The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

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

Professor Yumi Lee will be facilitating an event on March 29 featuring Professor Nick Mitchell from the University of California, Santa Cruz. The event will be a conversation on policing, abolition, critique in/of the university, and the institutional projects of Black Studies and Women’s Studies. The discussion will probe such topis as: why do universities have police forces? What is the relationship between universities and prisons? What does an abolitionist vision of the university look like? You can pre-register for the event, which will be conducted online via Zoom, here .   

Congratulations to Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, whose article, " The Roots of our Madness ," which examines a new edition of the poet John Berryman's letters , was   just published in the New York Review of Books . Check it out!  

On  Friday, March 19, Dr. Jean Lutes will be part of a panel titled "The Women's Pages: A Hard Look at Soft News," sponsored by the New-York Historical Society's annual Max Conference on Women's History. This year's conference theme is "Breaking News, Breaking Barriers: Women in American Journalism."  The panel, which is free and open to the public, starts at 1.00pm and will be held virtually on Zoom. It will also be recorded and made available to the public shortly after. Visit here more information and to register for the Zoom link.    

Listen to Dr. Megan Quigley, as she joins T. S. Eliot experts Frances Dickey and John Whittier-Ferguson on a podcast to discuss the revelations of the Hale archive: 1, 131 letters written by T. S. Eliot to his longtime love and correspondent, Emily Hale (pictured below). The letters, called the most famous sealed literary archive in the world, were under lock and key at Princeton’s Firestone library until 50 years after the deaths of Eliot and Hale. Their contents have transformed what scholars thought they knew about Eliot, as he points out his sources, undermines key ways we interpret his works—such as Modernist impersonality—and confesses his dreams and goals. And then he burns her side of the correspondence! Matt Seybold is the host on this episode of the American Vandal podcast.  

Guest Post by Charlie Gill, English Major, '21 On March 10th, Villanova students and faculty in the Gender and Women’s Studies and English Departments had the privilege to gather (virtually) for a talk with Patricia Carbine, a founder and publisher of Ms. Magazine . Ms. was the first publication directed to women that exploded the paradigm of women’s-magazine-as-extended-advertisement, speaking to woman as a social and political identity rather than a consumer demographic. Leaning in and opening the window of radical feminism in fashionable middle-class living rooms all over the nation, Ms. walked a fine line between representing the most marginalized voices of the movement and keeping their (often less-revolutionary-minded) advertisers placated. The result was a publication that became a driving force of, and inextricably linked to, the movement of second wave feminism. Pat Carbine was already a journalism industry insider when she, Gloria Steinem and others conc

  Please join Dr. Megan Quigley and Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh for a conversation with Merve Emre, associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. Emre is the author of The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (2018) and Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America  (2017) and is the editor of a new annotated edition of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The event will take place on Zoom at 4pm on Tuesday, March 23. Please register here  to receive the link.  

Georgetown University's English Graduate Student Association is looking for presentation proposals for   their spring conference, upcoming at the end of April. The theme this year is The Humanities & The Age of COVID: ‘Disruption, Hesitation, Silence.’ In the light of the current pandemic climate, the conference will be held entirely asynchronously and virtually, so presenters will submit a video of themselves presenting their work. The requirements for submission are below, and the deadline for submission is Friday, March 26.  Georgetown University English Graduate Student Association (Online & Asynchronous) Conference The Humanities & The Age of COVID: ‘Disruption, Hesitation, Silence’  April 30, 2021 “I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence,” writes Louise Glück in her essay “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence.” A poem, she argues, represents a dual creation: a reader must acknowledge what is present on the page and int

  Please join Villanova English faculty Dr. Jean Lutes and Dr. Travis Foster on Tuesday, March 16 for "We Have Been Here All Along: Gender, American Literature, and White Supremacy," an event to celebrate the publication of a new collection of essays on Gender in American Literature and Culture . The volume, co-edited by Dr. Lutes, will be published this month by Cambridge University Press and features essays by Dr. Lutes and Dr. Foster. The book introduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism. It offers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present and moves beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that have reinforced misleading assumptions about public and private spaces, domesticity, individualism, and community. The book also demonstrates how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. Respo

  Congratulations to Dr. Heather Hicks, whose timely chapter, "Disaster Response in Post-2000 American Apocalyptic Fiction," was just published in a collection of essays on   Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture by Cambridge University Press. Dr. Hicks's essay explores contemporary scholarship on apocalyptic fiction, noting that growing alarm about climate change has begun to raise pragmatic questions about this genre’s effects: What responses does apocalyptic narrative condition readers to have before, during, and after a catastrophic event? She observes that many critics have objected to the clichéd content of dystopian apocalyptic narratives, claiming that their bleak visions induce resignation in readers rather than a will to assert their political and personal agency. Meanwhile, a number of scholars associated with “disaster studies” have noted that the history of twentieth-century disasters suggests that people actually tend to be at their mo