Tonight, CAS Dean Brian Conniff will be speaking on the enduring connection between legendary American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen and seminal modernist writer Flannery O’Connor at 5:30 pm in LSC 133.

Brian Conniff has been the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences since 2010. Previously, he served as dean of the College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences at Radford University in Radford, Va. Prior to that, he served as a professor and chair of the Department of English at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio.

Dr. Conniff’s academic areas of expertise and research are lyric and modern poetry and prison writing. His book “The Lyric of Modern Poetry: Olson, Creeley, Bunting” was published in 1988 and his book entitled “Before the Law: Race, Violence and Morality in Contemporary American Prison Writing” is currently under consideration for publication.

Dr. Conniff has published more than two dozen articles in academic books and scholarly journals including, most recently “John Tracy Ellis and the Figure of the Catholic Intellectual” in Catholic Education; “Answering ‘The Waste Land:’ Robert Hayden and the Rise of African American Poetic Sequence” in The African American Review; and “Live from Death Row as Post-legal Prison Writing” in Literature and Law. He frequently writes book reviews for Religious Studies Review and Christianity and Literature.

During his career, he received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ohio Humanities Council, the Forum on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition Today and Campus Compact among others.

Dr. Conniff earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Rutgers University and his master’s degree in English literature from The University of Scranton. He earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Notre Dame.