The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Villanova English MA alum (class of 2022) Christopher Sassaris was out and about today bringing things from the old library building to the new library. You can read more about Christopher's journey from our MA to a career in distinctive collections on the YAWP . The new Falvey Library at Vic Maggitti Hall will open officially on Friday, October 23.

Grad students, undergrads, faculty, and staff came to SAC 300 on Thursday, September 24, at 3:30pm, for a hybrid critical-creative talk by the award-winning Puerto Rican scholar, poet, translator, and performer Urayoán Noel, who is an associate professor at NYU. Sponsored by the Department of English’s Graduate Colloquium Speaker series, “Bodymind Poetics” drew from Noel's forthcoming monograph Virtually Latinx: Identities in the Age of Social Media , and his in-progress experimental memoir of living with epilepsy, Neural Sea . Professor Noel presented students with a talk that drew from his diverse interests in academic writing, literary translation, and poetry. He began by discussing the work of poet Pedro Pietri, whom he described as modeling a "radical bodymind freedom." He then read from his upcoming work Virtually Latinx , where he described the presentation of diverse aspects of identity over contemporary social media platforms like tiktok. He went on to read secti...

This past Wednesday, the English Department celebrated 100 years of Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues with the event "I, too, sing America." A huge crowd of undergraduate students stopped by the 2nd floor lounge of Good Counsel Hall for a night of poetry and pizza. In his opening remarks, Professor Javadizadeh said he hoped the event would give students a taste of what they could expect from English classes at Villanova. Professor Javadizadeh originated the event over 10 years ago as a way to introduce 1st year students to the English major and minor, at the time focusing on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby . The event has since centered on other works including J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye , and, this year, Langston Hughes’ poetry collection The Weary Blues . Professor Javadizadeh and Professor Skillings welcome students. 2nd Year English MA Christopher Supplee then took center stage, providing historical context to Langston Hughes’ life and his publicati...

Sixty degree weather and afternoon sun made this past Thursday the perfect setting to talk about nature writing with English graduate student, Christopher Supplee. Chris is part of a nature writing collective based in Greater Philadelphia, the Buried Creek Collective. According to their mission statement, Buried Creek Collective works to educate Greater Philadelphia writers on our changing climate to foster informed storytelling and creative climate resistance. The collective guides members through their curriculum as part of the writing process, which is designed to provide knowledge on local waterways, land use, ecology, and infrastructure. Visits to sites of both environmental crisis and renewal are integrated into the curriculum to help provide an instructional basis for literary representations of the natural world. Not only do collective members visit these local sites, they also meet local sustainability and conservation professionals as part of the research process. The collect...

I recently had the chance to speak with Professor Adrienne Perry about her forthcoming co-edited poetry anthology, Other Legacies: Great Unsung American Poets . The book, co-edited by Kevin Prufer and Martin Rock, features contributions from 35 contemporary poets, each introducing a poet of their choice whom they feel has been neglected in literary conversations. The book arose out of Professor Perry and her co-editors' work on the Unsung Masters Series, an annual publication highlighting the work of an under-appreciated poet. The publication has an associated reading series, for which Professor Perry served as co-host, in which several scholars and writers are invited to come together to read the work of one such neglected poet. Recognizing the value these readings brought to discussions of American poetry, Professor Perry and her co-editors sought to build upon this unique experience in the form of a poetry anthology–one that would notably differ from traditional poetry anthologi...

Dr. Michelle Filling-Brown was named MVP (Most Valuable Professor) during the Women's Soccer Faculty Appreciation Day game. Dr. Filling-Brown was nominated by Avrie Nelson (#6), who is in her English 1975 course along with her teammate, Tea Gambardella (#2). Both players were excited to recognize their English professor as one of the day's MVPs. This moment was extra special for Dr. Filling-Brown, who values following her student athletes' games. Nelson and Gambardella are currently undefeated as the Women's Soccer team heads into conference play this weekend. Dr. Filling-Brown notes that they are amazing student athletes.  With excitement building for the upcoming weekend, this year's Faculty Appreciation Day was extra special for both the student athletes and the faculty members cheering them on.  Dr. Filling-Brown is pictured below during the MVP recognition at halftime and with Allison Venella, Senior Associate Athletic Director of Student Athlete Development: T...

Cathy Velez, a beloved English adjunct faculty member, was honored at a recent Villanova Women's Soccer game for Faculty Appreciation Day. This recognition happened during halftime where she was titled one of the game's inaugural MVPs... Most Valuable Professors. Professor Velez, who has taught English 1975 for many years, was touched by the kind gesture and celebration. Attached below is a photo of Professor Velez at the game. Go Nova, Go Cats!  - Juliana Catania MA '28

Who’s Afraid of Woolfbot? Professor Megan Quigley and MA Student Tate Gibbons Explore the Use of A.I. Chatbots in the Classroom By Nikola Stojcic MA ‘28 For many of us in the humanities, the encroachment of artificial intelligence usage into our academic lives has provoked feelings of wariness, to say the least. Indeed, what role is there, if any, for artificial intelligence in the field of English literature? For Professor Megan Quigley and 2nd year English MA student Tate Gibbons, the answer might look something like their custom chatbot, “The Lighthouse”--or, as it has come to be known, Woolfbot. In her forthcoming article “ Refined Out of Existence”: Modernist Impersonality Revisited, ” Professor Megan Quigley describes how in the summer of 2024 she began studying the recently unarchived eight volumes of T.S. Eliot’s Complete Prose . To help her sift through nearly 7000 pages of prose and to better understand and evaluate the usage of A.I. for herself, Professor Quigley created a ...

On Wednesday September 9th, Professor Mary Mullen visited the Keough-Naughton Institute at the University of Notre Dame for a panel discussion of her recently published co-edited volume Race, Violence and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland.  Working alongside co-editor Renée Fox and contributor Amy Mulligan, Professor Mullen's book aims to deepen understanding of the often-overlooked literature of nineteenth-century Ireland by " employing new methodological frameworks that expand how we understand the global, racial, formal, periodized, and political scope" of works from the era. The book is indebted to the work of retired University of Notre Dame Professor Sara Maurer, who Professor Mullen says "helped dreamed up the collection."   The book at the heart of the discussion. Professor Mullen with fellow panelists Renée Fox and contributor Amy Mulligan. Professor Mullen with retired University of Notre Dame Professor Sara Maurer. by Nikola Stojcic MA 28...

The English Department is happy to announce Co-Working Wednesdays!  Wednesdays in the English Department office (SAC 402) from 5:30-7:15 PM.  First session is September 30th . See you there!  

Dr. Alice Dailey developed a photography-writing project, titled “Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations,” in collaboration with her son, Adam Dailey. This past August, Tupelo Quarterly published this project in a folio on collaboration.  Page 8 of "Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations" Led by a fascination with creating analog spiritualistic photographs, Dr. Dailey found herself experimenting with several mediums outside of the process of photography itself. What started as a project to recreate Victorian spiritualist photographs transformed into her recently published photography-writing project, “Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations.” Dr. Dailey describes this project as originating from a desire to understand the creation of analog spiritualist photographs alongside the theory of embodied practice as a form of historical knowledge.  “The project thus began with no writing or narration planned. I simply wanted to make pictures,” explains Dr. Dailey when...

image retrieved from events.stanford.edu Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh traveled to California this past spring to give talks on the poets Jack Spicer and Solmaz Sharif. We sat down with Dr. Javadizadeh recently to hear more about these talks, which covered subjects as diverse as poets as radios, the notion of AI poetry, assimilation and language, and Iranian immigrant experience in the US. We first discussed Dr. Javadizadeh’s lecture at the Stanford Center for Poetics, which describes itself as “a home for research in poetics across periods, languages, and methods.” His talk, which took place on April 23 rd , was titled "Making Contact: Jack Spicer and Phatic Poetics." Dr. Javadizadeh borrows the concept of “phatic language” from the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, a concept which Dr. Javadizadeh describes as a variety of language in which “you’re not communicating, so much as you’re calling attention to the channel along which you are about to be communicating.” Some examples mi...

Emily Skillings Our newest faculty member, Emily Skillings, who will begin teaching with us this fall, was just awarded a Howard Foundation Fellowship by the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation. The Foundation awarded 14 fellowships totaling $560,000 to support early mid-career individuals. Each recipient received an unrestricted $40,000 fellowship. The funds provide time to advance independent creative and scholarly work on a major project. Per the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, "Since 1954, over 500 Howard Fellows have used the fellowship to transition from promising early-career status to recognized leaders in their fields. Howard Fellows have authored bestsellers, directed Oscar nominated feature-length films, and earned some of the world’s most prestigious honors including Pulitzer Prizes, the Rome Prize, and the Whiting Award. They have gone on to MacArthur, Guggenheim, and Carnegie Fellowships. "The Howard Foundation carefully selects its Fell...

For Stowell, Villanova’s graduate English program offered more than academic preparation—it provided the mentorship, teaching experience and intellectual community that continue to shape her work as a PhD candidate and educator today. Courtesy of Villanova CLAS News & Events When Olivia Stowell ’21 MA stepped into her first teaching assignment at the University of Michigan (which also happened to be in a 350-seat lecture hall), it easily could have overwhelmed her. Instead, she was prepared. Mentorship, classroom experience and faculty support in Villanova University’s graduate English program shaped not only how she teaches, but how she came to understand herself as an educator. “I love teaching; I really, really love it,” Stowell said. “I think one of the things that was valuable about my Villanova experience was the way it prepared me.” Currently a PhD candidate in the University of Michigan’s Communication and Media program, Stowell is taking the next steps in her educational a...

 Congratulations to our Spring 2026 MA graduates! Alexis Atwood, Carly Johnson, Maggie Jones, Katy Kessler, Jenna Kosnick, Ashley Lee, Griffyn Leeds, Ryan Miller, Anne Monsalve, Nosike Okafor, Natalie Pititto, Matthew Raskob, and Julia Reagan Here are some graduation pics graciously shared  by Katy Kessler:

Blogging for Scholars: Feeding Curiosities Through Research and Writing By. Alexis M. Atwood MA '26 Losing touch with the things that inspire us most is an almost imperceptible process. In youth, we are often pulled in vastly different directions; devouring books one day, exploring art or building scale models the next. These interests can fade into obscurity if not looked after carefully. As we grow to take on more responsibilities, we can begin to lose track of the small joys that lift our spirits and fill our days with simple wonder. As a scholar, I write firstly to remind myself of the things that I have lost touch with; to reconnect with a sense of imaginative play and exploration. I write also for others, to hopefully spark a sense of lighthearted curiosity for anyone who may come across my work.    I was fortunate at a young age to have friends who aspired to write novels and some who had journals and journals filled with poetry, friends who made me wish I had som...

By Griffyn Leeds MA '26 The English Department has generously funded my MA thesis research through the Graduate Mini-Grant funds. I am studying how the disease tuberculosis is staged in performance, and the most popular performance right now is  Moulin Rouge!  on Broadway. The funds granted afforded me the opportunity to see  Moulin Rouge!  and experience the extravagant spectacle in person. The experience was so incredible and so informative for my research. My thesis is now stronger for having seen the show live, and I could not have pursued this opportunity without the English Department’s generosity. I am grateful and overjoyed, and am so excited to complete my thesis on tubercular drama. Thank you Villanova University!

  Dr. Joe Drury recently presented at the American Society for 18th Century Studies conference in Philadelphia, which took place April 9-11. At the event, Dr. Drury presented his paper, “‘A Singular Man’: James Boswell’s Oddness,” which posits Boswell’s “oddness” as whimsy, a trait characterized by his almost compulsive tendency to overshare.  I was given the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Drury to discuss his paper in further detail. He cites Sianne Ngai’s book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, and Interesting, as sparking his interest in whimsy. Ngai’s book, Dr. Drury explains, is a “cultural analysis of our everyday aesthetic vocabulary,” especially that vocabulary which extends beyond the popular yet constraining conception of aesthetics as beauty. While Ngai’s novel explores the “zany, cute, and interesting,” Dr. Drury is more interested in whimsy. Dr. Drury explains that whimsy “has its origins in the period that I study, the Enlightenment, the long 18th century…I ...

The Graduate English program celebrated its 16th annual Thesis and Field Exam Symposium last night, with nine students presenting on their theses and field exams to an audience of over 25 students, faculty, and staff in SAC 300.  After everyone had a chance to enjoy dinner, Graduate Director Mary Mullen opened the evening with a toast to the graduating class. We then began the academic presentation portion of the evening with students presenting in groups of three followed by time for questions and discussion.  The first student to present was Alexis Atwood, who presented her field exam on Civil War, Poetics, and Vulnerability: Investigating Corporal Vulnerability in Salvadoran Poetry of Witness. Her field exam was based upon a comprehensive reading of selected poems of witness, memoirs, and testimonial narratives that surround the civil war in El Salvador in the late 1970s. Her aim was to explore how poetic forms represent corporeal vulnerability and to understand how poems b...