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Showing posts from May, 2021

Professor Tsering Wangmo Dhompa Honored on Good Morning America

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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

11th Annual Thesis & Field Exam Symposium

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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

Congrats to Anne Jones, Winner of the 2021 Esmonde Award

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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