The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Dr. Dailey in front of Fellows' Hall, where John Milton  lived when he was a student at  Christ's College, Cambridge. Over the fall break, I traveled to England to give a scholarly talk and to pursue new research. My first stop was Christ’s College, Cambridge, where I shared my current work on corporeality and real presence with the Medieval-Renaissance Faculty Colloquium of Cambridge University. I was treated to a wonderful tour of Christ’s College, alma mater of John Milton and Charles Darwin. There I saw the hall where Milton lived and sat in the beautiful room in which senior fellows of the college, like Darwin, have for centuries drunk wine, talked, made friendly wagers, and kept hand-written accounts of their consumption. These bound ledgers, some including Darwin’s hand writing, are still stored in the room and brought out for nightly record-keeping. After my time in Cambridge, I spent three days in London studying Michael Landy’s Saints Alive, an exhi...

This summer, the National Science foundation decided to award Villanova a grant of $1.67 million to build a CAVE system in Old Falvey. The CAVE is a room-like enclosure which has walls, floor and in some cases a ceiling made of rear-projection screens, allowing viewers inside the room to experience and interact with 3D immersive environments. The CAVE will be able to hold 10-15 students for research and classroom experiences and will be integrated with a mobile robot platform which will be developed at Villanova for telepresence experiences. Dr. Klassner has been spearheading this interdisciplinary project. The overall vision for the use of the CAVE includes technologically enhanced teaching and will allow Villanova to foray into the Digital Humanities. See the figure for a cutaway schematic view of the proposed CAVE facility. Villanova has invited professors from all disciplines to attend two luncheons to learn about the CAVE's capabilities and to deve...

This past September, current PhD student and Villanova Alum Alexandra Edwards stood onstage to accept a Creative Arts Emmy® for Original Interactive Program. She and her teammates were recognized for their work on the multimedia online project, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. We were able to email Alex and ask about her experience with the show, her current studies and her time at Villanova. The YAWP: Congratulations! Did you EVER envision yourself as an Emmy winner? Alex: NEVER. Never ever. Not even when I was standing onstage getting the award. It's amazing, but it still hasn't sunk in. Probably because I'm still doing the same stuff I was before: reading, writing papers, procrastinating on writing papers, the whole grad student thing. The YAWP: Lizzie Bennet Diaries is categorized as an "Interactive Media" project. What exactly does Interactive Media mean when it comes to entertainment? Alex: Interactive Media a big catch-all term for any kind of entertain...

The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Villanova Master's alumna Alexandra Edwards ('12) with a Primetime Emmy® for her work on The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, an interactive, multi-platform adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Edwards and the other two members of the transmedia team took home the Emmy® for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media—Original Interactive Program. The team accepted their award live onstage at the 2013 Primetime Creative Arts Emmy® Awards and were featured in the cable broadcast version of the ceremony. This fall, Edwards continues her work with Pemberley Digital, the production company behind The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. She serves as the transmedia producer for Emma Approved, the recently launched interactive adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma. She is also attached as the transmedia producer for the upcoming interactive webseries Hashtag Hamlet. The project has been invited to the 2013 Sundance Institute New ...

On October 3, Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh and a group of Villanova English majors and MA candidates hosted the "Wildcat in the Rye" event, the English department's first book discussion geared toward an audience of freshmen. Close to eighty students gathered on the second floor of Good Counsel Hall (with some spillover on the overhanging balcony) to eat pizza and discuss J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Dr. Javadizadeh opened the evening by sharing his first experience with the book: an older friend read him a passage in which a speaker at protagonist Holden Caulfield's Pencey Prep (modeled on Valley Forge Military Academy, which Salinger attended) gave a speech and interrupted himself with a bout of flatulence. Dr. Javadizadeh then read one of his favorite passages, in which Caulfield discusses his attraction to the American Museum of Natural History and the way in which nothing there changes no matter how many times one visits. He then described how the book ...

Lauren Shohet's reflective essay "The Unruly Pearl" is included in the catalogue for the show Christopher Cook: A Sign of Things To Come," on exhibit at the Ryan Lee Gallery in Chelsea (527 W. 26th St) Oct 10-Nov 16. This English artist currently works mostly in graphite, a medium he describes as between painting and drawing. Dr. Shohet's essay considers relationships between Cook's work and the Baroque.

Chiji Akoma presented “Frederick Douglass, Diaspora Identity, and the American Colonization Society Project” at a special panel marking Frederick Douglass Week at West Chester University’s Frederick Douglass Institute, on September 30, 2013.

In September, Dr. Foster gave a talk titled "Case Studies in Queer Ecology: Jewett to Freud" at Columbia University's Women & Society Seminar, arguing that Sarah Orne Jewett uses her 1884 novel, A Country Doctor, to apply Darwinian biology to Freudian questions about the diversity of human sexuality. And in November, he will present a work-in-progress, "Campus Novels and the Nation of Peers," at the University of Pennsylvania's Americanist Reading Group. The paper analyzes popular novels of student life published between the Civil War and World War I, arguing that this genre played a key role in reconciliation between the white North and South and the accompanying resubjugation of recently freed slaves.

Jean Lutes gave a talk titled, "Nellie Bly's Trip: A Stunt of World-Class Proportions," at Villanova on June 10, 2013, as part of Falvey Library's "Paper for the People: A Conference on Dime Novels and Early Mass-Market Publishing," which was organized to celebrate the recently discovered collection of dime novels and other late-nineteenth-century popular materials.

Dr. Ormsby-Lennon's essay "Of Late a Tabu: Newer light on Darker Authors" appears in kirsten Juhas, Patrick Mu[umlaut there]ller, and Mascha Hansen eds,  "The First Wit of the Age": Essays on Swift and his Contemporaries in Honour of Hermann J. Real  (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013), 149-166.

Dr. Megan Quigley delivered the annual East Coker lecture on  July 14th  at the T. S. Eliot summer school in the UK entitled, "Why  East Coker  is Still Shocking."  This lecture, part of a new project on Eliot and his influence on twentieth-century fiction, stems from archival work completed on two recent fellowships: at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA and at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, TX.  Dr. Quigley also organized a panel, "'That is not what I meant at all': Literary--Philosophical Correspondents,"for the annual Modernist Studies Association Conference, which took place at the University of Sussex.  Dr. Quigley's paper for that panel, delivered on  September 1st , was called "Rebabelization & Nonsense:  Finnegans Wake  in Basic English."

Dr. Lucky served as a moderator for the panel "Rethinking Scholarship and Knowledge Production" at the Black Doctoral Network Conference held at the Philadelphia Double Tree by Hilton Hotel, October 3-5, 2013.

Deborah A. Thomas, Ph.D., published “Vibrations in the Memory:  Bleak House ’s Response to Illustrations of Becky in  Vanity Fair ” in  Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction , 44 (2013), which appeared this summer.

On September 26th, second-year grad students as well as curious first-years gathered to go over the timeline of thesis deadlines, in order to get a feel for what the process will be like. Pizza was eaten and questions asked as the second year students started to get a picture of what the next few months will look like. Students also had plenty of time after Dr. Hicks' talk to chat, share experiences and stories, and laugh together about rising stress levels.

Megan Quigley's Modern British Novel course visited the Barnes Foundation at its new location downtown in Philadelphia on Saturday, Oct. 4th. Seeing works by Matisse, Picasso, Soutine, Modigliani and many others helped to bring home the parallel stylistic experimentalism in fiction in the early twentieth-century. What a great resource nearby!