Lecturer: Christine Schmitz

Location: Knoxville, Tennessee

Academic Background: BA in journalism and public relations, Temple University, Philadelphia, Penn.; MFA in creative writing, University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla.

Lecturer: Anna Sandelli

Location: Knoxville, Tennessee

Education: MSLS from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

What do you teach at SIS?

This is my first semester teaching within SIS, and I’m teaching INSC 538, User Instruction. It’s  really a class for people interested in library instruction, working with adult learners, and curious about learning more. (Associate Professor) Rachel Fleming-May, who developed the course, describes it as being for the “accidental library instructor,” which was definitely my own experience as a graduate student and in starting my academic library career.

Lecturer:  Kristin Chaffin

Location: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Education: MSIS from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

What do you teach at SIS?

INSC 384, the database design course. This will be my second term teaching it; I taught it this past fall for the first time. It’s been a lot of fun to teach; this is not my first foray into teaching undergraduate classes, but most of the courses I have taught have been graduate courses.

Lecturer: Jacob Kramer-Duffield

Location: Brooklyn, New York

Education: undergrad at Overland College in Ohio

What do you teach at SIS?

INSC 305 – Internet & Society. It’s sort of a survey course of how information science underlies a pretty broad range of structures and social situations within society and trying to make tangible a lot of stuff that can be more theoretical when viewed in greater context.

How has your experience as a lecturer at SIS been?

Lecturer: Chris Cunningham

Location: Hattiesburg, Mississippi

Education: Undergraduate degree in history with a social studies concentration, University of North Carolina-Charlotte; MLIS, UNC Greensboro; PhD, University of South Carolina; currently working on an MBA from Kent State University.

What classes do you teach at SIS?

I am currently teaching INSC 514, technology foundations. I’ve also taught the business intelligence course, and I’ve also taught an information use course that has now been deprecated.

What has your experience been like as an SIS lecturer?

Dan Greene’s (’03) current life is immersed in information sciences: he’s an alum of SIS, he is the SIS technology coordinator, and he’s also an SIS lecturer. But information sciences wasn’t even on his radar when he was an undergraduate at East Tennessee State University. There, he switched majors so many times he almost lost count before he finally did graduate with a degree in history. But there were always two other fields that kept pulling at him throughout the years: computer science and librarianship.

Lecturer: Plato Smith

Location: University of Florida, Gainesville

Education: MLIS, North Carolina Central University; PhD, Florida State University

Lecturer: Janine Pino

Location: Knoxville, Tennessee

Academic Background: MSIS, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Crystal Sherline didn’t think she wanted to get a PhD; she was working as a library director of a small, rural library, and had already been through the rigorous PhD experience with a spouse.

“I had a couple of patrons I was very close to, who were older and worldly. They told me, ‘You need to go do a PhD.’ I contemplated for a couple of years, but I’m a lifetime learner,” Sherline said.

Lecturer: Ashley Maynor (’13)

Location: New York City, NY

Academic Background: I was a college scholar, which is part of the “design your own major” program for undergraduates at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I mostly focused on French literature and cultural studies but took courses across many curricula—from anthropology to cinema studies to international relations! I also have an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and an MSIS from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.