The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Christoforos Sassaris, MA '22, has had a paper published in La Bibliofilía , Italy's oldest and preeminent peer-reviewed journal for bibliography and book history, in an issue dedicated to the memory of book historian Dennis E. Rhodes. You can learn more about the journal on their official site . Here is the abstract to Christoforos's article: "Yerasimos Vlachos’ Thesauros Tetraglossos —published in Venice, first in 1659 by Ducali Pinelli and again in 1723 by Antonio Vortoli—is a key text in the histories of modern Greek printing and the NeoHellenic diaspora. The book is a dictionary that contains modern Greek, ancient Greek, Latin, and Italian. Several notable differences exist between the first and second editions, and these differences shed light on the 1723 edition’s relation to the Hellenic community’s identity and its use of the text in the eighteenth century. Following the work of Vasilis Tatakis and others, I argue that the second edition served two main purpos...

Professor Tsering Wangmo Dhompa was featured in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review , in a biographical piece written by Emily DeMaioNewton. The piece marks the publication of Dr. Wangmo Dhompa's latest book of poetry, Revolute , and highlights both her trailblazing achievements (she is the first Tibetan woman to publish poetry in English) and her complex life story (she was born on a train in India to exiled Tibetan parents). Dr. Wangmo Dhompa was raised by her mother in India and Nepal and, following her mother's death, enrolled in an MFA program in San Francisco because "she thought that keeping busy and being in an unfamiliar place might help lessen the pain of loss." Since then, Dr. Wangmo Dhompa earned her PhD and has written many chapbooks and books of poetry, as well as a memoir. You can learn more about her work and her life by reading the article  from Tricycle . Illustration by Natalie Foss for Tricycle

​​​​Interview conducted by Jacqueline Ridberg Larabee VU MA '23 student Daniella began her Masters in English at Villanova knowing she wouldn’t end up in an typical “English” field. Rather her passion was always art. As an undergraduate she majored in Art History & English, and she knew that “Art history has a huge writing emphasis, but it is a flaw of most art history programs that they do not prioritize writing coursework.” Thus Daniella decided to pursue her MA in English. She talks about two divergent paths she saw herself going down after receiving her Masters: “One was to get a PhD in Art History, not English, and the other path was to pursue communications for an art museum.” Daniella decided to tangibly explore her post-grad career options by taking advantage of the English Department’s Professional Research Option (PRO), focusing on marketing & communications for Museums. The PRO course, available to second year English Masters students, consists of cre...

 Congrats to our grad students Em Friedman MA '21 and Christoforos Sassaris MA '21, who presented posters at the Villanova Graduate Research Symposium this fall. Em's topic was Feminist Abolitionism Across Time , and Christoforos's was Locating the Byzantine in Medieval English Literature: The Auchinleck Manuscript . More information about the graduate research symposium can be found here . Here is Em's abstract: The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) was an interracial women's abolitionist group active in Philadelphia from 1833-1870. This project explores the PFASS's ideological and rhetorical strategies by close reading documents in their archive, including annual reports, minutes, correspondence and personal letters to other abolitionists, speeches and financial records. The PFASS's archive is housed with the Abolitionist Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. By focusing on the three Women's Anti-Slavery Conferences —hel...

Congratulations to our own Em Friedman, MA ’22, who has had an article accepted for publication in Milton Studies . According to Em, “My paper is called ‘Unsexing Eden’ and it is about the subjective difference between Eve and Adam in John Milton’s Paradise Lost . My premise is that, while most readers and critics take Eve and Adam’s gender/sex difference for granted in prelapsarian Eden, this assumption does not necessarily derive from the metaphysical conditions of Milton’s monist materialism. After showing how physical morphology wouldn’t render ontological subjective-sexed positions in the poem, I offer a psychoanalytic reading of the first couple’s subject-formation. I draw from Lacan because of the centralized role sexuation plays in his account of subjectivation, and take up critical feminist and queer responses to Lacan including those by Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. However, my analysis departs from most psychoanalytic readings because I argue that prelapsa...

We are so happy to announce that after a reluctant hiatus, this year's Gender and Women’s Studies Conference is ON! This year's Conference Chair is Dr. Lauren Shohet, Professor of English. The event will take place on Friday, March 25, 2022. The GWS conference is an exciting opportunity to showcase student work, discuss your interests in Gender and Women’s Studies with students and faculty from Villanova, and see the broad range of intellectual disciplines represented in the field. We are including in this announcement our annual Call for Papers. We are seeking essays and creative work written either for the conference or during Spring or Fall of 2020 or 2021 that engage gender, sexuality, or feminist theories. We encourage submission of alternative forms of expression, including but not limited to original scripts, poetry, or films that engage gender analysis. We hope that Villanova students across departments and programs will submit their work; these are the following catego...

Occasionally our graduate students write reports  for our undergraduate blog  about undergrad alumni who majored in English. The following is an article written by one of our grad students! Deb Pfisterer (‘00): A Career in Consulting Interview Conducted By Jacqueline Ridberg Larabee, VU MA '23 student Deb began, like most college students, not quite sure what path she would pursue after graduation. She started her time at Villanova by majoring in Accounting. While she felt that business was always in her future (she says half-jokingly “I know I was meant to be in business because even as a kid a three-ring binder from my Dad excited me”), she also says she was unexplainably miserable as an Accounting major. Deb then decided to follow her bliss and become an English major where she “became who [she] was.” After graduating in 2000, her first job was for Boeing in military aircraft as a procedure writer. At Boeing, she was originally tasked with the mission to “get everyone into ...

 This coming Monday!  

 Second-year MA student Isobel McCreavy will be presenting her paper " Focalizing on Young Adult Literature: The Dangers of Ignoring Focalization" at the 118th Annual PAMLA Conference in Las Vegas on November 11th!  Isobel's essay "examines the use of tropes and narrative roles in young adult fiction to examine the messaging in four young adult works - John Green’s Paper Towns, J. K. Rowling’s the Harry Potter series, Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instrument series, and Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower. Each work has three narrative roles that dictate the perceptions and identity formations of its characters. The roles of narrator, focalizer and focalizee create dynamics in the works where characters exist only in relation to other characters, and their identities are tied to these roles. Embedded in tropes like the Girl Quest Tale and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, these roles confine the autonomy of its characters and hint at the dangers of focalization, i...

ENG 8560: Revolutionary Decade: The 1790s Dr. Evan Radcliffe Monday 5:20-7:20 pm   The 1790s was the decade of the French Revolution in Britain as well as France, with each new moment of turmoil in France—what an alarmed Alexander Hamilton referred to as “a rapid succession of dreadful revolutions”—generating its own vehement response across the Channel. The fall of the Bastille and the publication of The Declaration of the Rights of Man , the flight and arrest of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the royal trials and executions, the outbreak of war between Great Britain and France, the Terror—each year seemed to witness more of these “great national events,” as William Wordsworth called them. Wordsworth (who, like Mary Wollstonecraft, experienced some of the Revolution first-hand) and other British writers addressed these events and their possible implications in varied ways, often through developing their own original approaches and forms. Indeed, many of their works—William Bla...

Held in conjunction with Villanova University's 46th annual Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference will be the Delaware Valley Medieval Association Graduate Workshop. The event will take place on October 16th in Room 101 of The Inn at Villanova from 10am to 3pm, featuring a plethora of interesting presentations –  including one from Villanova MA student Em Friedman! Em will be presenting their work titled "Somatemporal ecstasy: technologies of eternity in 13th century women's mysticism."  If you are interested in attending or are curious about the workshop, you can register/learn more here . 

VU English professor Yumi Lee, who is on leave from Villanova this year, will be giving a colloquium talk at the University of Pennsylvania this coming Thursday, at 12:00 p.m. This talk examines the newfound visibility of the Korean War in American literature from the late 1990s to the present. Why and how, after going “forgotten” for decades, did the Korean War re-emerge as a topic of interest in contemporary American literature? To answer this question, Professor Lee considers the vexed temporality of the war, which never formally ended, instead remaining suspended in a status that poet Don Mee Choi has described as “ever-pending” (DMZ Colony, 2020). Lee suggests that if we alter our understanding of the time frame of the Korean War, moving from the bounded periodization of 1950-1953 to a more expansive, yet more literal, timeline that extends the war and its effects into the present, then we can read these texts from the 1990s and 2000s not as belated or historical in their approach...

Dr. Carissa Harris, an Associate Professor at Temple University, will be presenting a talk entitled "Twice Militant: Women's Intersectional Anger from the 1381 Uprising to #SayHerName." This event will be held in the Idea Accelerator in Falvey Library on Oct. 25th at 5:30 p.m. The wearing of masks will be required.  Extra thanks to grad student Theo Campbell for designing the excellent flyer, which you can see below.

Professor Megan Quigley was recently elected to the Board of Directors of the International T. S. Eliot Society. This weekend she taught a seminar to scholars from India, the Philippines, and all over the US—one of the benefits of zoom! But on Tuesday she’ll be back in her Falvey classroom looking forward to the 100th birthday of The Waste Land with her graduate class here.

An interview conducted by Alexander Matkowsky, 1st Year MA/Graduate Assistant in English This week I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Kimberly Takahata, the English Department’s new Assistant Professor of “Literature of the Americas to 1900”, who is currently teaching the undergraduate courses “American Literature Traditions 1” and “Race & Ethnicity in American Literature” in the Fall 2021 semester. Dr. Takahata pursued her undergraduate degree at Brown University and completed her graduate work and PhD at Columbia, working as a postdoctoral instructor at the West Point United States Military Academy. Her field of study, “Early American Literature”, is quite broadly defined; she works primarily with Long Eighteenth Century texts from Massachusetts down through the Caribbean. I asked her how her interest in this specific field came about. During her undergraduate experience, she found herself to be one of only a few students “jazzed by” Early American poetry and Puritan text...

Yesterday we held an orientation for our incoming graduate students. This was our first in-person orientation since COVID, and it was nice to be able to interact in person once more. Pizza and salad were enjoyed by all, and we are excited to get started next week. L to R: Julia Krieman Jamie Wojtal Alex Matkowsky Ethan Shea Hannah Kahn Caitlin Salomon Jacqueline Ridberg Theo Campbell

Villanova MA student Christoforos Sassaris has been working as a research center intern at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, and his time there has introduced him to some interesting artifacts. Much of his work has centered on a collection relating to the celebrated artist Maxfield Parrish, who was born in Philadelphia and became famous for his paintings and illustrations. While examining a scrapbook, Sassaris happened upon an image of a male figure (possibly Parrish) encountering a spectral double exposure figure—possibly a study for an unfinished painting? Sassaris was able to make connections and form hypotheses based upon the varied contents of the scrapbook: "The inserted items vary from newspaper clippings to art prints. One interesting standout was a two-page child’s report on how sugar is made on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia. This report speaks to the Parrish children’s frequent trips to that locale with their mother, artist and writer Lydia Parrish (1871-1953), who l...

Villanova MA student Christoforos Sassaris will present at West Chester University's "Object Talks," a monthly series on book history hosted by the WCU Center for Book History and WCU Special Collections. Christoforos will be presenting on "Yerasimos Vlachos' Thesauros Tetraglossos: Hellenic Identity in Eighteenth-Century Venice." The event will take place tomorrow, June 15th, from 6 to 7 pm. If you are interested in attending, you can register through their website .  

Congratulations to Christoforos Sassaris for earning the Dr. Nicholas Padis Memorial Graduate Scholarship from the Hellenic University Club of Philadelphia. The scholarship is primarily predicated on academic excellence, and "honors Philadelphia physician, first president and founding member of the Hellenic University Club of Philadelphia, Dr. Nicholas Padis."  In the poster announcing the scholarship, Christoforos (his middle name) is referred to by Panagiotis (his first name). More information about the Hellenic University Club of Philadelphia and its scholarships can be found on their website . Congratulations, Christoforos!  

Professor Tsering Wangmo Dhompa was featured in a list compiled by Good Morning America of inspirational Asian and Pacific Islander-identifying public figures. "Good Morning America and ABC News asked influential AAPI leaders, celebrities, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, athletes and more to nominate fellow members of the community for the list," according to to ABC News. Professor Wangmo Dhompa was nominated by Tenzin Mingyur Paldron, a Tibetan-American artist and scholar from UC Berkely. To quote the Good Morning America bio in full, "Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the first Tibetan-American professor of literature and creative writing, and the first Tibetan female poet to be published in English. Raised in India and Nepal, Tsering has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She is currently a professor in the English Department at Villanova University. Her first book of poems, Rule...

The eleventh annual Thesis and Field Exam Symposium was held on Monday, May 10th, over Zoom. This event was an opportunity to celebrate our spring and summer 2021 graduates, and for them to share excerpts and summaries of their work with friends, family, and colleagues. Completing theses this spring and summer were Mary Cordisco, Caitlyn Dittmeier, Alex Liska, Zac Richards, and Olivia Stowell. Completing field exams were Sarah Beth Gilbert, Catherine Bialkowski, Kathryn Corona, Josh Hsu, Anne Jones, Nick Keough, Carson Schatzman, Shea Szpila, and Lauren Wilke. During the symposium, Caitlyn Dittmeier spoke about women and gender in Irish poetry and folklore. Catherine Bialkowski spoke about manifestations of motherhood in classic children’s novels (in particular, why are there so many absent mothers in classic children’s books?). Josh Hsu spoke about science fiction and post-human concepts, beginning with Frankenstein and leading up to the present day. Lauren Wilke will be working over...

Congratulations to Anne Jones, M.A. ’21, this year's recipient of the Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award for best graduate essay. Anne earned this award for her essay, “The Vexed Position of the Black Secret-Bearer: Concealments and Revelation in Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman's Narrative .” The essay examines how Hannah Crafts’ 1850s novel theorizes secrecy both as a form necessary for enslaved peoples and as a tool of racial subjugation. While Hannah, the novel’s enslaved narrator, initially uses secrecy to facilitate intimacy within her community and resistance against slavery’s dictates, the essay demonstrates how and why Hannah becomes increasingly hesitant towards bearing the secrets of others. On the other hand, while wary of shared secrets, Hannah still uses personal secrets for her own survival. The essay argues that “Hannah longs both for the freedom attainable only through secrecy and for freedom from the chokehold of secrecy. Through the functioning of this dialec...

 The Graduate Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Falvey Memorial Library have established an assistantship in Irish Studies and Distinctive Collections, tenurable for one year by a student admitted to the Masters program in one of the following departments or programs: Classical Studies, Communication, Counseling, Education, English, History, Human Resource Development, Liberal Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Public Administration, Psychology, Theatre, or Theology. The Assistantship has been created to attract to the Graduate Division of Liberal Arts and Sciences outstanding students committed to Irish Studies and to recognize the strength of the Graduate Division’s faculty resources in Irish Studies across the humanities and social sciences. Because the Center for Irish Studies at Villanova University emphasizes the links between theory and practice, academic learning and its application, we expect the holder of the assistantship to be a ...

Professor Mary Mullen will be speaking at an upcoming CUNY C19 conference on “Hard Border(s): Ireland and the British Question,” to take place virtually on May 7. Professor Mullen will be speaking about Ireland and the Colonial Politics of Public Interest. The conference's speakers will touch on a variety of themes related to Ireland and its relationship to Great Britain, including "imperial hauntings," "nationalism," and "populism."  Professor Mullen is the author of Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Edinburgh, 2019), which won the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature from the American Conference for Irish Studies. She has published articles on settler colonialism, the politics of time, public humanities, fast-day literature, and nineteenth-century English and Irish writing. She is currently working on a new book project on the colonial politics of public interest, which considers how public i...

Congratulations to Dr. Tsering Wango Dhompa, whose new poetry chapbook, Revolute , was just published by Albion Books.  

ENG 8000 - 001 Theory Seminar R from 05:20 pm to 07:20 pm Heather Hicks This course will be run as a seminar in which each week, a different graduate faculty member will introduce you to a body of theory that is particularly important within current discussions in their field of specialization. What are some of the major theoretical approaches in medieval studies today? Early modern studies? What about 19th-century American literature and British literature?  Modernism?  Postcolonial Studies? Irish Studies? Contemporary literature? This class is an attempt to bring you immediately into dialogue with a wide variety of theories that are shaping literary study today. The course is intended to be a lively opportunity to meet most of the English faculty members who teach at the graduate level and to engage in dialogue about and analysis of the contemporary state of literary theory. Assignments will include biweekly journals and a final 15-page seminar paper. ENG 8106 - 001: Chaucer M ...