The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Unfortunately, Brenda Shaughnessy is under the weather and will not be able to give tonight's reading. Stay tuned for information on a possible rescheduling.

By Guest Contributor Daniella Snyder Read the abstract from Daniella's PRO here . In the last three decades or so, museums have become less of a place to plainly store antiques and sculptures, and more a place that collates and shares human experiences. According to Salvador Salort-Pons, the CEO, director, and president of the Detroit Institute of the Arts, these experiences and stories have a profound effect on visitors, writing that while we see ourselves in these stories, “it is through them that we encounter new perspectives that change how we think and feel.” Therefore, a good museum requires great storytellers of these human experiences, whether they are curators, directors, docents, talkative security guards, or well-written wall labels. These people—those that have the ability to tell a great story—understand and respect the invaluable power of language. Before completing my professional research option, I believed that museum communications was a relatively monolithic c...

The 22nd annual Villanova Lit Fest kicks off Thursday, Jan 30, with a reading by Brenda Shaughnessy. She'll be reading from her most recent collection, The Octopus Musuem, in Falvey Library's Speakers' Corner at 7 p.m. The reading is free and open to the public.

Emerald Isle Edition By Guest Contributor Jesse Schwartz This past summer, I had the privilege of spending 8 weeks as an archival intern at the Jackie Clarke Collection in Ballina, Ireland. I had this opportunity because of the Irish Studies Program at Villanova, which sends (and funds!) two or three students from Villanova to the Jackie Clarke every summer. I had never been to Ireland before, and it was an amazing experience to live and work in Ballina, which is a small town in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. The museum is a small, publicly funded, non-profit collection of historical materials that formerly belonged to Ballina resident, Jackie Clarke. The museum has three full-time employees, and a rotating part-time staff of six other workers, all of whom were lovely to get to know and work with. In his lifetime, Jackie Clarke collected over 100,000 pieces of Irish history, and turned his collection over to the town after his death in 2013. My job was two-fold: half of the...

The Graduate English Organization at the University of Maryland College Park is extending the deadline for submissions for its conference, "Radical Visions: Abolition as Praxis in Literature, Rhetoric, and Culture." The conference will held February 28-29, 2020. Their plenary speakers include Jonathan Burton (Whittier College), founder of the Qualities of Mercy project, and Katherine Knight Steele (UMCP), project director of Synergies Among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture , as well as a presentation from the Lakeland Community Heritage Project . Individual and panel abstracts can be submitted to conference.geo@gmail.com by February 1, 2020. Here is the relevant info from their call for submissions: What needs to be abolished in your discipline? What can emerge to take its place? Starting from the intellectual posture of prison abolition and encompassing diverse, interdisciplinary methodologies and periods, this conference seeks to ide...

Villanova faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students are invited to a one-day symposium on "Masculinities" on Friday, January 31. The event will take place at the Inn at Villanova, starting at 8.30 a.m. Speakers will include Villanova English faculty members Dr. Travis Foster and Dr. Jean Lutes. Visit here to pre-register for the symposium. For the program and other information, please contact kelly-anne.diamond@villanova.edu.