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 become discursive monuments of resistance against oppressive regimes, and against corporeal vulnerability caused by systemic violence.
Next to present was Carly Johnson, who shared her field exam on Macbeth Across Adaptations: Witchcraft, Culture, and Violence. Carly surveyed 28 adaptations of Macbeth for her field exam, across plays, film, TV, opera, graphic novels, and more. She was guided by adaptation theory, and interested in ideas of adaptation as transformation, by adaptation as network, and by Shakespeare as already adaptive (adaptations of adaptations). She found, among other things, that Macbeth is an adaptive network, not a fixed text, that meaning shifts across cultures and communities, and that the play itself survives through reinvention.
Following Carly's presentation, Maggie Jones presented on Traumatizing, Destabilizing Queens: Sites of Male Anxiety over Female Rulership and Gender Instability in Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Literature. Maggie's thesis began as an expansion on a fall 2024 Fantastic Middle Ages paper on Geoffrey of Monmouth's female king characters in Historia regum Brittaniae. She sought to do a deep dive into a specific period of Anglo-Norman literature using a gender studies lens, and found Twelfth-century chronicle and romance texts display male anxiety over the potential of female rulership and its ability to destabilize established gender roles and the distinction between feminine/masculine by utilizing historical-fantastical narrative devices to address traumatic grievances over the fluctuation of the two-term gendered system. Maggie illustrated her thesis with a specific example of the erasure of Eleanor of Aquitaine from Richard Coeur de Lyon.
Following Maggie's presentations, students and faculty shared questions and comments before moving on to the next series of three presentations.
This series began with Katy Kessler, who spoke on Planetary Backwoods: A Survey of Environmental Fiction Across Local and Global Scales. Katy's field exam consisted of a comparative study of local and global environmental fiction. Her local fiction selections, inspired by her upbringing in West Virginia, were written by Appalachian authors and found their settings in that region. Katy found that the Appalachian novels focused primarily on mountaintop removal and other local concerns, while the global novels were more likely to focus on climate change and to address broader injustices such as racism and colonialism. She concluded that reading from both local and global climate fiction allows audiences the ability to scale their understandings, and she found that her readings supplemented her personal reverence for nature with more scientific reasons to care for the environment.
After Katy's talk, Jenna Kosnick presented on "One of Nature's Bachelors:" Queerly Reading P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves Canon. Jenna introduced the popular Wodehouse canon to anyone not already familiar with it, and outlined her interest in critically examining this series which, while popular with readers, is not generally a subject of academic scholarship. Jenna examined Wodehouse's treatment of marriage and heterosexual couples, and found that heterosexual couples serve purely mechanical narrative functions, and that marriage is often presented as a predicament for the protagonist, Bertie Wooster, to avoid. Meanwhile, the relationship between Bertie and his valet, Jeeves, is a kind of marriage, and represents the core emotional relationship in the series.
Next, Ashley Lee presented To Exist in Darkness, Ink, and Dots: Translation and History in Han King's Human Acts and Ed Park's Same Bed Different Dreams. Ashley shared that her thesis was in the works since her first semester at Villanova, when she was feeling homesick and her mother suggested she read Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian in Korean. After completing the book in Korean, Ashley became interested in reading the translation into English by Deborah Smith, informed by some of the theoretical frameworks introduced in Dr. Adrienne Perry's translation course. Later, Dr. Yumi Lee suggested that Ashley read Ed Park's Same Bed Different Dreams. Ashley examined both texts for insights into translation and history, finding with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak that "Translation is the most intimate act of reading" and that translation is beyond language.
Next to present was Griffyn Leeds, who spoke on Staged Liberations from Tuberculosis Metaphors. Like Ashley, Griffyn's project harkens back to his first semester in the program, when he took a course with Dr. Joe Drury and reread Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor." At the same time, Griffyn was taking a theater elective, and he decided to combine his interests to explore the treatment of tuberculosis on the stage, looking at Long Day's Journey into Night, Moulin Rouge, and a 2024 avant garde piece called Illness as Metaphor. Griffyn concluded that, while we perhaps cannot eliminate the use of these illness metaphors, we can stage nuanced depictions of them.
Following Griffyn was Ryan Miller, whose thesis, The Lyric Made Modern(ist): Reforging Time in the Modernist Novels of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, drew inspiration from Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh's What is Poetry course. Ryan described how conversations on the nature of poetry led him to conclude that lyric poetry focuses on "moments in time." He later concluded that poetry, like "water in different glasses," is formless, fitting the shape of the object you put it in. Ryan was interested in examining how prose writing could serve as a new "glass" for lyric poetry, and analyzed works by Faulkner and Hemingway to do so. He found that lyric poetry served as a means of expressing in narrative, traditionally reliant on linear time, the seemingly non-linear nature of time as perceived by observers in the twentieth century.
Our final presenter was Julia Reagan, who spoke on Literature and Economic Criticism in the Aftermath of Neoliberalism. For her field exam, Julia examined novels from the 1990s onwards with an eye to analyzing how literature represents the economy. Julia also read economic texts as primary sources, tracing how economists' rhetoric and frameworks circulate in literary texts. Julia noted that the economic fantasy of independent individuals in a free market was reflected in literature by a proliferation of "free-floating orphans," alienated and disaffected characters without stable relationships to family, place, or class. Julia concluded her presentation by sharing some insights into her process, including how she scheduled her readings, took notes, and organized her comprehensive statement.
Congratulations to our presenters and graduating second-year students!
