The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Lisa Sewell's poem, "The Land of Nod" was published on  t he Academy of American Poets poem-a-day site on December 6.  Read the full poem here .

 A belated post with photos of Professors Alice Dailey and undergrad Chelsea Phillips in their Legacies of Revenge class on Dress as your Favorite Avenger Day.

J oin us for an exciting reading and conversation with two phenomenal authors! Thomas Swick is a veteran travel writer, newspaper editor, and Villanova alum celebrating the publication of his new memoir,   Falling into Place . Ariel Delgado Dixon is the author of   Don't Say We Didn't Warn You  and   Sourland , forthcoming from Random House. Swick and Delgado Dixon will share their paths to becoming writers, as well as their varied and interesting experiences, from Swick’s life behind the Iron Curtain to Delgado Dixon’s work as a farmer. This event is a good fit for anyone interested in travel writing, becoming a novelist, journalism, and editing (for starters). Refreshments provided! 

GEO Conference 2023-24 Call for Papers: Displacement The University of Maryland’s Graduate English Organization invites proposals relating to the theme of “Displacement” for our 17th annual conference, to be held hybrid/in-person on March 8th, 2024. Displacement can refer to the forced migration and movements of peoples across the globe over centuries. From slavery to the internal displacement of peoples and the contemporary refugee crisis, the term allows us to connect the literary with the cultural and the political in myriad ways. More broadly, displacement speaks to the physical and metaphorical movements, transfers, and undulations that undergird human existence. It is both a frictional and harmonic phenomenon that interrogates the ideas of space, place, and (dis)possession. Displacement also allows us to engage productively with contemporary challenges facing the humanities. It can help us think creatively about the public role of the humanities, the literary value of language an...

There will be a second teach-in on Palestine focused on Solidarity taking place on Monday, November 6 in the Driscoll Auditorium. The event will take place from 4:00-6:00 pm and will be followed by a student-led strategizing session from 6:00-7:00 pm. Come with questions. There will be pizza!

Please join us on November 8th, 2023 6 p.m. to 7:15 p.m. for an in-person event at Larson Kelly Auditorium in Driscoll Hall. This is a collaboration between the Lepage Center, the English Department, and Global Interdisciplinary Studies to consider what speculative fiction can tell us about real world history. Science fiction, fantasy, horror, post-apocalyptic fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, alternate history, weird fiction, climate fiction, all their overlap and subgenres come out of a milieu of real world experiences for their authors, shaped by the structures within which they live their lives. From gothic horror to Afrofuturism, writers and artists have responded to the real world by creating fictional ones that speak to the conditions of society, different understandings of what has come before, and conceiving what might come next. From Mary Shelley to Ursula K. Le Guin to N.K. Jemisin; from Jules Verne to Samuel R. Delany to Kim Stanley Robinson; all these writers, their ...

Professor Michael Dowdy just signed a book contract with University of Nebraska Press. They will publish his collection of essays on fathering in anxious times,  Tell Me About Your Bad Guys , in spring 2025. For more about this collection and his other essays, see his  personal website.

By Ariel Hooks, MA '25 I had a chance to interview Graduate English Program Coordinator Mike Malloy and Undergraduate English Senior Administrative Assistant Amanda Eliades and am thrilled to introduce them to current and prospective students in the English department. I talked to them about their respective roles within the English department, common questions students ask them, Villanova resources students might not know about, and what they’re currently reading. Read on to learn more about these wonderful people. Q: What is your role within the English department? What does a daily schedule look like for you? Mike Malloy Mike has many roles within the department, but he mostly works with the English graduate program and its students. As the Graduate Program Coordinator, he tackles anything related to the logistics of the program, including recruiting prospective students, helping students understand the program, answering any logistical or administrative questions from newly-adm...

We have 75th anniversary crew-neck sweatshirts and t-shirts in stock, as well as hats, totes, hoodies, and more! Stop by the office or write to Program Coordinator Mike Malloy if you are interested!

 Spring 2024 Course Descriptions ENG 8460 Science & Fiction Before Sci-Fi Dr. Joseph Drury ENG 9520 Writing & Indigeneity Dr. Kimberly Takahata ENG 9730 Staging the Spanish Tragedy Dr. Alice Dailey GWS 8000 Critical Perspectives on Gender Dr. Travis Foster ENG 8460 Science & Fiction Before Sci-Fi Dr. Joseph Drury CRN 33402 Thursday 7:30-9:30 pm   An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby The first science fiction novel is often said to be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But what did literary authors have to say about science in the century and a half between the Scientific Revolution and the creation of the world’s most famous monster, the period now known as the Enlightenment? In this course, students will read and analyze some of the key philosophical texts that helped establish the distinctive methodology and goals of the new science alongside a range of fictional texts—drama and poetry as well as novels—that explore its social and p...

Jean Lutes just published "Feminisms" in  The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics .   A brief summary of the chapter: "Twentieth-century feminist activism and thought spread with an urgency and ambition unseen before, as advocates for women achieved mass recognition, unsettled long-held convictions, and upset the status quo in ways unimaginable in previous centuries. No novel   genre escaped these changes or failed to register them. Feminist politics reshaped the content, and sometimes the form, of the novel. Yet, dramatic as the expansion of US women’s opportunities w as, progress was never unchallenged or universal. Feminist political gains inspired significant backlash: Patriarchy supporters fought back. Meanwhile, feminist organizing fractured from within. Before the twentieth century even began, women of color were explaining why they couldn’t be expected to identify only as women, as if all women belonged in a single categor...

On Wednesday, October 18 from 6-8 pm the Villanova Center for Arab and Islamic Studies will host a teach in on Palestine featuring English faculty members. Come with questions!

A recent article in  The Villanovan  discusses new additions to Villanova's Code of Conduct. It features Professor Megan Quigley saying: “I don’t believe in just banishing it,” Quigley said. “Well, for certain assignments I do. I already have assignments in my classes where the students give a paper prompt to ChatGPT and then we analyze what it produces for its strengths and weaknesses.” Later in the article, she comments:  “I would say that, for me, writing and thinking go hand in hand,” Quigley said. “Analyzing and synthesizing information, finding out what a strong versus weak claim is, whether you need those skills for law or teaching or writing or journalism, I think you are still going to need to have them.” Check out the full article  here . 

This weekend, professors Kamran Javadizadeh and Megan Quigley put their poetry skills to work at the T. S. Eliot conference in Cambridge, MA. They co-taught a seminar on "T. S. Eliot and Close Reading” to a group of professors and graduate students at the Houghton Library at Harvard University on Friday. Megan later delivered a lecture, “Perfectly good, normal and right: Eliot, Attraction, and Intimacy,” in Emerson Hall, the same philosophy building where T. S. Eliot took his philosophy courses at Harvard a century ago. Speaking of close reading, for more close reads you can listen to Kamran’s podcast on  Apple  or  Spotify .

Check out  this article  from  The Villanovan,  written by VU undergrad Caitlyn Foley, on celebrating 75 years of the undergrad English major at Villanova.

On Friday Sept. 15th, Dr. Megan Quigley presented a paper in Switzerland (really on zoom!) on reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s   Klara and the Sun   with ChatGPT and the Logic and Modern Literature Conference at the University of Lausanne. She thanks Erica Hayes, in Falvey Library’s Digital Scholarship Lab, and Jamie Wojtal, her RA, for assistance with AI side of the project. What do you think ChatGPT wrote when prompted to answer if the border between human and artificial intelligence was vague? And what does that mean for humanity’s “evolution” with AI?

 Professor Kamran Javadizadeh reviews Ben Lerner's  The Lights  in  The New Yorker.  Check out his essay here .

Professor Adrienne Perry recently visited Emily Dickinson's house. She shares some photos from the visit below. In her words: " What was most inspiring and exciting to me about this visit was to see how her family home has changed over time, as it's been decorated with period furnishings, including wallpaper created from scraps found in the home. I am always struck by the size and simplicity of her writing desk, to think that she wrote some 1,800 poems in this place, and to hear the docents speak about the wo rld around her. There was also a fascinating display about her editorial and drafting process, and a first edition of her poems, which featured the images of ghost pipe flowers. Talk of ghost pipe and the images of them, alongside Emily, sort of followed me around all weekend." A portrait of Emily Dickinson and her siblings from the drawing room Emily Dickinson's bedroom/ writing desk Emily Dickinson's bedroom Professor Adrienne Perry in front of Emily Di...

 Welcome to our new MA students for fall 2023! Counterclockwise from right: Ariel Hooks, Melody Gleason, Samantha Philipps, Jeanbry Torres, Jaxon Parker, Mahtab Chaudhry Not pictured: Rebecca Amrick, Annabella Nordlund, Nosike Okafor, Karina Renee We look forward to getting to know you all!

One of our grad students, Adam Riekstins, MA '24, recently interviewed Dr. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, currently Professor and chair in the Department of Religion and chair in Science and Technology Studies at Williams College. According to Adam, "A few weeks ago, I had an amazing opportunity to interview Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, a current academic 'celeb' who has laid a lot of the groundwork for metamodernism, a trending school of theory (both academically and publicly). I have written a lot about metamodernism in my graduate studies and presented on it at a few conferences as well." Adam initially reached out to Dr. Storm with a question about his work: "I approached reaching out to Dr. Storm very carefully, since his work has been the cornerstone of my graduate career so far and I didn't want to trigger a Wayne's World 'we're not worthy!' moment," he said. "I sent him an email with a few quick questions about metamodern...

From our friends at Main Point Books: Join Main Point Books, Alan Drew, and special guest John Vercher to celebrate the paperback release of The Recruit . Come spend a hot summer night with a detective on the hunt to solve a series of hate crimes. He stumbles upon a shadowy, dangerous network hiding in his quiet hometown - you'll stumble upon our lovely, cool new event space and two great contemporary writers! This event is at 7 pm in our lower level event space. Registration is requested via Eventbrite; walk-ins are welcome. Books will of course be for sale at the event, and can purchased for shipping through the links below. Alan Drew is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Gardens of Water and Shadow Man. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. An associate professor of English at Villanova University, where he directs the creative writing program, he lives near Philadelphia with his wife and two children. John Vercher is the author of: Three-Fifths , named a Be...

A few months ago, we ran a brief series highlighting some graduate English alumni and their careers. We thought we'd follow it up with an interview with a current student who is balancing studies and career: Sarah Gregory, current MA student and high school teacher. Sarah was kind enough to speak with us about her MA studies as well as her teaching. 1. What do you do at your job? What are some advantages and some challenges of working in your field? I have been in education for seven years, the last four of which I spent as a high school English teacher at a small private school in Lancaster County. Since it is a small school, I taught a different schedule each year, including a variety of English-related courses for grades 9-12. For the 2022-23 school year, I went part time in teaching to begin the English MA program at Villanova full time. For me, the best part of teaching high school English is that it combines many things I love and can do well: working with students, facilitat...

Villanova Magazine  recently featured Professor Lutes's research on Black women writers. Learn more and read the full article  here .

    Professor Heather Hicks spoke at the Phi Beta Kappa Ceremony, reflecting on her research, teaching, and the power of narrative to address human-made climate change. Here's the text from her talk: As a scholar with an interest in apocalyptic narrative, I’ve had the opportunity over time to read depictions of the end of human civilization in many forms and genres.    I’ve read ancient apocalyptic musings, like those in Hesiod’s  Works and Days ; I’ve studied and taught the Book of Revelation; and I’ve considered apocalyptic visions ranging from the 1600s to the present that have taken the form of religious verse, romantic poetry, ballads, short stories, novellas, novels, graphic novels, plays, radio programs, songs, television shows and films.    I’ve been fascinated by the prominence of this narrative form throughout human history: storytellers in the very earliest civilizations were already predicting humanity’s end.    I’ve also been int...