The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Calling all theater lovers... Current Villanova students AND alumni/ae can attend The Spanish Tragedy symposium for free! In academic year 2023-24, Villanova University faculty Dr. Chelsea Phillips (Theater) and Dr. Alice Dailey (English) launched a year-long interdisciplinary exploration of Thomas Kyd’s seminal Renaissance revenge play, The Spanish Tragedy  (1582). This extended pedagogical, scholarly, and creative endeavor began with a combined undergraduate-graduate course taught in fall 2023 titled “Legacies of Revenge.” It culminates in a  production of The Spanish Tragedy co-directed by Dailey and Phillips and staged in Villanova’s new John and Joan Mullen Center for the Performing Arts in April 2024 , along with a coinciding scholarly symposium on April 19-20, 2024. Through both academic study and performance, The Spanish Tragedy  Project seeks to foster engagement with the play as at once an historical and contemporary artifact and to deepen our understanding of the play’s pla

This event will feature a short discussion of Adania Shibli’s  Minor Detail  (2017)—an award-winning Palestinian novel that narrates two historical moments to show the haunting and all-too-ordinary nature of colonial violence—followed by a speculative creative writing exercise, inspired by Shibli, where we practice writing for social change. There will be pizza!  Wednesday, April 10 from 7:30 to 8:30 pm in Falvey 205.

By Katie Lewis What does it mean to be Asian American? This is the central question asked by Professor AJ Yumi Lee in a new undergraduate English course as of Spring 2024, ENG 4649: Introduction to Asian American Literature. The course explores how literature has represented and shaped Asian American identity since the 20 th  century.   The course is the first course to be offered by the English Department that focuses entirely on Asian American literature.   “It has been really fun teaching this class, and the students have been really excited,” said Professor Lee. “I have to give a shout-out to the class of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences dean's office. When I was developing the course, I was able to get a grant, since this is something that contributes to diversity efforts within the college. I definitely want to teach this class again and build off the conversations this semester.”   The beginning of the semester covered Asian American history, an area frequently under

By Melody Gleason, MA '25 What better way to wrap up Women’s History Month than honoring Villanova English’s first full-time woman professor: Margaret Powell Esmonde? Margaret Powell Esmonde taught at Villanova from 1974 until her death in 1983. She was a specialist in Renaissance literature who also taught various courses in science fiction and children’s literature. Beyond her contributions to Villanova, Margaret Powell Esmonde was an active member of the Children’s Literature Association, working on the board and eventually serving as president from 1978-79. She was awarded various fellowships through this association, one in 1982 for a study of the role of girls and women in children's science fiction. Margaret Powell Esmonde’s impact remains for girls and women in the literary scene. The Villanova English Department continues to honor her legacy through the Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award which is given annually to the most distinguished graduate essay written in a

 By Melody Gleason MA '25 Over the past two semesters, Dr. Dailey, Dr. Chelsea Phillips from the Theater department, and a group of students from various programs and departments have been working together to examine the theme of revenge and justice as a tragic element. The first half of this project started as class in the fall 2023 semester called, Legacies of Revenge – Across Time, Space, Genre, & Media. The course engaged both graduate and undergraduate students from multiple disciplines including English majors, minors, and theatre majors. Students in the course studied narratives of revenge across a plethora of entertainment mediums: from classical drama, to contemporary fiction, to modern film. The class especially focused on the play,  The Spanish Tragedy  written in the 1580s.   Dr. Dailey describes  The Spanish Tragedy  as  “the precursor to  Hamlet  and to a whole extensive revenge tragedy genre that enters the Elizabethan Theater scene through the Spanish tragedies.

This is a reminder that applications will be accepted for the summer Abbey Theater Internship grant until April 1st. Current students can check their emails and/or reach out to Mike for more details.

Mary Mullen will present her research on Irish famine novels on Wednesday, April 3 at the Novel Theory Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She will participate alongside scholars Claire Connolly and Mary Burke in an event titled,  "Irish Fiction Then and Now."  This is a hybrid event that will take in person and online. You can  register here. Here is the abstract for her talk: Irish famine novels often begin by addressing a skeptical public fatigued by stories of Irish suffering. Many authors passively “place” or “lay” their novels before the public, insisting that however strange their narrative seems, they depict the truth. The preface to William Carleton’s  The Squanders of Castle Squanders  (1852) is defensive, suggesting that despite his concern “for the general welfare of my countrymen,” he expects that all parties will be disappointed with the novel’s politics. Considering these prefaces and other public addresses within Irish famine novel

Travis Foster just published an article titled   "White Supremacist Submission"   in   Transgender Studies Quarterly.  The article received the   American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize   honorable mention for the year’s best essays on American literature, tenured category.   Here's the abstract to the article: Scholars tend to envision the sexual politics of settler colonialism and slavery through masculinist conceptions in which penetration designates mastery and receptiveness subjugation. This article asks instead how white desires for sexual submission to nonwhite men operate within white supremacy. It augments white trans and queer studies' conceptualizations of bottoming with theories of white submission found in Black thought, particularly Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin. And it argues that both sets of ideas find themselves anticipated in the mid-nineteenth-century writings of the white, gender-variant author Theodore Winthrop—particularly their most popular n

Two exciting Digital Seeds lectures, offered by Falvey Library, will be held this coming April, and may be of particular interest to our graduate students.  According to Falvey Library's website, "The Digital Seeds Speaker Series is a library funded program that supports the invitation of guest speakers in the digital scholarship community to speak at Falvey Library about their research and/or give a workshop on a topic of their choice. The goal of the speaker series is to provide an opportunity for Villanova faculty, staff, and students to learn more about digital scholarship and research at the intersection of social science, humanities computing, and data science. The lectures are open to the public and all Villanova faculty, staff, and students to attend. The series is a great way to make connections, build community, and facilitate conversation." The two upcoming lectures are Dr. Sarah Lang on “Leveraging Large Language Models to Unveil Seventeenth-Century Books of S

 Professor Joe Drury has a chapter coming out next week in the new  Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English , edited by Nicole Aljoe, Sarah Eron, and Suvir Kaul. The title of Professor Drury's essay is “Humans, Machines, and Automatons.” Here is the abstract of Professor Drury's chapter: Lord Macartney’s assumptions about the Chinese taste for spectacular ornamental machinery during his unsuccessful 1793–1794 embassy reflected changing attitudes toward technology within Britain’s Industrial Enlightenment. Where machines had previously been valued for their aesthetic qualities, the labor required to produce them, and the luxurious consumption they excited, late eighteenth-century commentators such as Adam Smith increasingly emphasized their utility, the productive labor they saved, and the frugality required of the capitalists who introduced them. Responding to this shift, Frances Burney’s  Evelina  and William Beckford’s  Vathek  reimagined the longstan

Coming soon! Villanova undergrad English major Jenine Hazlewood will be presenting to the school district of Philadelphia on the topic of "What were they made for? A Timeline of the 'Black Barbie' Doll."  This free virtual professional development workshop will take place on March 16 from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. To learn more and to register, please visit the virtual form .

Villanova’s Ellipsis Literary Magazine is seeking submissions! Everyone is encouraged to submit: undergraduates and graduates as well as professors and staff within the Villanova community. They accept a wide host of traditional and non-traditional media from writing, poetry, and art to embroidery, text messages, memes, and anything else with aesthetic value, humor, personal meaning, or, perhaps, a touch of the bizarre.  Simply submit your work to ellipsis@villlanova.edu, and they'll consider it for this year’s edition. Their deadline for submissions is March 20th. 

  Fall 2024 Courses ENG 8 000  What’s Hot? Introduction to Literary Theory Dr. Heather Hicks ENG 8106  The Fabulous Middle Ages Dr. Brooke Hunter ENG 8560  Victorian Publics & Populations Dr. Mary Mullen ENG 8640 Modernism & FanFic Dr. Megan Quigley ENG 9520  Reading the Ethnic Canon Dr. Yumi Lee Summer 2024 Course Description ENG 9640 The Modern American Novel Dr. Jean Lutes Summer 2024 Course Description ENG 9640: The Modern American Novel Dr. Jean Lutes CRN 11087 MTWR from 11:00 am to 01:20 pm Summer Session II: 7/1/24 - 7/29/24 This course studies significant works of American fiction written in the first half of the twentieth century and considers how writers responded to the sweeping changes that characterized modernity in America. As we chart modernism’s emergence, we will look both backward and forward, discussing how writers extended and challenged nineteenth-century literary traditions, as well as how they anticipated the concerns of our o

On February 21st, VU English Professor Kimberly Takahata moderated a discussion on approaches to including and teaching Lenape materials in the classroom, featuring Adam DePaul, the Chief of Education and tribal storykeeper of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania. This discussion followed a panel on the impact of Land Acknowledgements at academic institutions and why they are merely a starting point to supporting indigenous communities. The panelists included Adam DePaul, Chief of Education and Tribal Storykeeper; Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania; as well as Modonna Kongal, Meg Martin, and Autumn Coard from N.I.S.A, the Native Indigenous Students Association. Elisha Chi, a white settler descendant of the Iñupiat of the Bering Straits region, moderated the panel.  Kimberly Takahata and Adam DePaul