The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

  Villanova, PA –  In How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol (Cornell University Press, 2022), Villanova English Professor Alice Dailey, PhD, offers a study of Shakespeare’s English history plays that initiates a radical break from the interpretive practices that have dominated literary criticism for the past several decades. While those practices have traditionally prioritized the historical context from which a literary artifact emerges, Dr. Dailey’s book expands the plays’ context beyond the conditions of Shakespeare’s England, allowing readers to consider them among human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. How to Do Things with Dead People describes Shakespeare’s historical drama as—fundamentally—a reproductive technology by which living replicas of dead historical figures are animated and re-killed on stage. Considering the plays in such terms exposes their affinity with ...

Sometimes our grad students’ research interests take them far from home, and we are fortunate enough to hear from them about their experiences. This year, Theo Campbell, MA ’23, earned a graduate summer research fellowship and pursued research abroad in Ireland and in the UK. Here is their story: “The research I did this summer was a continuation of a project that started as my term paper for the Literary Theory class last fall. For that paper, I read the memoir of B. N. Hedderman, a district nurse who worked in the Aran Islands in the 1910s, through lenses of vulnerability and post-colonial studies. My plan for my research this summer was to look at other accounts from district nurses in rural Ireland from around the same time period to see whether Hedderman’s memoir and the conclusions I drew from it are indicative of the district nursing program as a whole, or whether she’s an anomaly. “My research involved going to several different archives to try and find those other accounts. He...

 Welcome to our new grad students who were able to attend last night's orientation! It was nice to finally meet you all. L to R: Megan Hays, Matt Villaneuva, Sarah Gregory, Adam Riekstins, and Eva Wynn