Today’s News from the University of Kansas
From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu
Headlines
Teaching Zora Neale Hurston to the Black Lives Matter generation
LAWRENCE — “Their Eyes Were Watching God” will serve as the jumping-off point for a teacher training session on Hurston set to take place in summer 2021 at the University of Kansas, using funds from a newly announced National Endowment for the Humanities grant. The seminar will show how Hurston’s work resonates in the era of Black Lives Matter.
Poet José Olivarez to give virtual reading for Hall Center Summer Speaker Series
LAWRENCE — The next event in the Hall Center Summer Speaker Series will be “An Evening with José Olivarez,” presented via Zoom at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 12. Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants and author of the poetry collection “Citizen Illegal,” winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize, a finalist for the prestigious PEN/Jean Stein Book award and named a top book of 2018 by the New York Public Library.
Kansas Geological Survey in partnership to research underground storage of carbon dioxide
LAWRENCE — For two decades, the Kansas Geological Survey has been investigating the state’s subsurface geology and industrial infrastructure to determine the safety and viability of injecting carbon dioxide (CO2) from industrial sources into underground rock formations for long-term storage and to recover hard-to-reach oil. As part of an initiative to share data and advance research on the process, the KGS is now partnering with 15 other state and federal entities from throughout the central and western United States.
Full stories below.
Contact: Rick Hellman, 785-864-8852, [email protected]
Teaching Zora Neale Hurston to the Black Lives Matter generation
LAWRENCE — LAWRENCE – Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is in no danger of being forgotten any time soon. Although overlooked at the time of its publication, it has since come to be considered a masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance.
The novel will serve as the jumping-off point for a teacher training session on Hurston set to take place in summer 2021 at the University of Kansas, using funds from a newly announced National Endowment for the Humanities grant. The seminar will show how Hurston’s work resonates in the era of Black Lives Matter.
The $200,000 award goes to KU’s Project on the History of Black Writing for “Hurston on the Horizon: Past, Present, and Future,” a three-week institute where 25 higher-education faculty will explore how best to teach Hurston’s life and works. It is part of a $30 million group of grants the NEH announced July 29. Ayesha Hardison, associate professor of English and of women, gender & sexuality studies, applied for the grant and will be the seminar’s director. Maryemma Graham, director of KU’s Project on the History of Black Writing, will co-lead the institute. The award is project’s 15th NEH grant; HBW has organized 12 institutes in total, and seven at KU.
The funds will subsidize the seminar participants’ costs and support the invited expert scholars, including some others from KU, who will serve as institute faculty.
“The grant is designed to give teachers at the college and university level an opportunity to study Hurston’s broad body of work,” Hardison said. “She’s a really fascinating figure because of how much work she produces — particularly for a black woman writer of her time — and also because of the range of the work she created.
“She was a novelist. She was a folklorist. She engaged as a journalist. She stages plays and concerts. She also was just shy of getting a doctorate in anthropology, so a lot of her writing is drawing on her anthropological or ethnographic observations.
“Hurston is an extraordinary writer to examine, not only for how boldly she lived her life, but also for the impact she made on American literature and culture.”
That impact is ongoing, Hardison notes, as Hurston’s nonfiction book “Barracoon: The story of the Last ‘Black Cargo,’ ” based on her 1927 interview with a formerly enslaved person and survivor of the Middle Passage, was just published in 2018.
“Several archival discoveries have been made since her death,” Hardison noted. “The summer institute is an opportunity to recognize the breadth of her creativity and intellectual work beyond ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God.’”
Hardison said that, in addition to inviting specific Hurston scholars to talk, she will invite some current creative writers to discuss Hurston’s impact on their work. Certain events will be open to the public.
In the age of #BlackLivesMatter, Hardison said Hurston remains relevant.
“I think Hurston relates to 2020—and, looking forward, to 2021 — because of her commitment to documenting black life,” Hardison said. “Hurston valued the expressions of African American culture, whether that was in language or other aspects of Black creativity. I think that resonates in the contemporary moment, as we think about Black lives, because Black cultural experiences are multiple, varied, dynamic and sustaining.”
———————————————————————-
The official university Twitter account has changed to @UnivOfKansas.
Refollow @KUNews for KU News Service stories, discoveries and experts.
————————————————————————
Contact: Eliott Reeder, 785-864-4798, [email protected]
Poet José Olivarez to give virtual reading for Hall Center Summer Speaker Series
LAWRENCE — The next event in the Hall Center Summer Speaker Series will be “An Evening with José Olivarez,” presented via Zoom at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 12.
This event is co-sponsored by The Commons and Kansas Public Radio. Information on how to connect is available on the Hall Center website, KU Event Calendar and Hall Center social media accounts.
Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants and author of the poetry collection “Citizen Illegal,” winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize, a finalist for the prestigious PEN/Jean Stein Book award and named a top book of 2018 by the New York Public Library.
In 2018, Olivarez was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he is co-editing the forthcoming anthology “The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT.” He is the co-host of the poetry podcast “The Poetry Gods” and a recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Poets House, the Bronx Council on the Arts and the Conversation Literary Festival.
Olivarez is a master teaching artist. In 2017-2018, he was the Lead Teaching Artist for the Teen Lab Program at the Art Institute in Chicago. He has led writing workshops and diversity trainings for institutions such as The Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum of Harlem, The Adirondack Center for Writing, Inside Out Literary Arts and many more community organizations and universities.
A recipient of the 2019 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Chicago Magazine and elsewhere.
———————————————————————
Subscribe to KU Today, the campus newsletter,
for additional news about the University of Kansas.
————————————————————————
Contact: Cathy Evans, 785-864-2195, [email protected]
Kansas Geological Survey in partnership to research underground storage of carbon dioxide
LAWRENCE — For two decades, the Kansas Geological Survey has been investigating the state’s subsurface geology and industrial infrastructure to determine the safety and viability of injecting carbon dioxide (CO2) from industrial sources into underground rock formations for long-term storage and to recover hard-to-reach oil. As part of an initiative to share data and advance research on the process, the KGS is now partnering with 15 other state and federal entities from throughout the central and western United States.
The Carbon Utilization and Storage Partnership, or CUSP, is led by the Petroleum Recovery Research Center (PRRC) at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, which was awarded $6.24 million by the U.S. Department of Energy for the project. The KGS will receive about $310,000 of that and could get additional funding for database development and other purposes as the project progresses through 2024.
Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) is a process being developed to reduce the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere. CO2 is a natural and essential component of the atmosphere, but it is also a greenhouse gas – a byproduct of fossil fuel emissions from vehicles and such stationary sources as electric, cement, ethanol and fertilizer plants – that is considered a cause of climate change.
“Nationwide, CCUS is moving ahead. There are multiple large-scale commercial project announcements, and the portfolio is growing,” said Eugene Holubnyak, petroleum engineer and the project’s lead investigator at the KGS. “KGS has developed a very strong CCUS program on its own, and this time around we want to play a central and integral role in CUSP.”
During the CCUS process, CO2 emitted by an industrial source is captured and transported through pipelines to a location where it can be used to squeeze out trapped oil unreachable by traditional recovery methods or stored long-term in deep and confined underground rock formations.
The Osage, Viola and Arbuckle Groups — porous rock formations that contain extremely saline water separated from shallower, freshwater aquifers by thousands of feet of impermeable rock — are the key targets for CO2 storage in western Kansas. Pore space in subsurface rock units has been used for more than a century for disposal of waste fluids produced through industrial processes, petroleum production, municipal water treatment and other operations.
Over the past 10 years, the KGS has led or played a key role in five large-scale CCUS projects funded by the U.S. Department of Eenergy. Working with private partners, the KGS has successfully injected CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery in the Wellington Field in Sumner County south of Wichita and the Hall-Gurney Field in Russell County. During previous and ongoing projects, the KGS has amassed large quantities of seismic data, drilling data, rock cuttings and drill cores – cylindrical segments of rock brought up intact from thousands of feet underground.
The KGS team is participating in all five CUSP focus areas: policy and law, data management, data analysis, economics and outreach.
“Currently, the KGS team is selecting database architecture to create an interactive, open-access dataset that will include subsurface, infrastructure, industrial and other data,” said Franek Hasiuk, KGS geologist and the project’s co-principal investigator at the KGS. “It will include information from all CUSP member states, and possibly beyond, that will be very useful for CCUS projects, the oil and gas industry, regulators and other stakeholders.”
Interest in capturing and storing carbon emissions was regenerated in 2018 when the Internal Revenue Service updated a tax incentive, known as 45Q, for companies willing to capture and store CO2. Oil and gas production, ethanol, electrical-power generation, pipeline, agriculture and other industries are eligible.
For long-term storage, CO2 is injected into UIC Class VI wells. The Safe Drinking Water Act, passed by Congress in 1974, established the requirements for the Underground Injection Control (UIC) program, which consists of six classes of wells designated for underground disposal of different levels of non-hazardous and hazardous waste.
“The KGS is helping well operators prepare sites to qualify for 45Q credits and apply for UIC Class VI permits, Holubnyak said. “We are working with developers to screen geologic sites for potential commercial projects.”
The KGS also is working with the Los Alamos National Laboratories and other CUSP members on methods to analyze data that will provide a better understanding of local and regional infrastructure development potential, infrastructure costs and ways to optimize future project development.
In addition to the PRRC at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and the KGS, the CUSP partners are the University of Utah, University of Texas Permian Basin, Arizona Geological Survey, Colorado School of Mines, Stanford University, Desert Research Institute of Nevada, Montana State University, Oklahoma Geological Survey, Washington Geological Survey, the University of Oklahoma, Indiana University, Utah Geological Survey, and the Pacific Northwest, Sandia, and Los Alamos National Laboratories.
More information about the project can be found on the KGS’s CUSP page.
The KGS is a non-regulatory research and service division of the University of Kansas. KGS researchers study and provide information on the state’s geologic resources and hazards, including groundwater, oil and natural gas, rocks and minerals and earthquakes.
KU News Service
1450 Jayhawk Blvd.
Lawrence KS 66045
Phone: 785-864-3256
Fax: 785-864-3339
Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]
Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs
