Skip Navigation
Falvey Library
Advanced
You are exploring: Home > Blogs

Library 101: Stream Falvey Library Events from the 2021-2022 Academic Year

If this is your first year at Villanova, please take a moment to browse some of the Library’s event offerings. Scroll to view links to most of Falvey’s sponsored and co-sponsored events from the 2021-22 academic year. Falvey Memorial Library hosts a number of in-person and virtual events each semester. View a list of upcoming Library events here. We know the Villanova community has many academic and social commitments during the year, so if you missed an event last semester, or if you just want to watch a particular event again, check out the list of Library programming below.

Scholarship@Villanova featuring Billie Murray, PhD, on Combating Hate: A Framework for Direct Action

The United States has a hate problem. In recent years, hate speech has led not only to deep division in our politics but also to violence, murder, and even insurrection. And yet established constitutional jurisprudence holds that proper response to hateful expression is not government regulation, but “more speech.” So how can ordinary citizens stand up to hate groups when the state will not? What does “more speech” look like in our contemporary moment? In Combating Hate, Billie Murray, PhD, proposes answers to these questions. As a scholar-activist at public protests against the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and Westboro Baptist Church, Murray researched firsthand the limitations of the ‘more speech’ approach as well as the myriad of tactics used by activists. Dr. Murray argues that while more speech tactics can be effective in some contexts, what is also needed in this ongoing struggle are combative tactics that embody a radically different strategy for combating hate—one that explodes the myth of content neutrality and reveals hate speech to be a tactic of fascist organizing with very real, highly anti-democratic consequences.

Watch the lecture here.

Reading the Bible in Black: the Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart

What if we read and interpreted the biblical text with Black ways of knowing and being as our guiding light? This interactive session, with Theology & Religious Studies professor, the Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart, explores the possibilities for spiritual, social, and political formation when we study the Bible in Black.
Part one: The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.
Part two: The New Testament.


Birds of North America: A Reading and Artist’s Talk

The event is a celebration of the publication of Birds of North America, an artist’s book that is accompanying a show at The Drawing Room in Philadelphia with images by Susan Hagen and poems by Nathalie Anderson and Lisa Sewell. At the event, Susan Hagen showed slides and gave an artist’s talk and Lisa and Nathalie read from their series of collaborative poems that focus on the birds.

About North American Birds: This series of miniature drawings of North American birds by Susan Hagen includes two characteristic individuals of each bird species, a male and a female. Most of the birds were encountered first-hand while walking in wetlands, forests, and urban landscapes, and many were spotted in and around Philadelphia during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021. This book features 82 of Hagen’s drawings, along with text by poets Nathalie Anderson and Lisa Sewell–who collaborated on an interactive series of poems that developed from their responses to the drawings and incorporated their personal experiences with birds. The poetic format of Sewell and Anderson’s work is derived from the rondelet, whose back and forth structures echo the way birds call and sing to each other across space. Two thirds of North American birds are currently at risk of extinction due to habitat loss, climate change, and extreme weather events like hurricanes and forest fires. This project is a multi-faceted inquiry into the beauty, meaning, and reality of birds in our time.
Watch the talk here.

Villanova University Three Minute Thesis Finals

Three Minute Thesis (3MT) is a competition for master’s and doctoral students to develop and showcase their research communication skills. 3MT cultivates students’ academic, professional, presentation and research communication skills. To be successful, competitors must effectively explain their research in three minutes, in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience.

Watch the presentations here.

2021 Outstanding Faculty Research Award Lecture

The 2021 Outstanding Faculty Research Award Lecture featuring co-recipients Christopher Kilby, PhD, and Samantha K. Chapman, PhD. Dr. Kilby and Dr. Chapman each gave presentations that highlighted the extensive research that led them to win the coveted Outstanding Faculty Research Award in 2021. First, Dr. Kilby, Professor, Department of Economics, Villanova School of Business, discussed his work on US influence in the World Bank and how this can undermine the institution’s apolitical mandate to alleviate poverty and provide important global public goods. The talk focused on Dr. Kilby’s recent projects that explored the role of US domestic politics in this process and on the World Bank’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following a short Q&A and break, Dr. Chapman, Professor, Department of Biology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, spoke on how coastal wetlands protect human communities from big storms and help mitigate climate change through carbon storage. Dr. Chapman explored how these thin strips of green that line the earth’s coasts are threatened by sea level rise and development, and how we can manage our coasts to help us adapt to climate change and move into a more sustainable future.

Watch the lectures here.

Conversation with Villanova 2022 Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies Emma Dabiri and NYU Sociologist Dr. Kim DaCosta

Emma Dabiri has written two very successful non-fiction books: Twisted (published as Don’t Touch My Hair in Ireland) and What White People Can Do Next. Her work in the arts, fashion, and the media are complemented by her academic teaching and research in African Studies and Visual Sociology. She is currently completing her PhD at Goldsmiths University, London. The Charles A. Heimbold, Jr. Chair of Irish Studies is held in the Spring semester of each academic year by a distinguished Irish writer. Inaugurated in 2000, it has become one of the most prestigious Irish Studies positions in the United States. Typically, the Heimbold Professor teaches two undergraduate seminar courses, one in Creative Writing and one in Irish Literature, allowing Irish Studies students to have the enriching experience of a close classroom experience with Ireland’s finest voices.

Kimberly DaCosta, PhD, is a sociologist interested in racial inequality and, in particular, the contemporary production of racial boundaries. Her book, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford University Press, 2007), explores the cultural and social underpinnings of the movement to create multiracial collective identity in the United States. She is currently writing on how interracial extended kin relationships speak to questions of interracial empathy, care and politics. She teaches courses on race in different societies, social mobility, consumerism, and the commercialization of intimate life.

Watch the conversation here.

2022 Villanova University Literary Festival: Jericho Brown

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition, won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

For more information on Brown, please visit his website.

Watch the reading here.

2022 Villanova University Literary Festival: Emma Dabiri

Emma Dabiri, our 2022 Charles A. Heimbold Jr. Chair in Irish Studies, is an Irish writer, academic, BBC broadcaster, and social media influencer who has written two very successful non-fiction books: Twisted (published as Don’t Touch My Hair in Ireland) and What White People Can Do Next. Her work in the arts, fashion, and the media are complemented by her academic teaching and research in African Studies and Visual Sociology. She is currently completing her PhD at Goldsmiths University, London.

For more information on Dabiri, please visit her website.

Watch the reading here.

2022 Villanova University Literary Festival: Camille Dungy

Camille T. Dungy’s debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. She is a professor in the English department at Colorado State University.

Watch the reading here.

2022 Villanova University Literary Festival: Tiphanie Yanique

Tiphanie Yanique is a novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer. She is the author of the poetry collection, Wife, which won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom’s 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection. Tiphanie is also the author of the novel, Land of Love and Drowning, which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and was listed by NPR as one of the Best Books of 2014. Land of Love and Drowning was also a finalist for the Orion Award in Environmental Literature and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. She is a tenured associate professor at Emory University.

For more information on Yanique, please visit her website.

Watch the reading here.

2022 CONCEPT Virtual Recognition Ceremony

We celebrate the official launch of the 2022 issue of CONCEPT, the interdisciplinary journal of graduate students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The ceremony recognized this year’s Graduate Research Prize for top paper, along with all of the student authors and editors, faculty editors, and peer reviewers. CONCEPT accepts submissions from Villanova graduate students in all fields of the arts and sciences and is an opportunity for them to share their scholarship and research. The 2022 edition of CONCEPT marks the 45th release of the journal.

Visit the CONCEPT website to learn more about the journal and to browse past volumes.

Watch the ceremony here.

Scholarship@Villanova talk featuring Mark Schrad, PhD, on Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition

A Scholarship@Villanova talk featuring Mark Schrad, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, on his book Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition. “Schrad’s pathbreaking history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Thomás Masaryk, Kemal Atatürk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Schrad argues that temperance wasn’t ‘American exceptionalism’ at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era” (Oxford University Press, 2021).

View the lecture here.

2022 Falvey Scholars Virtual Research Presentation and Awards Ceremony

This program provides the opportunity to recognize outstanding undergraduate research by the senior students who were selected as the 2022 Falvey Scholars from across Villanova’s campus. The event also serves as a recognition of the dedication of faculty in supporting undergraduate student-faculty collaborative research and scholarship. During the event, award recipients shared a video and provided a brief 10-minute presentation to highlight their overall research process and showcased a summary of their winning project. Presentations emphasized the use of Library resources, which included one-on-one librarian consultations, reference workshops, library books, and journals, access to Interlibrary Loan, databases, and even quiet study space. Five minutes of live Q&A take place after each student presentation.

Watch the presentations here.

Alfred F. Mannella and Rose T. Lauria-Mannella Endowed Distinguished Speaker Series Lecture featuring Poet Maria Famà

The 2021-2022 Alfred F. Mannella and Rose T. Lauria-Mannella Endowed Distinguished Speaker Series Lecture featuring Poet Maria Famà. Famà’s talk is titled, “Mining an Italian Heritage for Poems.” As a poet of Sicilian descent, she mines the richness of the oral culture that has been passed down by her family of storytellers. Famà writes her poems to preserve family tales, personalities, sufferings, joys, and wisdom for future generations. In her presentation, she gives examples of her poems from her various books and explains how they came into being.

Famà is the author of eight books of poetry. Her work appears in numerous publications and has been anthologized. Famà has read her poetry in many cities across the U.S. and shared one of her stories on National Public Radio. She co-founded a video production company and recorded her poetry for CD compilations of music and poetry.

To learn more, check out Maria Famà’s website here.

Watch the reading here.

Faculty OER Adoption Award Forum

Join the Affordable Materials Project (AMP) in celebrating faculty members, Jeanne Liedtka, JD, and Valentina DeNardis, PhD, awarded Open Educational Resource (OER) Faculty Adoption Grants for 2021-22 in a virtual forum. Faculty shared their insights into the benefits and challenges posed by redesigning their courses using FREE, OPENLY LICENSED TEXTBOOKS. Students shared feedback on using OER. This event is perfect for faculty considering or curious about OER and everyone interested in educational affordability, accessibility, and inclusivity.

Watch the panel here.

Matthew Bui, PhD, on “Toward Urban Data Justice: Auditing the Racial Politics of Data”

A virtual talk by Matthew Bui, PhD, on “Toward Urban Data Justice: Auditing the Racial Politics of Data” as part of Falvey Memorial Library’s Digital Seeds Speaker Series. What is the role of (open and big) data in enacting, facilitating, and/or limiting racial justice within an increasingly datafied society? This talk explores the relationship between marginalized communities of color and data, foregrounding questions about power, inequality, and justice. First, Dr. Bui briefly touches on a study that proposes a typology of community-based engagements with, and disengagements from, data for racial justice: namely, data use, re-use, and refusal. Building on this work and considering the politics of data re-use and refusal to keep powerful actors accountable, Dr. Bui discusses in detail a second longer-term project exploring questions of algorithmic accountability and the predatory nature of data-driven systems: specifically, a study that aims to audit and examine online targeted ads as racially discriminatory by nature. In all, this work theorizes and conceptualizes “urban data justice” as a community-engaged vision and reparative praxis in response to what Dr. Bui and his team are conceptualizing as “algorithmic discrimination.” In all, he asks: how do we tell stories with—and about—data? Who benefits from dominant narratives? How can we subvert unequal power relations within—and of—data? What new methods, frameworks, and language do we need for these endeavors?

Watch the talk here.

David R. Ambaras, PhD, and Kate McDonald, PhD on “Bodies and Structures 2.0: Scalar and the Practice of Digital Spatial History”

A virtual talk by David R. Ambaras, PhD, and Kate McDonald, PhD on “Bodies and Structures 2.0: Scalar and the Practice of Digital Spatial History” as part of Falvey Memorial Library’s Digital Seeds Speaker Series. The fundamental intervention of spatial humanistic scholarship is the notion that space is multi-vocal—that places are made up of layers of meaning and history; that layers of place produce distinct geographic footprints and sets of spatial relationships; and that one’s social-historical positionality or “body” shapes how one encounters particular spatial “structures.” Launched in 2021, Bodies and Structures 2.0 examines the dynamics of place- and space-making in modern East Asia. In this presentation, Dr. Ambaras and Dr. McDonald discussed how they developed Bodies and Structures 2.0’s unique combination of individually-authored modules and collectively-curated conceptual maps and visualizations and how they used the open-source Scalar platform to build our multivocal project.

Watch the talk here.

Polar Voyaging and the Humanities with Hester Blum, PhD, Professor of English at Penn State

In the summer of 2019 Blum was the lone humanities scholar on a scientific expedition tracking climate change in the Northwest Passage. Drawn from her experience on the Arctic icebreaker (and on an Antarctic expedition), as well as her research on nineteenth-century polar expeditions, Blum’s talk offers a meditation on ice as a measure for visualizing, writing about, mourning, and mediating the state of the climate in an age of ecological and institutional crisis. The event was offered in support of Falvey Memorial Library’s current exhibit “That Fairyland of Ice”: Polar Exploration in Mind and Memory.”

Watch the talk here.


Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Memorial Library.

 

 


 


Like
1 People Like This Post

0 Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

 


Last Modified: August 31, 2022

Ask Us: Live Chat
Back to Top