The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

On Thursday December 1st the English Department was pleased to host Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (University of North Florida), who presented “What Was Distant Reading?: Critical Counting and Poetic Making in Caroline Spurgeon’s ’The Art of Reading’ and Shakespeare’s Imagery." Buurma and Heffernan wrote: This talk is drawn from our book project “The Teaching Archive: A New History of Literary Study.” “The Teaching Archive” offers a new archive for disciplinary history: the twentieth-century English literature classroom’s syllabi, lecture notes, exams, and assignments. Our presentation turns to the teaching and research of Caroline Spurgeon, the first female professor in the UK and author of Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935).  Shakespeare’s Imagery, we argue, is important early work of distant reading. To prepare it, Spurgeon and her research team spent more than a decade combing through Shakespeare’s corpus in order to index t...

Last Wednesday the English department hosted a holiday decorating party. Students, faculty, and staff stocked up the lounge with food, drink, and cheer! Vegetarian chili, three layer dip, vegetable meatballs and potstickers. Plus tons of festive dessert.  Grads and undergrads got together to decorate the office tree and cover the ceiling in glittering snowflakes. We're delighted at the turnout of what we hope will be an annual Villanova tradition.