The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

The Referent of Ireland conference was held at Villanova University on Friday, February 21st, 2020. Panelists read and responded to a series of shared articles with short papers, and will reconvene over the summer in Galway to continue their work. The conference was designed to build "on fresh work on reference—or how the text refers to a world outside of the text—in order to rethink the aesthetics and politics of nineteenth-century Irish literature." Panelists considered questions such as: "What does literature about nineteenth-century Ireland refer to, and what are its habits of reference? Does the referent change for readers across time? Now that old saws about Ireland’s failed realism have been put to bed, what purposes might be served by thinking about Irish referential habits? Does thinking about Ireland and reference strand nineteenth-century Ireland in old paradigms of representation that preclude us from thinking about mediation? How does the nineteenth-centur...

Three Minute Thesis (3MT) is a competition for master’s and doctoral students to develop and showcase their research communication skills. Developed by The University of Queensland, 3MT cultivates students’ academic, professional, presentation and research communication skills. To be successful, competitors must effectively explain their research in three minutes, in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience. This year, Villanova will be hosting its inaugural 3MT competition on Friday, March 27, 2020, in Driscoll 134 at 5 p.m. A panel of judges will select a first-place winner ($1,000 award), a second-place winner ($500 award), and audience members in attendance will select an audience choice winner ($250 award). In addition, the first place winner of Villanova’s 3MT® competition will be entered into the regional 3MT competition for the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools , taking place in Quebec City, Quebec, on April 16, 2020. All graduate students who have ...

The Activist History Review is looking for proposals for a conference to be held at Villanova this coming summer! See the original call, below: The Activist History Review ​ invites proposals for its bi-annual conference, “Race and Equity in Higher Ed.,” to be held on June 13, 2020 [Saturday is best, though we are flexible on this date]. As the story goes, a college education facilitates the American dream. Accessible to all, we’re told, higher education drives social mobility and ensures that the best and the brightest all rise to the top. But from crippling student debt to racial disparities in access and the admissions rigging system that ranges from SAT prep to outright bribes, college access is bound by the very forces of race, class, and gender that a college degree purports to correct. TAHR ​ seeks to help unravel the relationship of race and place, which together overwhelmingly shape American life, in higher education at our bi-annual conference. We invite panel, poster, roun...

The following event might be up the alleys of some of our grad students... Please join us on Wednesday, Feb. 19, from 12-1 p.m., in Falvey Memorial Library’s Speakers’ Corner for a panel presentation demonstrating the vitality of literary translation; that a living mind behind the process is essential to translation as an art and academic endeavor. The "vitality" of literary translation rests in the root meaning of "vital"--in Latin, vitalis: "of life, likely to live.” Anyone who has attempted to put idiomatic language into Google Translate has almost certainly discovered how remarkably skewed--sometimes even comical--the result can be. A sensitive translator can produce a text that is as lyrical as the original without critically compromising the source text or its author's intentions. Hear from three such translators and their experiences communicating the richness of Arabic and Asian language to non-native readers. Panelists include Barbara Romaine , Ara...

What can you do with a Master's in English? Taking for granted that the people who ask this usually mean "in a professional context," how can we answer this question? One way would be to take a look back at the (roughly) last ten years of data on what alumni from the Villanova Master's program have gotten up to in their work lives. It's no secret that full-time college-level teaching jobs in English are hard to come by, although some of our graduates have gone down that road. Others have gone into (or, often, continued with) K-12 teaching. Higher education administration is a popular field for our graduates, as is adjunct and tutoring work, which may or may not coincide with PhD program work. Meanwhile, just over a third of our graduates are part of the 'other' category; but what does that mean? Villanova English MA graduates have titles like producer, specialist, director, editor, analyst, and writer. They work in diverse fields that rely on...

Interested in the state of critical theory? You might want to attend a lecture coming up this Friday that is being offered by the Philosophy department. Dr. Kieran Durkin from the Department of Sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara will be presenting "Critical Theory at the Crossroads: Negativity, Humanism, and the Dialectics of Social Transformation." The lecture will be given this Friday, February 7th, from 3-4 p.m. in Driscoll Hall, Room 240.

Are you looking to show off your Villanova English pride? Seeking to cover your head or tote some books in style? Look no further than the shirts, hats, and tote bags that are available for reasonable sums in SAC 402. Contact Mike Malloy or stop by the English office for more information. PS We also have bookmarks we are literally* giving away *meaning “not figuratively”

Villanova's first-ever Masculinities Symposium was held on Friday, January 31st. The event featured the work of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Presentations were given by many names familiar to the Villanova Graduate English community, including Dr. Travis Foster, who presented on The Effeminate Man, as well as Jesse Schwartz, graduate student, who presented on Death and Consumption, The Two Genders in  Shakespeare’s ​I Henry IV​ and ​Coriolanus. Dr. Travis Foster Dr. Marylu Hill, Melissa Sturges, and Jesse Schwartz

On Tuesday, Feb. 25th, from 5:30 -7:00 pm in SAC 400, Dr. Kathleen Lubey, St. John's University, will share archival evidence of alterations made by nineteenth-century editors to eighteenth-century pornography. These abridgements suppress early pornography's unruly feminist voices in an attempt to streamline the field of sexuality toward penetrative heterosex. With pornography's dissenting character restored to view, we can see that the genre--in the disorganized, experimental domain of eighteenth-century narrative--deeply challenged masculine sexual right. Does pornography across history retain any of this dissenting character? This event is co-sponsored by the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Dr. Kathleen Lubey