Katy Ryan has been awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. The national award will enable Professor Ryan to pursue research on the death penalty and twentieth-century American performance during a sabbatical leave in 2008-2009. Professor Ryan, who is the Founder and Faculty Advisor of the Appalachian Prison Book Project, has been teaching courses in American literature, prison studies, and performance at WVU since 2000. She also served for three years as the assistant editor of the academic journal, Theatre Topics. Her present research explores how capital punishment is represented in plays, songs, protests, and documentary films in twentieth century American culture. Her study includes both high-profile cases (the Haymarket Affair, the Scottsboro case, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs) and relatively unknown capital trials.
Ryan?s scholarly interest in the death penalty grows out of her activism in this area. In the early 1990s, Professor Ryan worked with teenagers who had been committed to the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services for violent crimes, and later she began making visits to death-row prisoners in Illinois. In 2004, with her father Bill Ryan and former death-row prisoner Renaldo Hudson, she helped to create a prison newspaper, Stateville Speaks. She also organized a visit to WVU by Delbert Tibbs, a man who spent three years on Florida?s death row for a crime he did not commit. Tibbs was featured in the recent play, The Exonerated.
Founded in 1988, the Tanner Humanities Center seeks ?to promote humanistic inquiry and exchange by supporting innovative scholarly projects and by creating opportunities for interaction among scholars, students and lifelong learners.? Previous faculty fellows have been from Yale University, Tufts University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Arizona, and Temple, among other research universities. Ryan looks forward to joining the Tanner Center?s efforts to develop and deepen the study of the humanities.
Contact: Katy Ryan; kohearnr@mail.wvu.edu; 293.9729