The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

The English Department is pleased to announce the line-up for the 2016 Villanova University Literary Festival.  All readings will be at 7pm. The locations will be announced soon. January 28:  Gregory Pardlo Gregory Pardlo's ​collection​ Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Digest​ was also shortlisted for the​ 2015 NAACP Image Award and is a current finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His other honors​ include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; his first collection Totem was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. Pardlo's poems appear in​ The Nation, Ploughshares, ​Tin House, T​he Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry,Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Pardlo lives with his family in Brooklyn. February 11:   Dan Torday Daniel Torday is the author of the novel The Last Flight of Poxl West. His novella, The Sensualist, won the ...

Photo by Auraleah Grega During the week preceding Fall Break, the English department ran their fourth annual freshmen program in Good Counsel Hall. A group of grads and undergrads volunteered to assist Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh in leading a discussion of a chapter from J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye . The point of the program was to introduce Villanova freshmen to the level of thoughtful analysis they can encounter through the English Department here. The event began with Dr. Javadizadeh presenting some context for the chapter, as well as an introduction to the great benefits of pursuing study in the field of English. Then student volunteers, each designated a role, read through the 13th chapter of  Catcher . The freshmen were then broken into small groups to discuss their ideas about the text they had just heard. Photos by Auraleah Grega With a grand total of 89 first year students signing in to the event (though numbers were likely higher than...

Below is a write-up by first-year graduate student Rob McClung about a trip he and the rest of Dr. Lisa Sewell's Ecopoetics course took earlier this month: Photo by Rob McClung         Philadelphia is often called a “city of firsts”: within its limits were established the nation’s first public schools, its first hospital, its first lending library, its first public parks, and on the banks of the Schuykill River, its first botanical garden, established by John Bartram on the 108 acres he purchased from Swedish settlers in 1728. Bartram (1699-1777) is remembered as the country’s earliest, and for many years its most prominent, botanist. A third generation Quaker, he remained a farmer throughout his life, but established himself as an authority on North American plants through a combination of autodidactic perseverance and extensive travel throughout the continent, taking him as far north as Canada and as far south as Florida to collect and catalog seeds and...

We are happy to report that class of 2016 Alumnus Jonathan Kadjeski is an Adjunct Instructor at Eastern University. Congratulations, Jonathan!

On May 18, 2015 Dr. Lucky presented a paper at the American Literature Association Conference in Boston, Massachusetts titled "'Ashes for a Heart': Problematizing Black and White Women's Solidarity in Valerie Martin's  Property , Sherley Anne Williams'  Dessa Rose  and Toni Morrison's  Beloved ."

Dr. Shohet, Lucklow Family Professor of English, recently published: "Othello's ipad" in  Shakespearean Echoes , ed. Adam Hansen and Kevin Wetmore. Palgrave, 2015. 108-119;  "Filles perdues, formes retrouvées dans le  Pericles  de Shakespeare et  l'Urania  de Mary Wroth" [Lost daughters, found forms, in Shakespeare's  Pericles  and Mary Wroth's  Urania ] in  Enfants perdus, enfants trouv é s: Dire l'abandon en Europe, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles dans l'europe de l'ancien régime.  Ed. Florence Magnot-Ogilvy et Janice Valls-Russell. Paris: Garnier, 2015, 125-139; and "Forming History, Inhabiting Form in Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House,'" in  Poetic's Today  34:5 (Fall 2014), 655-684. Dr. Shohet has also recently presented the following presentations: "Queering Place in  The Faerie Queene ," International Spenser Society Conference. Dublin, June 18-20 2015; " Pericles  and the Romance of R...

Dr. Javadizadeh was awarded and recently completed a two-month Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities a the University of Texas in Austin. He was at the Harry Ransom Center for May 2015 and the fall of 2014, spending most of his time researching their Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell manuscript collections. He is now finishing a draft of the resulting manuscript, which has the working title  Institutionalized Poets: Madness & Lyric at Midcentury . Below is a video recorded by the Harry Ransom Center where Dr. Javadizadeh discusses his research in their archives.

On April 1-4, 2015 at the Shakespeare Association of America Conference in Vancouver, Dr. Dailey presented her paper "I See Dead People: 2 Henry IV and the Corpse of History." Dr. Dailey was also awarded the Villanova Summer Research Fellowship to work on her new book project,  Shakespeare's Effigies: Staging Histories of the Living and the Dead .

Dr. Mullen and Dr. Hicks will present their perspectives on the current state of PhD. application, admission, and academic job market. There will also be conversation with Villanova alumnus Don James McLaughlin, who is currently writing his dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. Each speaker will offer their thoughts on whether or not to pursue a doctoral degree, where to apply, how to produce an effective application, and what the experience of a PhD. program is like. The event will end in a Q&A session moderated by Dr. Hicks. Come for the pizza, stay for the insightful perspectives on taking the PhD. path! Monday October 5 at 7:30PM in SAC 300.