The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Laura Tscherry, a current PhD student at Indiana University and 2017 graduate from the Villanova English MA program, was recently published in the Print Plus edition of Modernism/modernity . Laura wrote on "Queer Domestic Architectures: Theorizing Kinship and Communal Modernism," focusing on the way that various intimate living situations exist in literature (and in life!) beyond the heteronormative family unit. In their words, "I propose a theory of communal domestic spaces that asks what it means to share one's private life with strangers and what happens to relationality and space when those strangers become kin without the normative trappings of romance and children."  To pursue this theme, Laura writes on "more liminal or atypical domestic arrangements such as convents, tenement buildings, boarding schools, and old age homes," which "collapse, or complicate, neat boundaries of public and private." Laura goes on to note that "Communa...

 Alexandra Edwards, a 2012 graduate of Villanova's MA English program and an instructor at Texas Christian University, was recently awarded an honorable mention from the Modern Language Association for their Prize for Contingent Faculty and Independent Scholars. Alex received the mention for her book,  Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom . According to Edwards's book's  website , her book "investigates the overlapping cultures of fandom and American literature from the late 1800s to the mid-1940s, exploding the oft-repeated myth that fandom has its origins in the male-dominated letter columns of science fiction pulp magazines in the 1930s." In the words of the MLA prize committee: “ Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom makes an ambitious intervention and speaks across genres and disciplines. Alexandra Edwards’s study will become required reading in the growing genre of fanfiction studi...

Please join us for the   Fall 2024 Graduate Studies CLAS Research Symposium TOMORROW-- this Friday, November 15! This event highlights the outstanding and diverse scholarship being conducted by graduate students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Our very own Jaxon Parker will be among the presenters. When:  Friday, November 15 Time: 1 p.m. – 4 p.m. Where: Mullen Center Court Theatre (Oral Presentations)               Mullen Center Lobby (Poster Presentations)                                      Oral presentations will begin at 1 p.m. in the Court Theatre of the Mullen Center. Poster presentations commence thereafter in the lobby at 3 p.m. Please see the list of presenters below and make plans to support your classmates! Ligh...

Spring 2025 Course Descriptions   ENG 9560: Pathologies of Modernity Dr. Joe Drury CRN 36558 Thursday from 5:20 pm to 07:20 pm The theory and practice of medicine underwent dramatic changes between the eighteenth and early twentieth century. Medical knowledge was transformed by the rise of experimental science and the discovery of the circulatory and nervous systems, the introduction of new technologies, therapies, and drugs, the success of small-pox inoculation, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the emergence of public health and hygiene, anaesthesia, and germ theory. At the same time, medical practitioners raised their social status by establishing teaching hospitals, medical schools, and professional societies. Physicians began to present themselves as public authorities capable of diagnosing and treating the pathologies of modernity, while pointing to luxury, industrialization, urbanization, distraction, immigration, and empire as causes of sexual deviance, nervous illness, ...

Coming up on Tuesday, November 12th... This virtual forum features Jean Lutes, Denise Burgher, Trinity Rogers, and Brigitte Fielder of Taught by Literature , a collaborative digital humanities project that re-centers Black women writers, beginning with the work of African American author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson. The speakers will use Dunbar-Nelson’s short story, “ His Heart’s Desire ” (1900) to explore the challenges scholars face in recovering little-known African American texts when confronted by multiple textual variants, manuscripts without dates, and a readership unfamiliar with an author’s work.  A remarkable short story about a boy who wants a doll, “His Heart’s Desire” is one of twelve short stories Dunbar-Nelson wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about children living in a poor urban neighborhood. The stories were inspired by her work teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in New York City.   Lutes, Burgher, Roge...

 

On Tuesday, October 29th, in SAC 300, Professors Megan Quigley, Kamran Javadizadeh, and Patrick Query discussed T.S. Eliot and his legacy with an audience of graduate students. The event marked the publication of Eliot Now (Bloomsbury, 2024), an important new collection of scholarly approaches to the life and writing of T. S. Eliot, co-edited by Professor Megan Quigley. During the colloquium, moderated by Professor Javadizadeh, Megan was in conversation about the book—and about new directions in Eliot studies—with Patrick Query, Professor of English at West Point. We look forward to seeing our graduate students at our next graduate event, Thursday evening's Teaching Roundtable!

Ann Marie Jakubowski, Villanova English MA '17, has won the Fathman Award from the International T. S. Eliot Society for her paper, "Conversion as Revision: The Retrospective Poetics of Burnt Norton ." The Fathman Award is presented each year by the T.S. Eliot Society, at its annual meeting, to the best paper presented by an early-career scholar. Graduate students and recent PhDs are eligible. Ann Marie graduated with a Villanova MA in 2017 and a PhD at Washington University in St. Louis in 2024. She is currently a Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow at Valparaiso University, where she teaches literary and humanities courses in the undergrad honors college, Christ College. Congrats, Ann Marie! Kamran Javadizadeh, Ann Marie Jakubowski, and Megan Quigley

Villanova English MA alum Olivia Stowell '21 was recently featured on the Vox podcast Today , Explained , in which she spoke about AI in the classroom and described her decision to ban AI use in the courses she teaches as she pursues her PhD in Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. Olivia described the genesis of her decision: "It was fall of 2023; I was the TA for a TV class with my advisor. They had an assignment where they had to write about social media reception... I noticed the repeated use of phrases and repeated sentence structures. I was like, this does not feel like student writing to me. I was pretty certain that a student had used ChatGPT and they ended up admitting to it." Olivia noted that, at the time, "There was no institution-wide policy, and there still isn't, that I know of, so professors are kind of setting their own." Prompted by her experiences with ChatGPT as a TA, Olivia began to think critically about how she would t...

 Dr. Lauren Shohet has just published an article in the journal Anglia titled "Touching the Shield of Achilles: Ekphrasis and/as Re-Mediation." Here is the abstract: Homer’s treatment of the Matter of Troy illuminates the foundational impossibility of representation in ways that sponsor examination of the semiotic choices, the costs and benefits and tradeoffs, of different practices. Homer’s ekphrastic description of the shield of Achilles highlights a variety of available semiotic systems focused on different media of representation. This article explores Homeric ekphrasis in relation to later theories of media intersection, interaction, and transformation. Not only word, image, music, and dance, but also human perception as such, are subject to mediation. You can view more information on the article here . The shield's design as interpreted by Angelo Monticelli, ca. 1820, image courtesy of Wikipedia