The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Thanks to everyone who came to hang snowflakes, decorate the tree, listen to music, and enjoy getting into the holiday spirit!

12th Annual Graduate English Organization Conference: “Witness” Department of English University of Maryland, College Park March 9, 2019 Witnesses and witnessing are a paradoxical feature of our culture, our politics, and our literature. As scholars have recognized, the witness has played an important rhetorical role in the development of psychological, scientific, religious, legal, and philosophical structures and procedures. Donna Haraway, for example, has explored the function of the “modest witness” in validating matters of fact in the experimental theaters of early modernity. The third-party witness was crucial to the development of Enlightenment knowledge making and persists in today’s figuration of the legal witness. Witness law has been a site of oppression and an index of social inequality: American law once forbade the testimony of enslaved witnesses, and many legal systems have accorded women’s testimony less credibility than men’s. Material witnesses are called to tri...

Position Purpose Substitute Teachers are responsible for delivering instruction and implementation of daily lesson plans, providing a caring and safe classroom experience for students, and ensuring student learning. Substitutes could be asked to teach full or half days. Essential Functions ● Follows regular teacher's lesson plans in a way that ensures consistency and optimal learning. ● Assigns classwork and homework, as necessary, according to lesson plans. ● Differentiates instruction to fit the learning styles of various students. ● Maintains a well-managed classroom and positive learning environment. ● Supervises students out of class such as in the hallways, lunch room, and recess. ● Maintains established routine of the school and classroom procedures in which assigned. ● Remains at school the entire school day, unless otherwise instructed to leave by divisional leadership. ● Takes all necessary and reasonable precautions to protect students, equipment, mater...

CONCEPT, Villanova's interdisciplinary journal of graduate studies, is now seeking submissions. The deadline for submission is Friday, February 1, 2019. We are also looking for volunteers to serve as peer reviewers for the 2019 issue. PAPERS : We are looking for well-written, well-researched, and not-too-technical papers of up to 25 pages. Students from all of the Graduate Studies Programs for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are encouraged to submit. We seek papers that are exemplary in their respective disciplines and that address topics with an interdisciplinary appeal for our broad readership. Submissions should be material that has been researched as part of graduate work at Villanova. Selection for publication is highly competitive. We will recognize the best paper of the 2019 issue with the Graduate Research Prize. The winning author will be formally recognized at a publication celebration on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 from noon to 1:30 PM in Falvey Room 205. ...

This Thursday, November 29th, from 12:30 to about 3:00, we will be decorating the department for the holiday season and would like to invite you all to join us! We’ll have a light lunch, holiday treats, good company, and lots of snowflakes to hang!

The Wednesday after Thanksgiving, GWS is hosting an event titled "Public Disclosures of Private Realities": LGBTQ History and the Archive of Everyday Life by Dr. Stephen Vider of Bryn Mawr College. This is a great chance to meet and mingle with an expert as well as attend an important lecture within the field of Gender and Sexuality Studies. When : Wednesday, November 28 at 6PM Where : Bartley 1010

“Communities,” the Annual Symposium for English Graduate Students, is taking place at SUNY Brockport Feb 23, 2019.  The deadline is coming up in a few days, but may be extended. As always, remember that if you decide to submit proposals to any conferences, be sure to consider applying for funding.  See the Graduate Studies Office’s webpage on Conference Travel Funding .  Remember also that you have to apply for the funding before you attend the conference, and that you don’t have to wait for your paper or abstract to be accepted before you apply.  (In recent years, the funding has tended to run out early in the spring semester.)

Don James McLaughlin, ‘09, was awarded the Diane Hunter Prize for best dissertation in English from the University of Pennsylvania. The award, which Don James received in September 2018, goes to the best dissertation in English submitted during the previous academic year. His dissertation is entitled Infectious Affect: The Phobic Imagination in American Literature.  Don James was awarded his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in July 2017. He held a Visiting Assistant Professorship in English at Swarthmore College in 2017-2018. Following this appointment, he has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professorship in 19th-Century American Literature at the University of Tulsa, beginning in the fall of 2018. Don James has also been awarded the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, 2018-2019, for the purpose of conducting research in their collection of early American newspapers, rare books, and manuscripts, as he turns his dissertation into a...

Below are the Gender & Women’s Studies courses being offered this spring. Students pursuing the certificate may be particularly interested in these offerings. Remember you can take up to two courses in another department with permission from Dr. Radcliffe. GWS 8000: Critical Perspectives on Gender Dr. Elizabeth Kolsky R 7:30-9:30 An interdisciplinary study of gender, women, and sexuality, this course surveys contemporary developments in feminist, gender, and queer theory. It also applies those theories to a variety of topics, such as the representation of gender, the history of sexuality, the science of sexual difference, gender in the workplace, and gender in the digital age. Throughout the semester, we will consider how ideas about gender are bound inextricably to ideas about race and class. Sample student comments on the Spring 2018 course: "Amazing course taken as an elective outside my department. Everything I learned can be integrated into the way I conduct scienc...

Upcoming GWS Event! Mothers at Work: Who Opts Out? Presented by Dr. Liana Christin Landivar, Sociologist and Faculty Affiliate, Maryland Population Research Center, University of Maryland, College Park When: Tuesday, November 13th, 6pm GWS recruitment and information session at 5:30 Pizza will be served! Where: Tolentine 215 Liana Christin Landivar is the author of Mothers at Work: Who Opts Out? This book examines mothers’ employment rates and work hours in 55 occupations and shows that women in managerial and professional occupations were the least likely to opt out of the labor force but most likely to scale back on work by a few hours per week when they had children.

“Forms of Justice: Reflections on Writing, Creativity, and Social Change,” the English Graduate Conference at St. John’s University, has issued a call for papers. The conference will take place on April 6, 2019, in Queens. As always, remember that if you decide to submit proposals to any conferences, be sure to consider applying for funding.  See the Graduate Studies Office’s webpage on Conference Travel Funding .  Remember also that you have to apply for the funding before you attend the conference, and that you don’t have to wait for your paper or abstract to be accepted before you apply.  (In recent years, the funding has tended to run out early in the spring semester.)

Thanks to everyone who came to this year's Teaching Roundtable!