Join Us for the Remaining Lineup of Spring Events
Happy April, Wildcats! The end of the semester is quickly approaching. Be sure to check out one (or a few) of the remaining events at Falvey Memorial Library. All events are ACS-approved and open to the Villanova University community. The lineup of events are listed below.
2022 Villanova University Literary Festival: Tiphanie Yanique
- Thursday, April 21, at 7 p.m. in Falvey Library’s Speakers’ Corner.
- Livestream link.
- 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.
- This event is co-sponsored by the English Department, the Creative Writing Program, Global Interdisciplinary Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, the Center for Irish Studies, and Falvey Library.
Polar Voyaging and the Humanities
- Tuesday, April 19, at 4 p.m.
- Virtual lecture on Zoom. Register here.
- Lecture by 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.
- This event is offered in support of Falvey Memorial Library’s current exhibit “That Fairyland of Ice”: Polar Exploration in Mind and Memoryand is included alongside Earth Week events.
- This event is co-sponsored by Falvey Memorial Library, the Office of Sustainability, the Department of Geography and the Environment, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, and the Department of English.
2022 Falvey Forum Workshop Series: Capturing the Web: Introduction to Web Archiving
- Wednesday, April 20, at 12 p.m.
- Virtual workshop on Zoom. Register here.
- Workshop led by Beaudry Rae Allen, Preservation and Digital Archivist.
- Web archiving is the process of gathering up data that has been recorded on the World Wide Web, storing it, ensuring the data is preserved in an archive, and making the collected data available for future research. Get a foundational overview of web archiving in this workshop and learn ways to leverage the Wayback Machine and other web preservation tools in your scholarship and teaching.
- This event is co-sponsored by Falvey Library and the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
“The Politics of the Irish Harp Symbol from Henry VIII to Brexit” Lecture and Harp Performance with Mary Louise O’Donnell
- Wednesday, April 20, at 4 p.m. in Speakers’ Corner.
- Mary Louise O’Donnell, PhD, will discuss the origin of the Irish harp symbol and its history and significance in Irish political iconography through the centuries.
- Dr. O’Donnell is a harpist, musicologist, and Fulbright scholar 2019/2020. She holds a doctorate from the University of Limerick and is a former Irish Research Council postgraduate scholar and postdoctoral fellow. Her first book Ireland’s Harp: the Shaping of Irish Identity c.1770 to 1880 was published by UCD Press in 2014. She has also published widely on topics relating to Irish cultural history, semiotics, and performance studies. Some of her most recent research can be found in Musicians and their Audiences: New Approaches to a Timeless Division (Ashgate, 2016) and Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration (Routledge, 2017). Dr. O’Donnell has performed extensively throughout Ireland, Europe, Africa, and Asia as a soloist and with various ensembles; she has also appeared on BBC, RTÉ, CNN, and NHK (Japan). Working alongside her sister, Dr. O’Donnell recently recorded an album which includes compositions for pedal harp, portable Irish harp, and voice to harp accompaniment by the nineteenth-century Irish composer Charles Egan.
- This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Irish Studies and Falvey Library.
2022 Falvey Forum Workshop Series: Bringing Historical Maps into GIS
- Wednesday, April 27, at 12 p.m.
- Virtual workshop on Zoom. Register here.
- Workshop led by Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian.
- Georeferencing is the process of connecting images (e.g., scanned historical maps, aerial and satellite photographs) to their geographic locations, so that they can be used as spatial layers in GIS software. Using tools like Map Warper and ArcGIS Online, this workshop will provide participants with the steps to align geographic coordinates to a scanned historical map and display them online to examine how locations have changed over time.
- Falvey Scholars will give short presentations on the content and findings of the research involved in the writing of the thesis or in the creation of the project report.
Russia’s War on Ukraine: Historical Turning Points
- Monday, April 25, from 6-7 p.m.
- Virtual lecture on Zoom. Register here.
- A conversation about the ongoing war in Ukraine.
- Dr. Adele Lindenmeyr, Historian of Russia and the USSR, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Villanova University, and Dr. Mike Westrate, Historian of Ukraine and the USSR, Assistant Vice Provost, Graduate Education and Research, Villanova University, will discuss the turning points that led to Russia’s invasion.
- What were the historical turning points that led to Russia’s current war on Ukraine and its people? Join us for a discussion of the Ukrainian-Russian relationship, including: the Holodomor, WWII and its aftermath, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Budapest Memorandum, the Russian war on Georgia, and the illegal annexation of Crimea.
- This event is co-sponsored by Falvey Library and the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
2021-2022 Alfred F. Mannella and Rose T. Lauria-Mannella Endowed Distinguished Speaker Series Lecture featuring Poet Maria Famà
- Thursday, April 28, at 2:30 p.m.
- Virtual lecture on Zoom. Register here.
- Lecture by 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 will give examples of her poems from her various books and explain how they came into being.
- For more information on Famà, please visit her website.
- This event is co-sponsored by Falvey Library, the Italian Studies Program, the Department of English, and the Creative Writing Program.
Falvey Library’s Semi-Annual Stress Busting Open House: Make Finals a Grand Slam
- Friday, April 29 (Reading Day) from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. or until supplies last on the Old Falvey patio.
- Stop by for some major (league) fun and treats to make these finals a grand slam!
- Pals for Life therapy animals will be there to help you during the 7th inning stretch of the semester.
- This event is co-sponsored by Falvey Library, the Office of Health Promotion, and POWER.
2022 Falvey Scholars Awards Presentation and Reception Ceremony
- Friday, April 22, at 10 a.m.
- Virtual lecture on Zoom. Register here.
- The 2022 Falvey Scholar award winners: Nadjulia Constant, Daryl Jucar, Christopher DiLullo, Addison Drone, Nicole Garcia, Alec Henderson, Mai Khuc, and Erica Mallon.
- Falvey Scholars is an annual program that recognizes outstanding undergraduate research by senior students at Villanova University.
- Falvey Scholars will give short presentations on the content and findings of the research involved in the writing of the thesis or in the creation of the project report.
- This event is co-sponsored by Falvey Library and the Center for Research and Fellowships.
CONCEPT Virtual Recognition Ceremony
- Friday, April 22, at 1 p.m.
- Virtual lecture on Zoom. Register here.
- Join us as 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 will recognize 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.
- This event is co-sponsored by Falvey Library and the Office of Graduate Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
- Visit the CONCEPT website to learn more about the journal and to browse past volumes.
Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Memorial Library.
This fall, we invite the Villanova community to join us for a taste of mindfulness meditation on Mondays from 1:00- 1:30 p.m. This virtual series will begin with the first meditation on Monday, Aug. 23 and run on Monday afternoons throughout the semester.
persistent existence of important Indigenous places. They also challenge understandings of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) as a visual project that replaced Indigenous geographies with rationalized settler space. Indigenous properties and landscapes are clearly visible on historic maps, and in the patterns of the present-day PLSS. Their presence raises questions for GIS practitioners about the tensions between social and mathematical frameworks for locating peoples and places.
Liberal Arts and Sciences. After writing two books that describe eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature using familiar critical methods, he turned to new research opportunities created by large digital libraries. Since that time, his research has explored literary patterns that become visible across long timelines, when we consider hundreds or thousands of books at once. He recently used machine learning, for instance, to trace the consolidation of detective fiction and science fiction as distinct genres, and to describe the shifting assumptions about gender revealed in literary characterization from 1780 to the present. He has authored three books about literary history, Distant Horizons (The University of Chicago Press Books, 2019), Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies(Stanford University Press, 2013), and The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science and Political Economy 1760-1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2005). Website: 
Jenna Newman is a graduate assistant in Falvey Memorial Library and a graduate student in the Communication Department.
Jan. 25 and run on Monday afternoons throughout the semester.