Neville receives Fulbright alumni award for contemplative walking residency at Ireland’s Glenstal Abbey 

Dr. Kerry Neville, interim chair of the Department of Communication at Georgia College, has received a 2026 Fulbright Alumni award to support a contemplative walking residency at Glenstal Abbey in County Limerick, Ireland. A 2018 Fulbright U.S. Scholar, Neville is one of 30 Fulbright alumni selected for additional project funding in 2026 in celebration of the Fulbright Program’s 80th anniversary.  

Neville’s experience with her 2018 Fulbright at the University of Limerick (UL) was pivotal. 

“My Fulbright at the University of Limerick changed the direction of my writing, and, honestly, my life,” she said. 

The relationship has continued ever since. She has taught in UL’s MA in Creative Writing program and its Winter School, led workshops at the UL Creative Writing Festival and served as External Examiner for the Creative Writing Program. 

“Limerick has become a second academic home,” she said.  

The time in Limerick also brought Neville an unexpected teacher. Three mornings a week, Neville walked to New Street, where 89-year-old Dónal Ó Ceallaigh taught her Irish and refused any payment. 

“In this way, our language doesn’t die, though we do,” he told her. 

After his death, Ó Ceallaigh left Neville his notebooks, which hold years of Irish words gathered from friends, weather, animals and conversation. 

“Much of what I’ve written since has grown out of that friendship,” she said.  

During the one-week residency, Neville will research and draft a long-form personal essay for her collection-in-progress, Ciúnas Gan Uaigneas, Silence Without Loneliness: Essays on Contemplative Ecology. The collection explores Irish landscapes, monastic sites, rivers and stone circles as places where ecology, spirituality and Irish-American belonging intersect, with walking as a mode of inquiry.  

At Glenstal, Neville will participate in the daily rhythms of Benedictine monastic life: the Liturgy of the Hours, periods of silence and the abbey's celebrated work of ecological stewardship across its 500-acre estate, including the monastic gardens, woodland trails and lakes. She will conduct daily contemplative walks, take field notes on the abbey's ecology and architecture and consult the monks on the Benedictine tradition of stabilitas: stability of place. 

“This award lets me take that work into the silence of Glenstal Abbey, just outside Limerick, and live inside the Benedictine idea of stabilitas, staying put long enough to really listen,” she said.  

Neville will submit the resulting essay to a U.S. or Irish literary journal. It will also become part of the manuscript she is preparing for submission to a U.S. trade publisher.