The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

By undergraduate VU students Keenlyn Kilgore and Juliana Perri Dr. Lauren Shohet, a beloved English professor, sat down with two of her former students to talk about her experience at Villanova University as a professor, researcher, and member of the Villanova English community. In addition to her work at Villanova, Dr. Shohet is Subject Editor for Literature and Drama in English for Routledge On-lineResources.  So what made one of the university’s most loved professors decide  to teach? For one, conducting. Dr. Shohet experienced a novelty in high school when she was introduced to the world of conducting. For her, conducting choirs was a position of leadership that she now equates with being at the front of a classroom. Then, she helped guide others by providing the proper procedures with a baton. Now, she does the same with her students, providing them with the foundations they need to thrive. Dr. Shohet loves seeing her students come into their own, taking what they learn f...

Professor Megan Quigley recently published "Kenner as an Eliot Fan"   at Nonsite.org . It is her first scholarly piece on fanfiction. It " works to break down the border between scholarship and fandom, impersonality and attachment, objective annotation and invested interpretation." Read the full article  here .

This is a profile written by current grad student Deidra Cali '23 MA about her classmate, Theo Campbell '23 MA. You can see the profile in its original context here . Thanks, Deidra, and congratulations, Theo! VILLANOVA, Pa. – Whether it is because of similar research interests, connections within the field or other, more nuanced factors, faculty play a large role in students’ choice of graduate school and are also instrumental in shaping the graduate student experience. Villanova English master’s student   Theo Campbell '23 MA   points to the kindness, generosity and support of Villanova faculty for helping them to flourish as a scholar and to gain acceptance to the English PhD program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they will be starting in the fall. For Campbell, building connections is essential. “I recommend that prospective students reach out to faculty members who work in the area they are interested in, even if they are not teaching a graduate semina...

Second-year VU English MA student Caitlin Salomon recently presented at the NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association), on a panel entitled "The Future is Fragile," which "examined how the concept of fragility shapes our world and society." "My paper," said Salomon, "put Walter Miller’s (post)apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz in conversation with Judith Butler’s theory of vulnerability. I suggested that though Butler’s framework is an exemplary theoretical model to follow, Miller’s novel shows that even when we admit—and have tangible proof of—our own fragility, our flawed humanity leads us to protect ourselves at others’ expense. His inclusion of a posthuman character at the novel’s conclusion intriguingly poses that humanity can only be invulnerable when it’s no longer entirely human." Caitlin was kind enough to answer some additional questions about the conference for the YAWP. What was your impression of the conference itself? Th...

Undergrad English major Lauren Kourey wrote an article for  The Villanovan  on Professor Quigley's recent talk, "A Feminist  Waste Land ."  Check it out here.

  Travis Foster presented a lecture titled, " White Supremacist Submission:  Interracial Desire, Transfemininity, and the Biopolitics of Penetration" online at University of Wisconsin-Madison, on April 18 . Here's the abstract for the lecture: Scholars tend to envision the sexual politics of settler  colonialism and slavery through masculinist  conceptions equating penetration with mastery and  receptiveness with subjugation. This talk tracks instead how white desires for sexual submission to Black and brown men operate as white supremacy. It augments white trans and queer conceptualizations of bottoming with theories of white submission found in Black thought, particularly those of Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin—all of which find themselves anticipated in the mid-nineteenth century writings of Theodore Winthrop and the turn-of-the-century photography of F. Holland Day. For Winthrop and Day, bottoming fantasies facilitate transfeminine embodiment, staging a...

  Mary Mullen presented a lecture titled, " The Aesthetics of Interest in an Age of Question: Representing Ireland"  at Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University on Thursday, March 23. The talk  paired Edward Said’s reflection on the series of “interests” that underlie Orientalism with Sianne Ngai’s account of interesting as an aesthetic category, in order to consider the difficulty in sustaining British interest in colonial locations. The talk focuses on the novel as a form of “sustained interest”—drawing on work by William Carleton and Anthony Trollope—and the rhetorical form of the question—especially “The Irish Question”—to suggest that the very act of encouraging readers to take an interest in a foreign place can also direct their attention away from the people who inhabit this place.

Dr. Lauren Shohet is the Subject Editor for Literature and Drama in English for the new  Routledge Online Resources: The Renaissance World.  This project seeks to provide resources for students and scholars of the early modern period, while also questioning ideas of "the Renaissance" and "Renaissance Studies."  The current "freemium" version  shows you a small fraction of what eventually will be available! Check out topics like "Shipwreck, Wet Globalization, and the Blue Humanities"; "French Sexual Cultures"; "Buddhism and Globalization"; "Infanticide in Italy 1500-1800"; "Renaissance Poetry in Colonial Peru: The Antarctic Academy (1586-1617)"; and "Elizabethan Courtly Fashion."