The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

J ean Lutes and Hezekiah Lewis, associate professor in Communication, received a two-year $24,000 grant from the new GRASP program in CLAS to  continue work on a series of short videos designed to make early Black women writers more accessible to K-12 teachers.   The video project involves selecting under-studied texts by 18th-, 19th, and early 20th-century African American women; recruiting contemporary Black women educators to read those texts and talk briefly what those texts mean to them personally; producing short videos – no more than 10 minutes each – designed for K-12 classroom use; and making the videos available and freely accessible online, along with accompanying explanatory materials.  The videos will be made available on the  Just Teach One-Early African American Print initiative   on the American Antiquarian Association website.   This video series is part of Taught by Literature: Recentering Black Women Intellectuals, a collaborati...

Professors Alice Dailey and Chelsea Phillips (Department of Theater)  won a $15,000 Grant for Researchers for Arts and Sciences Professors from the College of Arts and Sciences to support a year-long exploration of   The Spanish Tragedy .  Specifically, the grant will enable them to have a guest artist in residence next year and to archive the work generated by the project.   Graduate students can participate in this project by taking the fall course, THE 8200  Legacies of Revenge in Drama, Fiction, Comics, and Film, and the corresponding spring course which will stage the play. Students are not required to take both fall and spring courses, but it is encouraged. From the successful grant application: As the play that introduced revenge as a tragic motive to the Renaissance stage,  The Spanish Tragedy  has had an enormous influence on the representation of revenge in the anglophile tradition, an influence that stretches from Shakespeare’s  Ha...

  Check out Kamran Javadizadeh's recent essay,   "On Diane Seuss"   in the London Review of Books.

Each week, for the next few weeks, we'll be talking with an alumnus/a from our graduate English program, catching up on their studies and/or careers. This week, we'll be talking with Alex Liska MA '21, Director of Retention & Sponsored Programs at Neumann University.  1. What do you do at your job? What are some advantages and some challenges of working in your field? Until recently, I served as Coordinator for Student Affairs at Neumann University, but I have recently accepted the position of Director of Retention & Sponsored Programs at Neumann. As Coordinator for Student Affairs, I supported the student experience through a myriad of functions including event planning, assessing campus engagement, parent and family engagement, building campus traditions, advising the budgets of the Student Government Association and all clubs, and more. Something that was both challenging and immensely rewarding in that role was fostering the growth of student leaders by helping ...

Fall 2023 Course Descriptions  ENG 8000 What’s Hot? Introduction to Literary Theory  Dr. Heather Hicks  THE 8200 Legacies of Revenge in Drama, Fiction, Comics and Film  Drs. Chelsea Phillips & Alice Dailey  ENG 9640 Crime Fiction & Gender  Dr. Jean Lutes  ENG 9710 Contemporary American Poetry: The Documentary Turn  Dr. Lisa Sewell  ENG 9730 The Art of Translation   Dr. Adrienne Perry    Summer 2023 Course Description  ENG 9530 Moby Dick  Dr. Travis Foster    ENG 9530: Moby Dick  Dr. Travis Foster  CRN 12006  MTWR from 11:00 am to 01:20 pm   Summer Session I: 5/31/23 - 6/28/23  This course provides an opportunity to read, study, and discuss Herman Melville’s 1851 novel,  Moby-Dick; or,  The Whale . The story tracks two parallel quests: the antagonist Captain Ahab’s attempt to kill and thereby take revenge on the white whale; and the narrator Ishmael’s attempt to ma...