The late Southern writer Flannery O’Connor would have turned 100 this year, and Fordham’s Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies is sponsoring multiple events celebrating the Catholic author’s work.
Support for this programming comes from the Flannery O’Connor Trust, which endowed the Curran Center in 2018 with a grant to promote the scholarship of O’Connor and other Catholic writers who have contributed significantly to the American canon.
The center’s associate director Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, herself a distinguished Flannery O’Connor scholar, is at the center of these efforts, planning multiple events and speaking on many panels about the writer’s profound Catholic faith, the enduring resonance of her fiction, and the ways she wrote about race in her short stories versus her personal letters.
In advance of a sold-out panel discussion on February 23 at the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah, Georgia, O’Donnell recalled how she first fell under the spell of O’Connor’s writing in an interview with the Savannah Morning News.
“I learned that she’s a Catholic in the South, which is a very odd thing to be…because she’s southern and very much fits in, but she doesn’t fit in terms of this Catholicism—which most Southerners at the time regarded with a great deal of suspicion…So, I began to have an affinity for her because of the sense of being both of the place and also not of the place.”
On O’Connor’s actual birthday, March 25, 2025, Fordham will be screening Everything That Rises Must Converge, a film of the play based on O’Connor’s short story about a Black woman and a white woman on a bus in the newly desegregated South. A panel discussion will follow featuring director Karin Coonrod; several actors from the play; Mark Chapman, associate professor of African and African American Studies; and O’Donnell, whose multiple books on O’Connor include Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith and a book of sonnets that channel O’Connor’s voice, Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor.
This summer, Fordham’s London campus will also host a conference sponsored by the Curran Center, “Flannery Abroad: A Conference in Celebration of Flannery O’Connor’s Centenary” from June 5 through 8.
O’Donnell will also be discussing O’Connor’s legacy on May 5th at the Cultural Center of Milan via Zoom and on May 23 at the American Literature Association Conference in Boston.
