

Hippieland: Bohemian Space and Countercultural Place in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood by Kevin Mercer 

Mass Media and the Evolution of the Environmental Movement: 1960-1979 by Donald Anguish 

Creative Writing 

Golden Years by Sienna Malik 

Tourist Trap: On Being Raised In Award-winning Sand by Catherine Jane Carson 

According to the Gospel of Haunted Women by Judith Roney  

Assisted Living: Stories by Donovan Swift 

I Have Questions by Lorena Matejowsky 

Migrant Child by Nicholas Shepherd 

College of Sciences 

A Socio-Economic Assessment of Marine Turtle Eco-tourism by Kendra Cope (2015) 

Impact of Increased Green Turtle Nesting on Loggerhead Fitness by Amanda R. Carmichael (2018) 

It’s Just a Bad Period” and Other Ways of Dismissing Women’s Pain: An Ethnographic Look into the Experience of Endometriosis by Seline Hays 

Impact of Work-Life Balance on Health-Related Quality of Life Among College Students by Emily Vernet 

Experiences of Young Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Latinx People in Healthcare by Caleb Hernandez  

Whose Sustainability? An Analysis of a Community Farming Program’s Food Justice and Environmental Sustainability Agenda by Sarah Davenport  

College of Nursing 

Exploring the Different Factors Associated with Burnout by Natassja J. DeBra 

As we continue to share UCF Library’s online resources, we hope that you find new ways to engage with your fellow Knights across disciplines and genres. 

What terrors lurk in the heart of humanity? What scary thoughts skulk in the corners of your mind? What dark and spooky words will cross your page?

Can you creep out UCF Libraries staff with a scary story set in one of the UCF Library buildings?

Submit your scary story for the annual Knight Terror Library writing contest by 11:59 pm on October 27, 2019 to see if you can cause the best fright.

• Contest for UCF students only.
• One entry per student.
• 500 words or less.
• Story must be set in one of the UCF Library buildings (John C. Hitt Library, Curriculum Materials Center, Rosen Library, Downtown Library, or one of the Connect campus libraries).
• Stories with explicit sexual content will not be considered for this contest.

Submit your scary short story here

Winners will be announced on October 31, and be immortalized in STARS KnightVerse. First place wins a Libraries coffee mug and construction ducky. Second place wins a UCF Libraries water bottle and Pegasus sticker.

Judges reserve the right to not select a winner due to limited submissions, or lack of exceptional submissions.

Congratulations to our two Knight Terror winners!

 

1st place: “Chasing Cars” by Jillian M. Carver

2nd place: “Twitch” by Ryan M. Parente

 

Both are now a part of our KnightVerse in STARS!

Thank you to everyone who submitted a story. There were a lot of very scary stories to choose from which made judging very exciting.

STARS, Showcase of Text, Archives, Research & Scholarship, is the digital institutional repository of content by, for, or about UCF. In less than two years, the repository has garnered over 500,000 downloads from 22,504 organizations and institutions in 223 countries.

(more…)

As previously posted, Dr. Robert Cassanello’s podcast project “A History of Central Florida” is a 50-episode podcast that examines the history of central Florida through local area objects found in museums, historical organizations, and other places. Today, we want to direct you specifically to Episode 45 Diploma Plate. The diploma plate featured is from UCF Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives department. (more…)