KU Libraries select 2025 Sprints Week participants featuring teaching and research projects

LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas Libraries have selected a trio of faculty members to work with specialized teams of librarians to address course development and research challenges during Sprints Week, May 19-23. 

Faculty and academic staff from across the university submit proposals each spring to take part in the experience. This year’s selected participants are Dorothy Hines, associate professor of curriculum & teaching and African & African-American studies; Jeremy Shellhorn, professor of visual communication design; and Georgina White, assistant professor of classics.  

Hines, Shellhorn and White will collaborate with teams of KU librarians designed to address their specific projects for 35-40 hours during one intensive week during the spring-summer intersession, with a public presentation at noon May 23 at the Clark Instructional Center in Watson Library. Each faculty member is also awarded a $1,000 stipend. 

Michael Peper, head of KU Libraries’ Center for Faculty & Staff Initiatives and Engagement, said Sprints Week activities raise the visibility of library expertise and resources, including pedagogical innovations and librarians’ knowledge of technology, research methodology, and open access materials that empower course objectives and expand the scope of research impact. 

Dorothy Hines

Hines’ project focuses on developing a course about the education of African Americans during slavery and postslavery, including a body cartography project, a way of mapping reactions and processing personal responses to texts to help students think more deeply about the subject and their interactions with it.  

As an instructor with a joint appointment that spans disciplines, Hines was drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of the Sprints experience.  

“The core at heart of what we do in our research has to be interconnected to other disciplines,” Hines said. “So when you think about education, when you think about social justice, you think about equality, et cetera, those things cannot happen unless diverse minds and perspectives are at the table.”  

Jeremy Shellhorn

Shellhorn seeks to create an open, crowd-sourced digital repository of National Park Service signage as a teaching and research resource. He was inspired to submit a Sprints application after seeing his colleague Sam Yates Meier complete a Sprint in 2023.   

“I listened to the presentation, and realized oh, this is a great, like unbelievable opportunity where there's this team of experts over in the libraries that will push pause on whatever they're doing and lend their skill sets to it,” Shellhorn said. 

Georgina White

White endeavors to design a new first-year seminar to prepare students for upper-level classics courses using open educational resources, freely available and adaptable educational materials. She said working with a specialized team around course design to meet Core 34 requirements is one of the unique benefits of the Sprints opportunity.  

“I'm looking forward to using everyone's skills and creating a better syllabus and making a better course and a better student experience,” she said. “But it's also really exciting to be able to do this work collaboratively.” 

This year’s Sprints presentation will take place as a brown bag luncheon during Faculty Affairs’ Faculty Development Academy Week. KU Faculty Development Academies are daylong intensives, focused on a particular topic, giving faculty time to delve deep and develop a core capacity in a chosen area.