NYIT College of Arts and Sciences Student-Faculty Collaboration Summer Research: Interpreting Edna O'Brien's Unpublished Sylvia Plath Play Manuscripts

Following the success of Virginia: A Play (1980), the Irish writer Edna O’Brien took to bringing dramatic form to the American poet Sylvia Plath’s life and work in notebooks dating from May of 1985 that are housed in Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. Using Scalar, NYIT rising sophomores, Rebekah Geevarghese and Uzma Patel designed a digital project interpreting handwritten and typed drafts of the play. Working with scans of materials, the students investigated aspects of O'Brien's creative process, reading widely in Plath's poetry, prose, and fiction. Geevarghese and Patel will be speaking about this project with Dr. Golden at Fordham University's Transnational Print Culture Conference in October. This project was generously supported by a Student-Faculty Collaboration Grant from NYIT's College of Arts and Sciences.