The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

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...

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.