The Sweet Public Domain: Celebrating Copyright Expiration with the Honey Bunch Series

About this Publication

The Sweet Public Domain: Honey Bunch & Copyright was developed by the office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Contributors

Sara Benson is the Copyright Librarian and an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Library at Urbana Champaign. She holds a JD from the University of Houston Law Center, an LLM from Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley, and an MSLIS from the School of Information Science at the University of Illinois. Prior to joining the Library, Sara was a Lecturer at the University of Illinois College of Law for ten years. Sara is the host of the Podcast ©hat (“Copyright Chat”) available on iTunes. Her recent research interests include working a large-scale project studying how to effectively teach fair use doctrine to librarians. This study was published in the spring issue of the Journal of Academic Librarianship. The goal of her research agenda is to “shape the future of copyright policy by examining both on-the-ground practice in libraries and museums as well as the sociopolitical guiding principles behind such practices.”

Read: ​The Sweet, Sweet Public Domain

LuElla D'Amico is an Assistant Professor of English and Co-Coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. Her primary area of study is girls’ literature in the nineteenth century, and her articles and essays on series fiction and children’s literature more broadly have appeared in Children’s Literature in Education, Girlhood Studies, and Who Writes for Black Children?, among others venues.  She has a forthcoming article on the Elsie Dinsmore series in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, and she edited the collection Girls’ Series Fiction in American Popular Culture (Lexington 2016).  Dr. D'Amico currently serves as President of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society.

Read: ​Just a Little Bestselling Series: An Introduction to the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s Honey Bunch Series

Kirby Ferguson is a filmmaker, writer, and speaker known for creating the smash online series, "Everything is a Remix." He is acclaimed for his energetic, entertaining and informative filmmaking style, which incorporates narration, motion graphics, animation, and music. He is currently midway through production of the feature documentary "This is Not a Conspiracy Theory," which looks at the history of conspiracy theories and why so many believe them. He is also an established speaker, who has presented at TED, SXSW, Google, Hulu, Netflix, Columbia University, NYU and many more.

Read: Allow Me to Rain on Your Public Domain Parade

Deidre Johnson taught children’s literature in the English Department at West Chester University for twenty-five years.  Her early research and publications were on the Stratemeyer Syndicate; she also investigated the life and children's fiction of Syndicate ghostwriter Josephine Lawrence.  Her current research and publications focus primarily on 19th-century girls' and children's series and the women who wrote them.  She is also associate editor of Dime Novel Round-Up and maintains a research website at www.readseries.com.

Read: Honey Bunch: Creation and History of the Series

Editors 

Kaylen Dwyer is an MLIS student at the U of I and a graduate assistant for the Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing. While earning her bachelors in English literature from Taylor University, she was senior editor of the undergraduate literary journal Parnassus and served as an editorial assistant for Relief. As part of the team for The Sweet Public Domain, Kaylen was responsible for gathering the materials for the exhibit, editing the texts, custom coding, and graphic design. 

Paige Kuester is the current project archivist for the Marine Corps Film Repository at the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections. While a graduate assistant with Scholarly Communications and Publishing, she initiated the Honey Bunch Project by identifying works that were in the Illinois Library collection that would enter the public domain in 2019. From these works, Paige selected texts of interest for researchers. She also began mapping out the digital exhibit for the final project before her time at the department ended. 
 
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