Jennifer Brannock, professor and curator of Rare Books and Mississippiana in The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) Libraries’ Special Collections, has earned the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA)’s Learning History Research and Innovation Award, sponsored by Gale, A Cengage Company.

Brannock was selected for her innovative historical research in support of her project, “Con Sellers, Masculinity, and the Publishing Industry: Lowbrow Publications in Midcentury America”. The Learning History Research and Innovation Award includes $2,500 to facilitate and further research relating to history and history librarianship.

RUSA is a division of the American Library Association (ALA) and serves libraries in reference, user services, adult readers advisory and collection development, as well as resource sharing, genealogy and archives, business reference and reference technology. The award requires that recipient research efforts include an emphasis in an area reflected by the History Section’s subject-oriented committees, not excluding American history. Subject areas include genealogy, local history, instruction and research services, and historical materials.

Sellers was a Korean War veteran and Mississippi native who was determined to write for a living. In order to support his family, he wrote for ‘lowbrow’ publishers and magazines, since quality writing wasn’t considered a prerequisite for the genre, and Sellers could pen a book in approximately nine days. He produced more than 250 publications in his writing career, using more than 60 pseudonyms, and his papers are included in USM’s Special Collections.

“I’m absolutely thrilled to receive this grant to further advance my research. There are very few manuscript resources available that are focused on this topic, and the collections that are out there require me to travel,” Brannock said. “This award will allow me to go the Library of Congress and conduct research in one of the few collections around.”