The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Enlightenment Sexualities *This course will fulfill the pre-1800 British/Irish literature requirement. ENG 8460 Dr. Joseph Drury CRN 32794 Tuesday 5:20-7:20pm The age of Enlightenment was also the age of the libertine. A freethinking philosophy of pleasure and individual freedom, libertinism emerged in seventeenth-century France before crossing over to England with the restoration of the monarchy after the Civil War. Turning their bakcs on what they saw as repressive religious and moral dogmas, libertine authors drew on contemporary philosophical materialism to write witty, cynical, and sometimes obscene works celebrating sexual promiscuity and hedonism. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, libertine ideas began to find their way into Enlightenment political projects aimed at restoring human nature to its "primitive" purity or emancipating women from patriarchal oppression. At the same time, however, libertinism and sexual deviance of various kinds also

Second-year student Matthew Ryan and first-year student Olivia Stowell both presented papers at the South Central MLA conference in Little Rock, AK, this past weekend! Matthew presented his paper "The Contemporary Irish Tragedy" on a panel on Gothic Presence, examining the intersection of the Irish Gothic, tragedy, and the bildungsroman. Olivia presented her paper "Mater Dolorosa, Mother Beyond Discourse: Suffering, Maternity, and Discourse in My Name Is Asher Lev " on a panel on Gender and Race in 20th Century American Literature, conducting a Kristevan reading of Chaim Potok's novel. Congratulations to Matthew and Olivia! Matthew Ryan and his fellow Gothic Presence panelists

Sarah Beth Gilbert, a second year MA student here at Villanova, attended the Multiverse, Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention in Atlanta, GA over her fall break.  She appeared on two panels, “Female Agency in Wielding Power” and “Beyond Gender: LGBTQ+ Representations in Science Fiction.” In the first panel, she presented her paper, “Institutionalized Control of Female Agency: Knowledge and Power of Witches in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Penny Dreadful .” In the second panel, she took part in an informal discussion about representation of LGBTQ+ characters in Science Fiction literature, film, and television. Sounds fascinating!

Daniella Snyder, a second year MA student here at Villanova, went on a trip to Maine during her fall break and saw where the sun first rises in the US at Acadia National Park. More fall break goings-on to come... The sun rising at Acadia National Park

The Body Studies Journal ( bodystudiesjournal.org , ISSN 2642-9772), a peer-reviewed, open access journal for the inter-/trans-disciplinary field of Body Studies, welcomes submissions for its second issue. They are specifically seeking articles that contribute to defining the field of Body Studies. Suggested topics include but are not limited to: Social and Cultural Perspectives of the Body Body image Mental health and the body Gender and Sexuality Race and Colonialized Bodies Religion and the Body Diseased/Aging Bodies Reproduction Regulation of the Body Technology and the Body Please submit your contact information, abstract, and paper (using the citation style appropriate for your discipline) as a word document to Michelle Filling-Brown, Ph.D. at michelle@bodystudiesjournal.org . Deadline for submissions: December 31, 2019. 

A Villanova MA alumna and a current Villanova MA student will be presenting at a forthcoming panel sponsored by the International Virginia Woolf Society at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900. Laura Tscherry, '17, now a Ph.D candidate at Indiana University Bloomington, will be presenting "'Isn't it odd how much more one sees in a photograph?' -- Words, Images, and Action in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas ." Current Villanova master’s student Sarah Beth Gilbert will be presenting "Virginia Woolf's Fantastical Feminist Sci-Fi: Orlando, Gender Subversions, and the Critique of Identity." The conference will take place from February 20th to the 22nd, 2020.

Gender and Women's Studies Program is partnering with the History Department to organize Villanova's first Masculinities Symposium on  Friday, January 31st, 2020  at the Inn at Villanova . The Symposium provides a platform for Villanova Faculty and Graduate Students from any discipline to present their recent or ongoing research projects to an audience of peers and interested public through 20 - minute presentations. Presentations can focus on a wide range of topics including but not limited to fatherhood, female masculinity, hegemonic masculinity, contemporary or historical enactments of masculinity, and different cultural forms of masculinity. The Masculinities Symposium invites abstract submissions from Villanova Faculty and Graduate students. Abstracts should be a maximum of 300 words and be submitted via email to kelly - anne.diamond@villanova.edu by November 15.

Professor Kamran Javadizadeh was recently published in PMLA, the official publication of the Modern Language Association. His article, “The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject,” arose for Dr. Javadizadeh when he was reading Rankine's Citizen. "I noticed," said Javadizadeh, "that, tucked into the middle of her book, and in a moment that seemed to me like a reference to the Middle Passage and the history of slavery, Rankine used a phrase—'the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads'—that she was clearly (to me at least!) lifting and adapting from a poem by Robert Lowell. But I had no idea what the two moments had to do with each other—and no idea, therefore, why Rankine was turning to Lowell’s language to evoke the history of slavery." Javadizadeh started digging, and what he found surprised him. "It was when I went back to Lowell’s archive at Harvard and looked at drafts of

It's been a busy month for Dr. Mary Mullen: not only has Edinburgh University Press just published her book Novel Institutions, but her article, "' A Great Public Transaction: Fast Days, Famine, and the British State ,"" was just published in the journal Victorian Studies. The article considers the National Day of Fast and Humiliation, observed in 1847 on the occasion of the Irish Famine. Dr. Mullen studies the literature that fast days produced—poems, pamphlets, newspaper articles, political cartoons—as well as how fast days become a narrative device in fictional narratives like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lois the Witch (1859) and historical accounts like Charles Trevelyan’s The Irish Crisis (1848). Ultimately, she suggests that fast days help us think about conceptions of the public in Victorian Britain. Although fast-day literature works to foster public unity during times of heightened social divisions, it ultimately distinguishes between publics and populations

The University of Delaware Adjunct Faculty, Department of English The English Department seeks qualified instructors of English 110: Seminar in Composition. ENGL110 is the only course required of all undergraduates at the University of Delaware. Its goals and outcomes are outlined at https://www.english.udel.edu/ undergraduate/engl110/engl110- goals-practices . Responsibilities The successful applicant will be responsible for teaching a first-year composition course. There is no standard syllabus for ENGL110 so faculty members are responsible for developing their own syllabi and course materials in accordance with the programs goals and practices. A willingness to utilize active learning strategies is essential. Adjunct faculty must also be available for office hours outside of class as part of their agreement to teach ENGL110. Successful applicants also attend two program meetings at the beginning of both the fall and spring semesters, as well as have annual revi