Villanova English professor Alice Dailey and Villanova theater professor Chelsea Phillips have been jointly honored with the 2025 Faculty Award for Innovative Teaching.
This award is given by Father Peter, following the recommendation of the Faculty Congress Committee, and recognizes "a full-time faculty member who employs creative techniques to enhance student learning and growth."
The award is being given to recognize the work professors Dailey and Phillips did on the Spanish Tragedy project in 2023-2024. The project consisted of concurrent fall 2023 graduate and undergraduate courses cross-listed in English, Theatre, and Honors, followed by a production of Thomas Kyd's difficult and rarely staged 1580 play, The Spanish Tragedy, which Dailey and Phillips co-directed as the culminating show of Villanova Theatre’s 2023-24 season.
According to Dr. Dailey, The Spanish Tragedy is “the precursor to Hamlet and to a whole extensive revenge tragedy genre that enters the Elizabethan Theater scene through the Spanish tragedies. So it’s an enormously influential, important play, but it’s very rarely performed.”
In 2023, A VITAL minigrant supported course development for “Legacies of Revenge Across Time, Space, Genre, and Media,” leading to a rich syllabus that explored the play’s literary background as well as its cognates in contemporary media, including literature, art, television, film, popular music, and gaming. Students used this background to edit the text of The Spanish Tragedy for performance and propose set and costume designs for the spring production.
In their culminating assignment, students were invited to respond to course material through either creative or critical projects. This invitation yielded student work ranging from literary and film analysis to one-act plays, performance pieces, fiction, poetry, and an original video game.
In addition, a 2023-24 GRASP grant from CLAS enabled Dailey and Phillips to hire a seasoned actor of early modern drama as a mentor and verse coach for their student cast, who included graduates and undergraduates from English, Theatre, Philosophy, Political Science, VSB, and the College of Professional Studies. Dr. James Keegan (University of Delaware), who has performed leading roles across sixteen seasons at the American Shakespeare Center, added immensely to the project’s artistic and pedagogical value.
A CLAS Faculty Research and Development Grant enabled Dailey and Phillips to host a symposium on The Spanish Tragedy during the show’s two-week run. The symposium brought academics from across the country together to see the play, hear keynotes from established drama scholars, and engage with Villanova students.
This is not the first honor for The Spanish Tragedy. It also received an Honorable Mention from The Shakespeare Association of America.
You can read more about the project on this blog and explore oral histories, photographs, and more on the Spanish Tragedy project's website.
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| Photo Credit: Paola Nogueras; courtesy of spanishtragedy.villanova.edu |