Sinéad O’Connor. Image courtesy of Michel Linssen (Getty Images).

“Maybe it was mean, but I really don’t think so. You asked for the truth and I told you.”— Sinéad O’Connor

Shuhada’ Sadaqat (previously Magda Davitt), known professionally as Sinéad O’Connor, Grammy Award-winning artist, passed away Wednesday, July 26, at the age of 56. The Irish singer-songwriter was known for her “powerful, evocative voice” and her “political provocations onstage and off.”

O’Connor was born in Glenageary, a suburb of Dublin, on Dec. 8, 1966. In her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, she spoke of a traumatic childhood and those harrowing experiences influenced her music. O’Connor was sent to reform schools in her teens, including Dublin’s notorious church-affiliated Magdalene laundries, “where thousands of unmarried mothers and other unwanted women were forced to work without pay in abject conditions.” She received her first guitar there and sang on the streets of Dublin and then with the Irish band In Tua Nua.

O’Connor was discovered by Paul Byrne, a drummer with ties to the Irish band U2, when she sang “Evergreen,” the theme from A Star Is Born at a wedding. She would go on to release 10 studio albums. Her breakout album, 1990’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” included O’Connor’s cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” The album won O’Connor a Grammy Award in 1991 for best alternative music performance.

Through her life, O’Connor spoke out against abuse in the Catholic Church, social injustice, commercialism, and misogyny in the music industry. She was also an advocate for mental health. Never backing down in her convictions, which “became increasingly erratic” towards the end of her life, O’Connor “rarely shrank from controversy, but it often came with consequences for her career.” As she stated in her memoir, “Everyone wants a pop star, see?…But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame.” O’Connor did just that, as Dave Holmes writes in Esquire, “Ireland on the day of Sinéad’s death is vastly different from the country she was born into…A once-repressive country has become one of the world’s most progressive.”

Dig deeper to learn more about O’Connor.

Falvey Library Resources:

• Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters (McCabe, 2023)
• Nothing Compares (Ferguson, K. & O’Connor, S., 2023) *DVD
• Five Irish Women: The Second Republic, 1960-2016 (Nolan, 2019)
• Book World: Sinéad O’Connor Was a Star, Then a Pariah. She Claims She Wouldn’t Change a Thing (The Washington Post, 2021)
• Sinéad O’Connor Doesn’t Recall It That Way (The New York Times, 2021)
• Sinéad O’Connor (TIME, 2020)
• Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice (O’Donnell et al., 2021)

Additional Resources:

• Sinéad O’Connor (Official Website)
• Rememberings (O’Connor, 2021)
• The Controversial Saturday Night Live Performance That Made Sinéad O’Connor an Icon (TIME, 2023)
• Sinéad O’Connor Obituary (The Guardian, 2023)
• Sinéad O’Connor, Irish Singer-Songwriter Famous for “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Dies at 56 (CBS Mornings, 2023)
• Sinead O’Connor’s Life in Pictures (The New York Times, 2023)
• The Unapologetic Brilliance of Sinéad O’Connor (The New Yorker)
• Sinéad O’Connor, Acclaimed Dublin Singer, Dies Aged 56 (The Irish Times, 2023)
• ‘I’m Just Like Anyone Else’: Read Sinéad O’Connor’s First Rolling Stone Profile (Rolling Stone, 1988)
• Who’s The Boss? Sinead O’Connor Has A New Answer (NPR, 2014)
• Sinéad O’Connor Has A New Memoir … And No Regrets (NPR, 2021)
• Nothing Compares 2 U (Official Music Video)

References:

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

By Kallie Stahl 

To quote the band Aqua, “I’m a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie world.”

If you’ve read Shawn Proctor’s blog, or you’ve seen the numerous memes surrounding this summer’s biggest rival, then you know it’s Oppenheimer vs. Barbie. Proctor covered Christopher Nolan’s film on Wednesday, and I felt Barbie deserved equal coverage. After all, she’s everything. He’s just Ken.

Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Short Review:

Both films hit theatres Friday, July 21. I didn’t score tickets to an early screening of Barbie (as Proctor did with Oppenheimer), so I’ll leave the review to Manohla Dargis of the New York Times:

“Like Air, Ben Affleck’s recent movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan, as well as other entertainments tethered to their consumer subjects, Barbie can only push so hard. These movies can’t damage the goods, though I’m not sure most viewers would want that; our brands, ourselves, after all. That said, [director] Greta Gerwig does much within the material’s inherently commercial parameters, though it isn’t until the finale — capped by a sharply funny, philosophically expansive last line — that you see the Barbie that could have been. Gerwig’s talents are one of this movie’s pleasures, and I expect that they’ll be wholly on display in her next one — I just hope that this time it will be a house of her own wildest dreams.”

View Barbie showtimes here.

The Story Behind the Movie:

Fast facts courtesy of www.barbiemedia.com and USA Today:

• Barbie was created by Mattel in 1959 (Ken joined her in 1961).
• Barbie was invented by Ruth Handler (Mattel was co-founded by Handler and her husband Elliot).
• The initial idea for Barbie came to Handler after watching her daughter play with paper dolls.
• Barbie was modeled after the Bild Lilli doll (Mattel bought the rights to the doll and made their own).
• Barbie’s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts (named after Handler’s daughter, Barbara. Ken is named after her son, Kenneth).
• Her birthday is March 9, 1959, the day she was unveiled to the toy industry during New York Toy Fair.
• Barbie is from (fictional) Willows, Wisconsin.
• Her first outfit? Black-and-white striped swimsuit.
• Barbie’s signature color is Barbie Pink (PMS 219).
• She’s had over 250 different occupations.
• It takes more than 100 people to create a Barbie doll and her fashions.
• Barbie is the most popular fashion doll ever produced and the No. 1 fashion doll property.
• More than 100 Barbie dolls are sold every minute.
• The best-selling Barbie doll? The 1992 Totally Hair™ Barbie.
• Over 18 billion minutes of Barbie user-generated content is created every year.

Further Reading with Falvey Library Resources:

• Barbie Culture (Rogers, 1999)
• Barbie’s Queer Accessories (Rand, 1995)
• Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body (Toffoletti, 2007)
• Athena to Barbie: Bodies, Archetypes, and Women’s Search for Self (Wright, 2021)
• Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Kafai,2008)
• Bury Me with Barbie (Senna, 2014)
• Has Barbie Lost Her Luster? (Academic Video Online, 2013)

References:

• Barbie. (n.d.). Retrieved July 19, 2023, from http://www.barbiemedia.com/about-barbie/fast-facts.html
• Dargis, M. (2023, July 19). Barbie’ Review: On the Road and Out of the Box. The New York Times. Retrieved July 19, 2023, from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/movies/barbie-movie-review.html
• Munson, O. (2023, July 13). Barbie history: The story behind the world’s most popular doll. USA Today. Retrieved July 19, 2023, from https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2023/07/13/who-created-barbie/11746176002/

Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library. Some of her favorite Barbie dolls of the 90’s: Bead Blast Barbie Doll, Olympic Gymnast Barbie Doll, Movin’ Groovin’ Barbie Doll, and Dorothy Barbie Doll (The Wizard of Oz). 

Aurora borealis is observed from Coast Guard Cutter Healy Oct. 2, 2015, while conducting science operations in the Arctic Ocean. Healy is underway in the Arctic Ocean in support of the National Science Foundation-funded Arctic Geotraces, part of an international effort to study the distribution of trace elements in the world’s oceans. (U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Cory J. Mendenhall) Public Domain.

If you are in Pennsylvania, tonight may be a rare opportunity to see the northern lights, also known as the aurora borealis, a solar storm caused when atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere crash into particles radiating from the sun. The aurora frequently dances across Canadian skies, but tonight’s potential event (weather and cloud cover permitting) could be visible in the Mid-atlantic, due to stronger solar storms, according to The Guardian.

“The earliest sightings of the aurora date back almost 30,000 years. A French cave painting dated back to 30,000 BC depicted a suspected aurora, according to information from NASA,” the article notes.

The best chance to see this nocturnal event is to head outside between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m, when the sky will be darkest.

However, if you miss the chance to see it, expect to have other chances, according to the New York Times. The shift in the sun’s magnetic fields which is causing the lights to be visible further south is part of an 11-year cycle that will crescendo next year in the solar maximum phase.

Want to snap a photo of the northern lights that will win over your friends and family? Check out Photographing the Aurora Borealis: How to Shoot the Northern Lights, available as an ebook in Falvey’s digital resources.

Shawn Proctor, MFA, is Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Library. He has never seen the northern lights yet, even though they were visible in the sky when he canoed a river in Canada. He was tired that night and mistakenly thought he’d see them a different time.

From dust jacket: “Photograph of Cormac McCarthy by David Styles” – Scan sourced from EveningStarBooks.net . Cropped and retouched by the uploader. Public Domain (Original file: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98835624)

Cormac McCarthy died at age 89 on June 13. He was a master of the modern western and a unique prose stylist. His novels featured scant punctuation. No quotation marks. No showy semi-colons and nearly never colons. His stories were structured with only capital letters and periods. Oh, and the occasional comma. (Like the prior sentence.) But only once a page or so.

McCarthy drew inspiration for his undeniably muscular prose from James Joyce (See this interview for more on that.) The result were clear deceptively simple language that belied the nuanced themes just underneath the surface. In a postmodern literature class at Rosemont College we discussed McCarthy’s personal views. No one could quite decide whether he was conservative or liberal. Did the novels lionize the stoic characters or lament them? Or both? We decided the answer depended upon the reader’s point-of-view.

Most will remember McCarthy for the Cohen brothers film No Country For Old Men, adapted from his novel and winner of the Oscar for Best Picture. Picture an everyman who happens upon the scene of a crime in the desert and must spend the remainder of the story untangling himself from the dangers unleashed.

Photo from my copy of The Road. The marginalia reads “Oh my goodness. I hate this book.”

Rather, I suggest starting with McCarthy’s The Road. It is a punishing story set in a ashen post-apocalyptic world. A father and son cling to one another in the slim hope of surviving for a little longer. I had the pleasure of reading it after someone donated it to the local library. My favorite margin note (AKA marginalia) of all time was on page 58 of this copy of The Road. It read simply, “Oh my goodness. I hate this book.”

The book was appreciated in its own time and has grown in critical esteem in the seventeen years since publication.

Follow that up with the classic western Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West. The style and story are more subdued than The Road. The nameless characters experience a dash more of hope against the unforgiving world.

Whether you enjoy it or think, I hate this book, I hope readers will respect his bleak vision and contemporary yet timeless voice.

Selected Library Holdings:

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. Knopf ; Distributed by Random House, 1992.

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West. 1st Vintage International ed. Vintage Books, 1992.

McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

McCarthy, Cormac. Suttree. 1st Vintage International ed. Vintage International, Vintage Books, 1992.

Shawn Proctor, MFA, is Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Library.

Hua Hsu. Photo: Devlin Claro.

Last week, Hua Hsu was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir Stay True.

The narrative centers around Hsu and his friendship with University of California, Berkeley classmate, Ken. Two different identities, Ken, whose family had been in the United States for generations, represented everything that Hsu, a first-generation Taiwanese American, defined himself against—mainstream America. The two became friends, both agreeing that despite their differences, “American culture didn’t seem to have a place for either of them.”

Three years after their initial meeting, Ken is killed in carjacking in Vallejo, Calif., in July 1998, after a party in Berkeley. “Determined to hold on to all that was left of his best friend-his memories-Hsu turned to writing…A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.”

Hua Hsu is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. A staff writer at The New Yorker, Hsu’s work has been published in Artforum, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Wire. A former fellow at the New American Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, Hsu is a professor of Literature at Bard College. He received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD from Harvard University.

For more information on Hsu, dig deeper and explore the links below:

• Stay True (2022)
• A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific (2016) *eBook 
• “What Conversation Can Do for Us” (The New Yorker)
• “My Dad and Kurt Cobain” (The New Yorker)
• Stay True: Hua Hsu with Ken Chen | Conversations from the Cullman Center
• Podcast with Hua Hsu, author of Stay True
• Hua Hsu and Lucy Sante on Growing Up and Staying True
• #PouredOver: Hua Hsu on Stay True
• How Writing Matters: Hua Hsu
• Time to Say Goodbye LIVE + Stay True
• “Hua Hsu and Ryan Lee Wong On Writing AAPI Coming of Age Stories” (The Amp)
• “‘New Yorker’ Writer Hua Hsu On Friendship, Grief, And Pop Culture” (NPR)
• “Hua Hsu on his new book Stay True” (NPR)
• Hsu’s Twitter and Instagram

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

King Charles and Queen Camilla. PHOTO: CHRIS JACKSON/GETTY

The Coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla will take place Saturday, May 6, at 11 a.m. London time (6 a.m. ET). Most major networks in the U.S. are expected to broadcast the coronation live. Viewers can also live stream the event for free on BBC.com and BBC News Channel. Coverage on BBC will begin at 7:30 a.m. London time (2:30 a.m. ET).

The first ceremonial crowning of a British monarch in 70 years, the Coronation of King Charles III will be the second-ever to be broadcast (the first being Queen Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953). The ceremonial traditions dating back 1,000 years are mostly for theatre as King Charles III immediately ascended to the throne upon the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II on Sept. 8, 2022. “A coronation is both the symbolic religious ceremony during which a sovereign is crowned and the physical act of placing a crown on a monarch’s head. It formalizes the monarch’s role as the head of the Church of England and marks the transfer of their title and powers” (BBC).

King Charles III and Queen Camilla will process from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey (Britain’s coronation church since 1066) before the coronation. The coronation will be conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. “While there have been efforts to modernize, the core elements of the historic coronation rite — the recognition, oath, anointing, investiture and crowning, enthronement and homage — all still remain. It is during some of these key moments that the coronation regalia — powerful symbols of the monarchy amassed by Kings and Queens throughout history — will be presented to Charles” (CNN) [For a full breakdown of coronation rituals click here]. After the completion of the ceremony, King Charles III and Queen Camilla will process from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace. Later in the day they will wave to crowds from the palace balcony during a scheduled flyover.

Saturday’s crowds will be filled with cheers and protests, as the coronation provides both an opportunity to “celebrate being British,” and to “question the legitimacy of the Monarchy” (PBS). King Charles III, while more progressive and modern than prior monarchs, must navigate a new era…one in which British support for the monarchy is dwindling. “There are more questions hanging over the new monarch and indeed the Windsor family itself than at any point in living memory” (PBS). Time will tell what this reign will bring.

Dig deeper and explore the links curated by Merrill Stein, Political Science Librarian.

• The Coronation of His Majesty The King (The Royal Family)
• Coronation of King Charles III (BBC News)
• King Charles: Your essential guide to the Coronation weekend (BBC News)
• King Charles III (NewsBank)
• How Monarchs Succeed (EBSCO)
• King Charles III coronation will recognize ‘people of all faiths’ (The Washington Post)
• How does the coronation look from the US? Like the final straw for Brand Britain (The Guardian)
• Charles III full coronation coverage (The Telegraph)
• King Charles videos reveal ‘special’ childhood moments (The Telegraph)
• King Charles’ coronation: 5 Things to Know (AP News)
• King Charles III’s coronation: The schedule and how to watch the ceremony as Britain’s monarch is crowned (CBS)

The previous coronation:

Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library. She studied abroad in London in 2012 (the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II). 

By Julia Wagner

Photo courtesy of donikakelly.com

Villanova University’s 2023 Literary Festival will be featuring poet Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations (Graywolf) and Bestiary (Graywolf), for a reading and talk on Thursday, March 30, at 7 p.m. in Falvey Library’s Speakers’ Corner. Kelly was born in Los Angeles, Calif., and earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. She currently resides in Iowa City with her wife.

The Renunciations is a winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary is a winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. She has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. Her work has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award.

This ACS-approved event—co-sponsored by the English Department, the Creative Writing Program, the Honors Program, Africana Studies, Global Interdisciplinary Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, the Center for Irish Studies, and Falvey Library—is free and open to the public.

Dig deeper and explore the links below for more on Kelly’s work:

• Kelly’s official website
• Kelly’s Twitter
• The Renunciations (2021)
• Bestiary (2016)
• More Poems by Kelly (Poetry Foundation)
• Self-Portrait With Father (New York Times)
• From the Catalogue of Cruelty (The New Yorker)
• Sixteen Center (The New Yorker)
• Calling: Marfa (The Atlantic)
• An Interview with Donika Kelly (West Branch)

Julia Wagner ‘26 CLAS is a Communication major from New Hampshire (Go Patriots!). She works as a Communication & Marketing Assistant at Falvey Library.

“I am personally so excited that The Renunciations is part of my Moderns curriculum, and I can’t wait to hear Kelly speak!”

Photo credit: Paige Critcher.

Villanova University’s 2023 Literary Festival will be featuring Tsering Yangzom Lama, who will read from selections of her works on Thursday, March 16, at 7 p.m. in Falvey’s Speakers’ Corner. Tsering Yangzom Lama was born in Kathmandu, Nepal, and earned an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a BA in Creative Writing and International Relations from The University of British Columbia. She currently resides in Vancouver, Canada.

Her debut novel, We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies (Bloomsbury, 2022) is a New York Times Summer Reads Pick and a finalist for The Scotiabank Giller Prize. It is also longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and The Toronto Book Award. She is a co-founder of Lhakar Diaries, an English-language blog for Tibetan youth in exile. Her other works have made appearances in The Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review, Grain, Kenyon Review, Vela, LaLit, and Himal Southasian. She is also a 2018 Tin House Novel Scholar.

Dig deeper and explore the links below for more on her work:

• Tsering Yangzom Lama’s official website
• Tsering Yangzom Lama’s Twitter and Instagram
• We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies (2022)
• Lhakar Diaries 
• “Q&A with Tsering Yangzom Lama” (Victoria Festival of Authors)
• “Tibetan author Tsering Yangzom Lama opens up about immigrating to Canada” (The Globe and Mail)
• “Tsering Yangzom Lama on Cultural Appreciation Versus Cultural Engagement” (Literary Hub)
• “Tibet Talks: A Reading and Conversation with Author Tsering Yangzom Lama” (International Campaign for Tibet)
• “Tsering Yangzom Lama: We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies w/ Jay Neugeboren” (Books Are Magic)

Julia Wagner ‘26 CLAS is a Communication major from New Hampshire (Go Patriots!). She works as a Communication & Marketing Assistant in Falvey Library.

Maddy Siegrist. Photo courtesy of Villanova Athletics.

2,409…That’s the number of points needed to break Villanova’s basketball all-time leading scoring record. Shelly Pennefather, now Sister Rose Marie of the Queen of Angels, since becoming a cloistered nun in 1994, has held the record since 1987. She was the school’s all-time leading scorer for both women and men with a career total of 2,408 points. Villanova senior forward Maddy Siegrist scored 23 points on Friday, Jan. 20, at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., surpassing Sister Rose Marie, for a career total of 2,571 points (as of Feb. 14, 2023).

2,409…A unique number, but a quick search using VUFind [a library resource portal designed and developed by Falvey Library’s Technology team] yielded an interesting note on that exact numeral. Harley 2409 is a manuscript written in the first half of the fifteenth century. It contains the longest version of “The Cleanness of Sowle,” which has been attributed to the spiritual teachings of St. Catherine of Siena. Cleanness, as Jennifer N. Brown states, is “St. Catherine’s spiritual beliefs in a nutshell.” In Harley 2409, “The Cleanness of Sowle begins with God’s voice directing the listener, clearly a woman (‘my daughter’) that he will lead her to the cleanness that she desires if she follows his teaching.”

Serendipitously stumbling upon the spiritual connection of this historic moment seems fitting. As Mike Jensen writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Siegrist’s own faith is important to her…[She] feels a bond [with Sister Rose Marie] beyond their points. She’ll get a letter in Villanova’s basketball office, return address, the convent. Sister Rose Marie often will include a prayer card.” In St. Catherine’s definitive work, her “Dialogue” (which includes over 400 letters and prayers), she speaks of her “conversations between God and the soul.” St. Catherine shares her revelations from God with her readers—with all of God’s daughters. “We can read God’s communications to [Catherine] with detached awe or we can receive His messages to us through her writings” (Tan Books, 2010).

2,409…A seemingly random number at first glance, is now a historic milestone and an unbreakable bond.

Dig deeper and explore the links below:

• The Life of St. Catherine of Siena (Raymond, o. C., 2011) *eBook
• The Letters of St. Catherine of Siena (Catherine, o. S., & Noffke, S., 1988)
• The Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena (Catherine, o. S., 2018) *eBook
• The Steps of Love in The Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena (Follmar, M. A., & Catherine, o. S., 1987)
• Catherine of Siena: A Life of Passion and Purpose (Vauchez, A., 2018)
• “A Long Embrace” (ESPN, 2019)
• Whatever happened to Villanova basketball star Shelly Pennefather? ‘So I made this deal with God.’ (Merrill, 2019)
• ‘Shelly Pennefather Day’ honors hoopster who pivoted to cloister (Loughlin, 2021)
• Maddy Siegrist (Villanova Athletics)
• Villanova’s Maddy Siegrist breaks all-time scoring record (Rapay, 2023)
• Magic Maddy Siegrist: The Big Baller on Villanova’s campus (Godin, 2023)

More milestones achieved:

Maddy Siegrist scored 50 points on Saturday, Feb. 11, at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ., breaking the program’s single game record. Sister Rose Marie held the record for 38 years, scoring 44 points in a single game. With her 50 point performance, Siegrist became the new all-time leading scorer in Big East Women’s Basketball history for regular season conference games. 

Save the date: 

Join us on Monday, April 24, from 3:30-4:30 p.m. in Room 205 of Falvey Library for the St. Catherine of Siena Research Award Symposium. The St. Catherine of Siena Undergraduate Peace and Justice Research Award is awarded annually to an undergraduate student for a research project relevant to peace and justice issues. Submitted papers are evaluated by CPJE affiliated faculty. The top three students, including the winner, present their work on a panel with a faculty respondent to a University-wide audience. This event, co-sponsored by the Center for Peace and Justice Education and Falvey Library, is free and open to the public.

Works Cited:

Brown, Jennifer N. “The Many Misattributions of Catherine of Siena: Beyond The Orchard in England.” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, vol. 41, no. 1, 2015, pp. 67–84. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.41.1.0067.

Catherine, o. S. (2010). Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena: A conversation with God on living your spiritual life to the fullest (New and abridged edition.). Tan Books.

Jensen (Staff Writer), M. (2023, January 22). Siegrist has formed bond with ex-’Nova great. Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA), p. C9. Available from NewsBank: Access World News: https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view?p=AWNB&docref=news/18F34FB6B7B2D1D0.

Schultze, D. (2018). Spiritual Teachings by Catherine of Siena in BL Harley 2409: An Edition. Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie/Journal of English Philology, 136(2), 296-325. https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2018-0033.

Villanova’s Maddy Siegrist explodes for 50 points, shatters multiple records | NCAA.com. (n.d.). Retrieved February 13, 2023, from https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-women/article/2023-02-11/villanovas-maddy-siegrist-explodes-50-points-shatters-multiple-records.

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

By Ethan Shea

Massive Lego bricks in Enfield, CT

In last week’s “Peek at the Week” blog, Annie pointed out that Saturday, Jan. 28, was National LEGO Day. To prolong celebration of the holiday a bit longer, this installment of “Cat in the Stax” will explore the history of this world-renowned toy.

I was quite literally raised in the shadow of LEGO, as the company’s North American branch is headquartered in Enfield, Connecticut, the town I grew up in. The soccer field I played at was called LEGO Field, and I would routinely drive by the three massive LEGO bricks shown above.

The Cult of Lego by John Baichtal

However, LEGO recently announced that they will be moving their HQ from Enfield to Boston. This move will not be complete until 2026, but as a former resident of Enfield, it stings a little.

How did LEGO end up in a run-of-the-mill town like Enfield anyways? Don’t get me wrong, I love my hometown. But I have always wondered why a massive company like LEGO would choose Enfield over a city like New York or Boston. I guess LEGO was thinking the same thing…

Anyways, after a bit of research, I learned why LEGO has been in Connecticut for so long.

In 1961, the Shwayder family, known for luggage manufacturing, was authorized to produce and sell LEGO in the United States. At the time, they were based in Brookfield, Connecticut.

Since the Shwayder family was mostly familiar with the luggage business, LEGO sales began to fall. To remedy the situation, they brought in a man named Jack Sullivan. They collectively decided headquartering in Brookfield was part of the problem and eventually chose Enfield to be the new home of LEGO simply because it is located near the midpoint between New York and Boston. Sullivan also lived in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, just a hop, skip and jump away from Enfield.

If you would like to learn less hyper-localized facts about LEGO, there are plenty of resources available through Falvey. Here are a few I recommend checking out:

• The Cult of LEGO – John Baichtal
• LEGO Manufacturers: The Kristiansen Family – Lee Slater
• Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry – David Robertson

Lastly, I hope you enjoy this photo of the LEGO creations my roommate and I recently put together. We have grown to love the Botanical Collection, so our plastic garden is blooming!

A growing LEGO garden

Ethan Shea is a second-year graduate student in the English Department and Graduate Assistant at Falvey Library.