The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

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...