Please join us virtually at noon on Tuesday, April 21 for the University Libraries’ first annual Peter Ossorio Archives Fellowship Symposium.
The Libraries Special Collections, Archives, and Preservation (SCAP) department inaugurated the Peter Ossorio Archives Fellowship in spring 2020 to engage CU Boulder undergraduate students in the research and archival collections of Peter Garcia Ossorio (1926-2007). The fellowship is supported by funding from the family of Ossorio, who wish to share his work and legacy with CU Boulder scholars.
Ossorio was a longtime faculty member in CU Boulder’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and is widely recognized for creating Descriptive Psychology, “a set of systematically related distinctions designed to provide formal access to all the facts and possible facts about persons and behavior—and therefore about everything else as well.” (Peter G. Ossorio, 1982) The University Libraries Archives hold Ossorio’s professional research and published papers relating to descriptive psychology and additional areas of his research.
Spring 2020 undergraduate fellows Gwendalynn Roebke and Kelly Dinneen each completed 60 hours of independent research with the Ossorio collection and will present their findings at Tuesday’s symposium. A question and answer period will follow. Head of Archives Megan Friedel will moderate the symposium.
“We are excited that fellowships like this engage students who might not otherwise use or know about archival collections, and introduce students to the process of archival research,” Friedel said. “We feel it’s important for the Archives to actively support CU Boulder students in and outside the classroom.”
Roebke is a fourth-year distributed studies major in astrophysics, neuroscience and philosophy. Their presentation looks at Ossorio’s ideas on the self and how that becomes contentious with concepts of the misunderstood condition. Dinneen is graduating in May with a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy, neuroscience and mathematics. She is a Boettcher Scholar completing her honors thesis, “Everything in Moderation: The Therapeutic Burden of Moral Theory.” Her research focuses on the intersection of ethics, education and human decision-making.
The symposium will be presented virtually on Zoom. Join us to celebrate the work of the first Peter Ossorio Archives fellows by emailing sca@colorado.edu to receive a meeting invitation and Zoom details.