The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Four Villanova graduate English students have published original scholarship in CONCEPT, Villanova's interdisciplinary journal of graduate studies, this spring. The students are Caitlyn Dittmeier (Networks of Foam: Becoming through Relation in Marianne Moore's Shoreline Poems), Anne Jones (Tracing the Missing Letter: Reassembling Nonhuman Agency in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake ), Nicholas Keough (Boys Will Be Boys: Constructions of Toxic Masculinity in Dramatic, Metaphorized, and Real-Life War Spaces), and Olivia Stowell (A Form of Work We’d Rather Not Do Alone: Chen Chen, Poetics of Relationality, and the Intersubjective Lyric I). CONCEPT accepts submissions from Villanova graduate students in all fields of the arts and sciences. Submissions are reviewed by graduate student editors, faculty editors and peer reviewers, with final decisions made by the editors. According to Managing Editor John E. Kurtz, PhD, Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, ...

Congratulations to Villanova English MA student Carson Schatzman, who has been elected Vice President for Academic Affairs on the Graduate Student Council Executive Board. He will begin work in the coming academic year. "I decided to run," said Schatzman, "because I am interested in the administrative side of education, want to continue developing leadership skills, and have been looking for a way to invest and contribute to a community—what better than the one right in front of me?" When asked about what he hopes to accomplish, he said, "I’d personally like to help promote inter-departmental discussion, work, and relationships. My thought is, connection between departments will encourage a graduate student culture—providing an avenue for social connection, which many grad students feel lacking (regardless of school, this isn’t just a Villanova issue). More than this personal aspect, I think conversation with students/faculty in other disciplines is a...

Villanova MA students and English professors gathered, digitally, on Saturday to celebrate our ten spring 2020 graduates: Avni Sejpal, Brendan Maher, Caitlin Phillips, Catherine Mooradd, Edward Dold, Jesse Schwartz, Kristen Sieranski, Matthew Ryan, Michelle Wrambel, and Thomas Higgins. After a toast and brief remarks from Graduate Director Evan Radcliffe, our students shared some favorite authors, most underrated authors, and/or their ‘zoom bookshelves’: the books they would most like to be seen on their shelves in the background of their Zoom conversations. Authors and titles mentioned by our students and faculty members included… Students Avni Sejpal Milkman by Anna Burns, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes Caitlin Phillips (could not be present, but sent her selections by email) - Dracula , because it was a book I looked at closely for my undergraduate capstone paper. It carries many different interpretations that help people ...

If you haven't already, make sure to check out our faculty's summer reading recommendations !

Check out this video diary featuring Dr. Megan Quigley, currently on sabbatical in the UK, talking to the readers of the James Joyce Quarterly about how she is handling the COVID pandemic and how it has affected her thinking about her research. After that, you can watch Dr. Quigley read a chapter from Joyce's Ulysses for the Rosenbach Museum's Every Day Reading Challenge.