The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

While everyone else was being festive, English professors were busy at the Modern Languages Association Conference in Toronto in January. Professor Kamran Javadizadeh, the chair of the executive committee for the MLA’s Poetry and Poetics Forum, chaired two panels on poetry. Professor Megan Quigley delivered a paper entitled “Modernist Impersonality in the Age of AI,” and was an official mentor for other faculty at the conference! Per Dr. Quigley, "It was cold but wonderful."

  Coming Soon! Augustine and AI Panel discussion, on Monday, January 26th at 6 p.m. in Falvey 205. Featuring as a special guest Villanova MA alum el friedman, along with Villanova faculty. Organized by the English department AI committee.

Don James McLaughlin, who graduated from the Villanova MA program in 2009, has just published  Phobia and American Literature, 1705-1937: A Therapeutic History with Oxford University Press.  Per Don James's website, " Phobia and American Literature, 1705-1937: A Therapeutic History provides an intellectual history to explain how phobia first came to prominence as a medical diagnosis, political analytic, and aesthetic sensibility in American print cultures." The book "demonstrates how in the early 1800s a phobic imagination emerged by way of an experimental comparison integrating understandings of infectious disease and psychopathology: rabies and racism." The book goes on to analyze "how phobia evolved into a framework for exploring myriad themes, including the relationship between individual psychology and social injustice, the benefits and limits of empathy as a mode of political engagement, and various functions of fear as an affective force in civil s...