Documenting COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the Villanova community in unique ways with the swift shift to online learning; seniors not being able to attend in-person commencement; NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament cancelled; our faculty and students in the Nursing School called into service; the campus closed; the uncertainty of what fall 2020 will look like; and the ever-growing disruptions to our personal lives.

The University Archives, in partnership with Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, invites you to contribute your recollections of how you are experiencing the ongoing situation around COVID-19 to the archives’ collection.

The project is meant to capture the stories and thoughts so future researchers and community members can look back to know and understand what this period was like for those who lived through it.  The project is also an opportunity to share in the experience and your memories matter, so your experiences are an important part of our shared Villanova history.

How to participate

We invite you to submit your experience to the University Archives where the materials will be preserved and made publicly available for future research. The submission form can be found here.

And all members of the community– students, faculty, staff, and alumni– are welcome to submit:

• stories of their experience
• photographs
• social media posts
• video or audio recording
• digital artwork

How you submit your thoughts and experiences is up to you! For instance, you can write in the form of a journal entry,  save your social media posts, take photos and/or videos of life as you see it, or create multimedia works of digital storytelling.

Also, you may submit as many times as you’d like. Share your experience once or monthly!

If you have any questions about the form or the project please contact: documentingcovid@villanova.edu

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Jason Steinhauer, Director of Lepage Center, for spearheading the collaboration. Thank you to Mark Hewlett and Kaitlin Gottuso in assisting with review. And many thanks to the our Falvey colleagues’ David Uspal and Joanne Quinn for form set-up and graphics.