The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

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 ...