The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

 Joe Drury recently wrote an introduction for a forum on "The Postcritical Eighteenth Century," which was just published in the new volume of  Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture . The forum emerged out of a panel Drury organized at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Orlando. The articles explore the possibilities opened up for scholars of eighteenth-century literature by the recent "postcritical turn" in literary studies. According to Drury's introduction, the term "postcritical" was coined by Rita Felski in 2015, as a "catch-all for a group of recent methodological interventions and experiments in literary studies" which "spring from a widespread dissatisfaction with the mode of critique initiated by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche and retooled for literary analysis by the successive waves of Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, new historicist, feminist, and queer criticism to

Villanova's interdisciplinary graduate student research journal,  CONCEPT,  recently opened for article submissions! CONCEPT is also searching for volunteers to serve as peer-reviewers. This is a great opportunity to publish your research or gain experience with peer-reviewing. See more details below: Call for Papers The journal is now accepting article submissions. The author of the best article in the 2021 issue will receive the Graduate Student Research Prize. The deadline for submission is Monday, February 1, 2021. Submissions should be material that has been researched as part of graduate work at Villanova. Authors should register with the website, http://concept.journals.villanova.edu   and follow the instructions there for posting their submission. (An author may submit no more than one (1) article for consideration.) Any questions should be directed to the Faculty Managing Editor, Dr. John Kurtz (john.kurtz@villanova.edu). Call for Volunteers The journal is now seeking vo

First-year student Christoforos Sassaris recently participated in a Zoom event about the project of transcribing the letter-books of William Darlington, a historical figure local to Chester County. Christoforos's transcription project was a part of his internship at West Chester University's Special Collections Library in spring 2020. More information about the event can be found here .

Second-year MA student Anne Jones presented at the virtual Graduate Student Research Symposium last week, sharing her work from her Summer Research Fellowship. Here is the abstract for Anne's paper, entitled "Unraveling the Empire: The Spinning Wheel as an Actor in Gandhi’s Writings and the Imperial Network": "M. K. Gandhi’s writings have been crucial to the ideologies that informed the Indian independence movement. In works like "Hind Swaraj," he outlined his belief that political self-rule for India had to be bound with economic independence and civil disobedience. For Gandhi, these tenets materialized through the use of a crucial object: the charkha or spinning wheel. Spinning one’s own cotton/cloth, he argued, would mobilize India’s rural population and assist India’s economic independence by rejecting imported British cloth. Using the hermeneutics of Actor-Network Theory, my research traced how the spinning wheel gained anticolonial agency and created

  Ellipsis , the literary magazine supported by Villanova English, is accepting student, faculty, and staff submissions for its 2021 publication. They are happy to consider graduate student submissions. The editors welcome "submissions of any form of writing and artwork -- photography, sketches in your notebook when you're bored in class, murals, finger paintings, poems, short stories, essays, recipes, Instagram stories, screenshots of your friends' text messages . . . you name it, we want to review it!" To submit, send your work as an attachment to vuellipsis@gmail.com with the title of your work and your name in the subject line. Please refrain from putting your name on the submission itself to keep the review process anonymous. The editors will contact you in the spring to inform you if your work was accepted into the magazine. If you are interested in being part of the Ellipsis  staff or learning more about the submission process, email vuellipsis@gmai

  On Tuesday, Dr. Rob Nixon, professor in the Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University, delivered Villanova English's Annual Luckow Family Lecture:  "The Less Selfish Gene: Forest Altruism, Neoliberalism, and the Tree of Life." . About 85 students and faculty attended the lecture, delivered by Zoom, which was followed by a lively Q & A. In his talk, Dr. Nixon argued that the recent surge of interest in popular science writing about forest ecosystems and plant communication reflects public curiosity in models of the natural world and modes of flourishing opposed to the egotism and individualism popularized by neoliberalism.  

Detailed descriptions of courses can be found below the course list! Spring 2021 English Courses ENG 8260 Revenge Tragedy -  Dr. Alice Dailey ENG 8560 Institutional Fictions - Dr. Mary Mullen ENG 9640 Alone Together: Literature & Social Distance - Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh ENG 9730 British Literature & Medicine 1700-1900 - Dr. Joseph Drury GWS Courses that Count for English GWS 8000 Critical Perspectives on Gender - Dr. Jean Lutes ENG 8260: Revenge Tragedy Dr. Alice Dailey CRN 32463 Thursday 5:30-7:30 pm (hybrid) Revengers, Murderers, and Malcontents in Renaissance Tragedy One of the dominant features of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama is its preoccupation with spectacular acts of murder and revenge and with the psychological, social, familial, and political circumstances that motivate and justify violence. This course will study the formal traditions of revenge drama and the genre’s place within Renaissance debates about concepts of family, gender, honor,

This past Thursday evening, students and faculty met over Zoom for a casual discussion on teaching strategies, experiences, and practices. Dr. Heather Hicks, Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, Dr. Mary Mullen, Dr. Evan Radcliffe, and Dr. Tsering Wangmo shared about their personal teaching styles, and about what teaching in the pandemic has been like for them. Second year graduate students Caitlyn Dittmeier and Olivia Stowell also described their experiences working as teaching interns this semester. Caitlyn (who is interning for Dr. Mullen's Irish Literature: Gender and History course) and Olivia (who is interning for Dr. Javadizadeh's course on Letters, Texts, and Twitter) each discussed what they've learned so far, and answered questions from the other students attending the roundtable.  First year graduate student Franki Rudnesky shared, "I'm so glad I attended the teaching roundtable. As a first year student, being a TA is something I'm looking forward to doing nex

Our own Megan Quigley has edited and written for a special Print Plus edition of Modernism/modernity that investigates the legacy of T.S. Eliot in the era of #MeToo.  Quigley asks whether Eliot's poetry can still speak to contemporary readers, and inquires, "Should Eliot, who in 1957 married his secretary, 38 years his junior, now, in the era of #MeToo, be 'cancelled'?" Quigley goes on to note that "Eliot’s posthumously published racist verses, particularly in the aptly titled The Columbiad , may be reason enough to topple his still-towering status." And yet, notes Quigley, "Students born in the 1990s see their own experiences of sexual violence, economic precarity, and racism refracted in Eliot’s fragmented war-torn verse." Quigley then goes on to examine closely a reference to "pills" (and the subsequent scholarly annotation of that reference) in Eliot's "The Waste Land." According to Modernism/modernity , "The P

 Coming Soon... "The Less Selfish Gene. Forest Altruism, Neoliberalism, and the Tree of Life." The Luckow Family Lecture, sponsored by VU English, will be delivered by Rob Nixon, Barron Family Professor in Humanities and Environment at Princeton University. The lecture will be delivered on October 27th at 5:30 p.m., via Zoom. Those who wish to attend should register in advance here . About the event: Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant communication? We are witnessing a surge in public science literature that engages botanical research into forest sentience, forest suffering and the capacity of plants to commune with each other. The contemporary appeal of plant communication is rooted in a quest for alternative models of being, models more accommodating than neoliberalism. This talk will explore an ascendant understanding of forest dynamics, offering a counter-narrative of flourishing, a model of what Ge

  Last Friday, the English MA grad students met over Zoom for a happy hour hosted by Caitlyn Dittmeier, Lauren Wilke, and Olivia Stowell. Besides chatting about classes, the students also introduced each other to their various pets and plants (pictured above). Be on the lookout for information about future Zoom happy hours and hangouts--they may become a regular occurrence! More details about future meetings to come via email. 

A Life of Rare Finds: Catching up with English Alumnus, Michael DiRuggiero By Caitlyn Dittmeier, 2 nd Year M.A. in English This week, I had the opportunity to connect with Michael DiRuggiero, a Villanova English alumnus and owner of The Manhattan Rare Book Company. Michael attended Villanova from 1990-94, graduating summa cum laude with a B.Ch.E and B.A. in English. As a former Villanova English and Biology undergraduate, I enjoyed hearing how Michael has been able to embrace the sciences and humanities throughout his academic and professional careers. I asked Michael if he would share a few memories from his time at Villanova. He immediately remembered Dr. L.W. Irwin, whose teaching of English Renaissance drama was transformative to his studies. Michael initially thought he would not be able to pair writing courses with intensive engineering requirements. Thanks to AP credits, however, he was able to carve out enough room in his schedule to pursue his high-school passion for lite

 Anne Jones, now a second-year student in our MA program, earned a Summer Research Fellowship for the summer of 2020. These are competitive stipends in the amount of $3000 to support scholarly efforts conducted during June, July, and August. During a normal summer, recipients would often travel to archives relevant to their work. Of course, this has not been a normal summer!  Anne shared some information and reflections about her project with the YAWP: M. K. Gandhi’s writings have been crucial to the ideologies that informed the Indian independence movement. In works like Hind Swaraj , he outlined his belief that political self-rule for India had to be bound with economic independence and civil disobedience. For Gandhi, these tenets materialized through the use of a crucial object: the charkha or spinning wheel. Spinning one’s own cotton/cloth, he argued, would mobilize India’s rural population and assist India’s economic independence by rejecting imported British cloth. What he did no

One of our new graduate students, Christoforos Sassaris, has recently worked on an exhibition exploring the history of race, health, and epidemics. According to Sassaris, "As one of the interns in the Mellon Scholars Program at the Library Company of Philadelphia, I had the opportunity to work on this exhibition, which is highly relevant . I am very thankful to have taken part in this project." You can explore the digital exhibition here . 

 Dr. Mary Burke (UConn) is requesting papers for a 20-minute presentation in a panel on the Irish-American actress Grace Kelly. The panel will take place in March in Philadelphia at NeMLA, which is slated to be conducted in person.  According to the call for papers, "In the scholarship of Irish America, there is a startling absence of work on Grace Kelly (Princess Grace of Monaco), a cultured woman whose interest in her heritage led her widower to endow an Irish literature library in her honor. Irish American Studies has traditionally been preoccupied with narratives of Irish suffering or with prominent and powerful men, which does not gel with the story of an exceedingly photogenic woman from an immediate background of some privilege. Nevertheless, this glamorous veneer is the end-point of a multi-generation family story that follows the broad contours of post-famine Irish immigrant experience." More details can be found here . 

Professor Adrienne Perry will be taking part in an evening of poetry on Zoom, presented by Belladonna Collaborative. The event will take place on Tuesday, August 18th, at 7 PM. Professor Perry will be joined by fellow contributors to Matters of Feminist Practice : Frances Richard, Rachel Levitsky, Serena Chopra, and Yanara Friedland. Belladonna "promotes the work of women and feminist writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, unpredictable, and dangerous with language." This event is free and open to the public. Tickets are available here .  

A special issue of Legacy, a Journal of American Women Writers , has been guest-edited by Dr. Travis Foster. The special issue, “American Women’s Writing and the Genealogies of Queer Thought,” is available now. According to their website, “In print since 1984, Legacy  is the only scholarly journal to focus specifically on American women’s writing, broadly defined, from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries.” Professor Foster, along with Professor Timothy M. Griffiths of Penn State University, guest-edited the special issue and provided an introduction. The journal features articles such as “Producing Intimacy: Queer Attachments in Workingwomen’s Writings” and “‘A Queer Semblance of a Baby’: Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Queer Futurity.” The issue can be read here .

Congratulations to Dr. Megan Quigley, whose article, "Reading Virginia Woolf Logically: Resolute Approaches to Woolf's The Voyage Out and Wittgenstein's Tractatus , was just published in the journal Poetics Today in a special issue focusing on the relationship between logic and literature. Dr. Quigley's article argues for a “resolute reading” of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out , akin to Cora Diamond and James Conant’s reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . She argues that, like some recent readers of the Tractatus , we should think of The Voyage Out as therapeutic nonsense. What does that mean? The “resolute" approach to the Tractatus argues that we should embrace Wittgenstein’s own assertion that the Tractatus is finally nonsense. Accordingly, the Tractatus acts as a kind of therapy, enabling us to dispense with certain types of philosophical, linguistic, and analytical claims. Quigley argues that Woolf’s The Voyage Out takes a

Check out our Student Bios section (see the link at the top of the page) to learn about some of our new English MA students for Fall 2020!

The PMR is making an open call to scholars, institutions, and societies to propose papers, panels, or sponsored sessions for their upcoming conference in all areas and topics in late antiquity/patristics, Byzantine Studies, Medieval Studies, Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, and Renaissance and Reformation Studies. Scholars are especially invited, but not required, to address the conference's plenary theme of thought and prayer. The deadline for submission is July 30th, 2020, and notices of acceptance will be sent by August 15, 2020. The conference will take place, virtually, from October 16-18, 2020, at Villanova. Abstracts should be submitted here .

When Virginia Woolf’s brother died, she lied about it for nearly a month in a series of letters to her closest friend. In The New Yorker , Professor Kamran Javadizadeh examines why.

Villanova English issued the following statement on Instagram in response to the Black at Villanova University account: " The English Department urges all Villanovans to read the stories being shared on the  @blackvillanova  account, including posts that call out the English Department for instances of racism. We are listening, and we are committed to taking action to combat racism and white supremacy in our department and across campus."

Alex Abad-Santos, a senior writer for Vox and a Villanova English graduate, was recently on NPR discussing problems stemming from a lack of diversity among food writers, chefs, and reviewers. You can catch the interview here and dip into his back catalogue of work at Vox here . Finally, you can read about his journey from Villanova English major to successful journalist here .

Congratulations to Dr. Yumi Lee, whose article, " Repairing Police Action after the Korean War in Toni Morrison's Home ," was just published in the journal Radical History Review . Dr. Lee's timely essay looks at the way Toni Morrison's 2012 novel Home  links the violence of US military “police action” in Korea in the early 1950s to the long history of police violence at home.  She argues that the novel's  critical portrayal of the Korean War punctures two enduring myths with origins in the 1950s: the myth of a peaceful domestic “color-blind” society and the myth of heroic US military intervention abroad. In Dr. Lee's reading,  Home  is an allegory that invites readers to imagine forms of justice outside of a policing framework, both globally and domestically, through its narrative of repairing trauma and harm through community care rather than punishment or retribution. Morrison’s rewriting of the 1950s in  Home  therefore places the contempora

The Villanova English  Department stands in solidarity with our Black students, staff, and faculty and their allies against anti-Black racism, police violence, and racial injustice. The faculty intend to contact students with  an action plan before the fall semester begins, and we will be asking for student input as we proceed. In the meantime, if you have specific suggestions or questions about our department response, please direct them to  Dr.  Jean   Lutes , chair of our department Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee, at   jean . lutes @villanova.edu . As a first step in our response to the rising Black Lives Matter movement, we invite you to consider  this reading list  on white supremacy, policing, and racial justice: James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963) [available online via Falvey Library], and Raoul Peck’s 2018 documentary I Am Not Your Negro [available for purchase on Youtube and Amazon prime video] Angela J. Davis, Are Prisons O