The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Ted Howell, a recent alumnus of the program and a PhD student at Temple University, is getting attention for breaking ground with an innovative new course at Temple. “Cli-fi: Science Fiction, Climate Change, and Apocalypse" focuses on the new genre of "Climate Fiction," which shows the possible apolcalyptic outcomes that are inevitable if climate change continues as predicted. This course is getting media attention for the way it brings together literature and cutting-edge scientific findings. The course focuses on this new movement in literature (exemplified in such works as  The Wind-Up Girl ), which harnesses the concerns of a culture that feels the threat of apocalyptic climate change. In addition to getting students thinking about the intersection between climate science and fiction, he also encourages his students to participate in the wider climate change conversation by posting all their work to a blog. He was recently featured in a  Reuters  article , a  New...

Quoted from The Word Works' April 21, 2015 Newsletter: Lisa Sewell's Impossible Object is real - and wonderful ! Winner of the First Annual Tenth Gate Prize Impossible Object , Sewell's third full-length collection, shows what it means to be in constant, alert connection to the world and its voices. Each poem is deeply rooted in a specific work of literature as well as an event in the poet's life, earning this praise from Linda Gregerson: "Lisa Sewell has invented a new poetic genre. I'd call the mode ekphrastic, but ekphrasis doesn't quite capture it. She eats, sleeps, and breathes books. Books are her lime flower tea - she recovers the past in books. Books are her avenue to political witness - they afford a foundational grammar for feeling and moral awareness. Books are her oxygen and elementary language." Arthur Sze adds, "In these sharp, arresting poems, Lisa Sewell writes out of a place and time 'when there is neve...

Don James McLaughlin is the recipient of the Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Dissertation Fellowship, awarded by the University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies. The award is a yearlong fellowship for the 2015/16 academic year.

Dr. Hunter's article "Boethian Humor and the Pseudo-Beothian De disciplina scolarium" just came out in Viator 46.1 (2015): 161-79. She also has another article forthcoming in Carmina Philosophiae. Dr. Hunter just awarded the Katherine F. Pantzer Fellowship in Descriptive Bibliography at Harvard's Houghton Library, where I'll be resident for four weeks looking at early printed editions of De disciplina scolarium. She also received a research grant from Villanova to go look at another collection of early print editions of De disciplina at the Library of Congress.

Here's some interesting  graphs and stats  that show the correlation between where someone gets a PhD and where they get a job. Though the conclusions aren't groundbreaking, it's unusual to see such concrete numbers in these discussions.

Our very own Dr. Lisa Sewell will be giving a scholarship@Villanova talk in Falvey Library on Tuesday, April 14, at 4:30 pm. Dr. Sewell will be discussing and reading from her new volume of poetry, Impossible Object , which is the winner of the Gate Prize for poetry.