Smith
Women to Help Honor Sylvia Plath's 75th
 Oxford
University will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the birth
of Sylvia Plath ’55
with a symposium this week featuring presentations by several
scholars from the Smith community.
Karen Kukil, associate
curator of special collections in the Smith College libraries
and an expert on Plath, will speak on “Sylvia Plath’s Women and Poetry” and
will participate as part of a panel on Plath-related archives.
Kukil, editor of the collection The Unabridged Journals
of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, has presented talks on Plath
at Oxford previously, most recently in May.
Cornelia Pearsall, associate
professor of English language and literature, will give
a presentation with Aubrey Menard ’08.
Menard, a student assistant in the Mortimer Rare Book Room,
will also team with Pearsall and Kukil in the spring for
a special studies project on Plath.
Meanwhile, an exhibition
of small press editions of Plath’s
writing will be on display at the Bodleian Library, Oxford’s
main research library, at which Smith alumna Sarah Thomas ’70 recently
became the librarian.
The conference, which runs from
Oct. 25 through 29, coincides with the publication by Oxford
University Press of Eye
Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s
Art of the Visual, by Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley.
The book, which displays many of Plath’s drawings and
paintings for the first time, reassesses the poet as a visual
artist.
With a series of performances,
readings, paper presentations, film and dance, the conference
explores the relationships between different forms of art
and demonstrates several aspects of Plath’s work.
Plath was an undergraduate at Smith from 1950 to 1955 and
an instructor in the English department from 1957 to 1958.
for further information
on the Sylvia Plath symposium at Oxford. |
