The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

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 Iris...

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...

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  re...