Working together across disciplines

The results of a collaboration between students in the English and Art and Design departments are now on display in Rice Library. 

Rosalie Moffett, assistant professor of English, and Dr. Gregory Blair, adjunct instructor in the Art and Design department, partnered to give their students (15 in each class) a visual-text project: create a poetry broadside.

The broadsides, visual representations of the poetry students' original works, can be viewed in Rice Library's second floor reading room. A reception to celebrate the project's completion will take place there from noon until 2 p.m. Thursday, December 5. 

Moffett believes skills students learned through this process will benefit them after graduation. "Sometimes people think of the careers of writers or artists as solitary, but in reality, much of the work our students will go on to do is collaborative-publishing, animation, design, marketing-so it's important to give them the experience of sharing their concepts and talking through ideas, images and possibilities when each has a stake in the outcome," she says.

Moffett and Blair hope to continue the broadside project in the future and have talked about other collaborative opportunities, like graphic novels. "There are so many ways that our students can work together to inspire each other and create beyond what they could do alone," Moffett says. "I know that there's a lot that my creative writing students can contribute to other fields, and I imagine other professors feel the same about their students, so I hope to work on more collaborations with other faculty in the future."