Murder! Obscenity! Fornication! Villainy! Kidnapping! Infanticide! Insanity! Torture! Prostitution! Just another day at the convent, according to Maria Monk, perhaps America's most widely published author before Harriet Beecher Stowe released Uncle Tom's Cabin. Wonder over the biggest American controversy of its day! Hear about those who were responsible for scandalizing a nation! Marvel at the skeptics who got to the truth of the matter! And learn, if your heart is strong enough, what the nuns have buried in the basement!

What About Bob?

Bob Blaskiewicz received his Ph.D in English from Saint Louis University. He specializes in twentieth-century American literature and culture, and wrote his dissertation on the fiction and memoirs of American combat veterans of the Second World War. He is a Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where he teaches writing and communication classes that take extraordinary claims as their subject. His most recent classes include Science and Pseudoscience, American Conspiracy Theories, and Writing about World War II in Film and Literature (Spring 2011). He is currently the Chair of the Steering Committee for the Atlanta chapter of the Independent Investigations Group (IIG-Atlanta), a research group and public resource for information about the paranormal and extraordinary. IIG-Atlanta also has a standing $50,000 challenge for anyone who can provide evidence demonstrating the existence of the paranormal, occult, or supernatural under properly controlled conditions. But he really wants to direct.

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