The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Villanova English MA alum Olivia Stowell '21 was recently featured on the Vox podcast Today , Explained , in which she spoke about AI in the classroom and described her decision to ban AI use in the courses she teaches as she pursues her PhD in Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. Olivia described the genesis of her decision: "It was fall of 2023; I was the TA for a TV class with my advisor. They had an assignment where they had to write about social media reception... I noticed the repeated use of phrases and repeated sentence structures. I was like, this does not feel like student writing to me. I was pretty certain that a student had used ChatGPT and they ended up admitting to it." Olivia noted that, at the time, "There was no institution-wide policy, and there still isn't, that I know of, so professors are kind of setting their own." Prompted by her experiences with ChatGPT as a TA, Olivia began to think critically about how she would t

 Dr. Lauren Shohet has just published an article in the journal Anglia titled "Touching the Shield of Achilles: Ekphrasis and/as Re-Mediation." Here is the abstract: Homer’s treatment of the Matter of Troy illuminates the foundational impossibility of representation in ways that sponsor examination of the semiotic choices, the costs and benefits and tradeoffs, of different practices. Homer’s ekphrastic description of the shield of Achilles highlights a variety of available semiotic systems focused on different media of representation. This article explores Homeric ekphrasis in relation to later theories of media intersection, interaction, and transformation. Not only word, image, music, and dance, but also human perception as such, are subject to mediation. You can view more information on the article here . The shield's design as interpreted by Angelo Monticelli, ca. 1820, image courtesy of Wikipedia