The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Laura Tscherry, a current PhD student at Indiana University and 2017 graduate from the Villanova English MA program, was recently published in the Print Plus edition of Modernism/modernity . Laura wrote on "Queer Domestic Architectures: Theorizing Kinship and Communal Modernism," focusing on the way that various intimate living situations exist in literature (and in life!) beyond the heteronormative family unit. In their words, "I propose a theory of communal domestic spaces that asks what it means to share one's private life with strangers and what happens to relationality and space when those strangers become kin without the normative trappings of romance and children."  To pursue this theme, Laura writes on "more liminal or atypical domestic arrangements such as convents, tenement buildings, boarding schools, and old age homes," which "collapse, or complicate, neat boundaries of public and private." Laura goes on to note that "Communa...

 Alexandra Edwards, a 2012 graduate of Villanova's MA English program and an instructor at Texas Christian University, was recently awarded an honorable mention from the Modern Language Association for their Prize for Contingent Faculty and Independent Scholars. Alex received the mention for her book,  Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom . According to Edwards's book's  website , her book "investigates the overlapping cultures of fandom and American literature from the late 1800s to the mid-1940s, exploding the oft-repeated myth that fandom has its origins in the male-dominated letter columns of science fiction pulp magazines in the 1930s." In the words of the MLA prize committee: “ Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom makes an ambitious intervention and speaks across genres and disciplines. Alexandra Edwards’s study will become required reading in the growing genre of fanfiction studi...