diff --git a/CHANGELOG.rst b/CHANGELOG.rst
index 727c516..7f1d90d 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.rst
+++ b/CHANGELOG.rst
@@ -6,6 +6,13 @@ The following is a summary of changes and improvements to
 
 .. New features in each version should be listed, with any necessary information about installation or upgrade notes.
 
+1.8 (prelim)
+------------
+
+* Fix UTF-8 issue introduced in 1.5 (see discussion on
+  `PR #21 <https://github.com/emory-libraries/eulfedora/pull/22>`_)
+* Updated for compatibility with requests 2.11
+
 1.7.1
 -----
 
@@ -74,6 +81,7 @@ The following is a summary of changes and improvements to
   and better handling for large objects.
 * Upload API method (:meth:`eulfedoa.api.REST_API.upload`) now supports
   iterable content with known size.
+* Updated to require requests 2.9 or greater.
 
 1.4
 ---
diff --git a/eulfedora/api.py b/eulfedora/api.py
index 29e096d..f665e40 100644
--- a/eulfedora/api.py
+++ b/eulfedora/api.py
@@ -84,11 +84,12 @@ def __init__(self, base_url, username=None, password=None, retries=None):
         # NOTE: only headers that will be common for *all* requests
         # to this fedora should be set in the session
         # (i.e., do NOT include auth information here)
+
+        # NOTE: ssl verification is turned on by default
+
         self.session.headers = {
+            # use requests-toolbelt user agent
             'User-Agent': user_agent('eulfedora', eulfedora_version),
-            # 'user-agent': 'eulfedora/%s (python-requests/%s)' % \
-            # (eulfedora_version, requests.__version__),
-            'verify': True,  # verify SSL certs by default
         }
         # no retries is requests current default behavior, so only
         # customize if a value is set
@@ -865,7 +866,11 @@ def upload(self, data, callback=None, content_type=None,
             menc = MultipartEncoderMonitor(menc, callback)
 
         headers = {'Content-Type': menc.content_type}
+
         if size:
+            # latest version of requests requires str or bytes, not int
+            if not isinstance(size, six.string_types):
+                size = str(size)
             headers['Content-Length'] = size
 
         try:
diff --git a/test/test_fedora/test_api.py b/test/test_fedora/test_api.py
index 7fa7dd0..aa24fbf 100644
--- a/test/test_fedora/test_api.py
+++ b/test/test_fedora/test_api.py
@@ -836,7 +836,8 @@ def data_generator():
         content_md5 = md5sum(text_content)
         size = len(text_content)
 
-        upload_id = self.rest_api.upload(data_generator(), size=size, content_type='text/plain')
+        upload_id = self.rest_api.upload(data_generator(), size=size,
+                                         content_type='text/plain')
         pattern = re.compile('uploaded://[0-9]+')
         self.assertTrue(pattern.match(upload_id))