The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

This past Wednesday, the English Department celebrated 100 years of Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues with the event "I, too, sing America." A huge crowd of undergraduate students stopped by the 2nd floor lounge of Good Counsel Hall for a night of poetry and pizza. In his opening remarks, Professor Javadizadeh said he hoped the event would give students a taste of what they could expect from English classes at Villanova. Professor Javadizadeh originated the event over 10 years ago as a way to introduce 1st year students to the English major and minor, at the time focusing on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby . The event has since centered on other works including J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye , and, this year, Langston Hughes’ poetry collection The Weary Blues . Professor Javadizadeh and Professor Skillings welcome students. 2nd Year English MA Christopher Supplee then took center stage, providing historical context to Langston Hughes’ life and his publicati...

Sixty degree weather and afternoon sun made this past Thursday the perfect setting to talk about nature writing with English graduate student, Christopher Supplee. Chris is part of a nature writing collective based in Greater Philadelphia, the Buried Creek Collective. According to their mission statement, Buried Creek Collective works to educate Greater Philadelphia writers on our changing climate to foster informed storytelling and creative climate resistance. The collective guides members through their curriculum as part of the writing process, which is designed to provide knowledge on local waterways, land use, ecology, and infrastructure. Visits to sites of both environmental crisis and renewal are integrated into the curriculum to help provide an instructional basis for literary representations of the natural world. Not only do collective members visit these local sites, they also meet local sustainability and conservation professionals as part of the research process. The collect...

I recently had the chance to speak with Professor Adrienne Perry about her forthcoming co-edited poetry anthology, Other Legacies: Great Unsung American Poets . The book, co-edited by Kevin Prufer and Martin Rock, features contributions from 35 contemporary poets, each introducing a poet of their choice whom they feel has been neglected in literary conversations. The book arose out of Professor Perry and her co-editors' work on the Unsung Masters Series, an annual publication highlighting the work of an under-appreciated poet. The publication has an associated reading series, for which Professor Perry served as co-host, in which several scholars and writers are invited to come together to read the work of one such neglected poet. Recognizing the value these readings brought to discussions of American poetry, Professor Perry and her co-editors sought to build upon this unique experience in the form of a poetry anthology–one that would notably differ from traditional poetry anthologi...

Dr. Michelle Filling-Brown was named MVP (Most Valuable Professor) during the Women's Soccer Faculty Appreciation Day game. Dr. Filling-Brown was nominated by Avrie Nelson (#6), who is in her English 1975 course along with her teammate, Tea Gambardella (#2). Both players were excited to recognize their English professor as one of the day's MVPs. This moment was extra special for Dr. Filling-Brown, who values following her student athletes' games. Nelson and Gambardella are currently undefeated as the Women's Soccer team heads into conference play this weekend. Dr. Filling-Brown notes that they are amazing student athletes.  With excitement building for the upcoming weekend, this year's Faculty Appreciation Day was extra special for both the student athletes and the faculty members cheering them on.  Dr. Filling-Brown is pictured below during the MVP recognition at halftime and with Allison Venella, Senior Associate Athletic Director of Student Athlete Development: T...

Cathy Velez, a beloved English adjunct faculty member, was honored at a recent Villanova Women's Soccer game for Faculty Appreciation Day. This recognition happened during halftime where she was titled one of the game's inaugural MVPs... Most Valuable Professors. Professor Velez, who has taught English 1975 for many years, was touched by the kind gesture and celebration. Attached below is a photo of Professor Velez at the game. Go Nova, Go Cats!  - Juliana Catania MA '28

Who’s Afraid of Woolfbot? Professor Megan Quigley and MA Student Tate Gibbons Explore the Use of A.I. Chatbots in the Classroom By Nikola Stojcic MA ‘28 For many of us in the humanities, the encroachment of artificial intelligence usage into our academic lives has provoked feelings of wariness, to say the least. Indeed, what role is there, if any, for artificial intelligence in the field of English literature? For Professor Megan Quigley and 2nd year English MA student Tate Gibbons, the answer might look something like their custom chatbot, “The Lighthouse”--or, as it has come to be known, Woolfbot. In her forthcoming article “ Refined Out of Existence”: Modernist Impersonality Revisited, ” Professor Megan Quigley describes how in the summer of 2024 she began studying the recently unarchived eight volumes of T.S. Eliot’s Complete Prose . To help her sift through nearly 7000 pages of prose and to better understand and evaluate the usage of A.I. for herself, Professor Quigley created a ...

On Wednesday September 9th, Professor Mary Mullen visited the Keough-Naughton Institute at the University of Notre Dame for a panel discussion of her recently published co-edited volume Race, Violence and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland.  Working alongside co-editor Renée Fox and contributor Amy Mulligan, Professor Mullen's book aims to deepen understanding of the often-overlooked literature of nineteenth-century Ireland by " employing new methodological frameworks that expand how we understand the global, racial, formal, periodized, and political scope" of works from the era. The book is indebted to the work of retired University of Notre Dame Professor Sara Maurer, who Professor Mullen says "helped dreamed up the collection."   The book at the heart of the discussion. Professor Mullen with fellow panelists Renée Fox and contributor Amy Mulligan. Professor Mullen with retired University of Notre Dame Professor Sara Maurer. by Nikola Stojcic MA 28...

The English Department is happy to announce Co-Working Wednesdays!  Wednesdays in the English Department office (SAC 402) from 5:30-7:15 PM.  First session is September 30th . See you there!  

Dr. Alice Dailey developed a photography-writing project, titled “Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations,” in collaboration with her son, Adam Dailey. This past August, Tupelo Quarterly published this project in a folio on collaboration.  Page 8 of "Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations" Led by a fascination with creating analog spiritualistic photographs, Dr. Dailey found herself experimenting with several mediums outside of the process of photography itself. What started as a project to recreate Victorian spiritualist photographs transformed into her recently published photography-writing project, “Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations.” Dr. Dailey describes this project as originating from a desire to understand the creation of analog spiritualist photographs alongside the theory of embodied practice as a form of historical knowledge.  “The project thus began with no writing or narration planned. I simply wanted to make pictures,” explains Dr. Dailey when...

image retrieved from events.stanford.edu Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh traveled to California this past spring to give talks on the poets Jack Spicer and Solmaz Sharif. We sat down with Dr. Javadizadeh recently to hear more about these talks, which covered subjects as diverse as poets as radios, the notion of AI poetry, assimilation and language, and Iranian immigrant experience in the US. We first discussed Dr. Javadizadeh’s lecture at the Stanford Center for Poetics, which describes itself as “a home for research in poetics across periods, languages, and methods.” His talk, which took place on April 23 rd , was titled "Making Contact: Jack Spicer and Phatic Poetics." Dr. Javadizadeh borrows the concept of “phatic language” from the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, a concept which Dr. Javadizadeh describes as a variety of language in which “you’re not communicating, so much as you’re calling attention to the channel along which you are about to be communicating.” Some examples mi...