The Case for Finding Everything Interesting
By Alexis Stakem, MA ‘28
Julia Reagan ‘26 MA has always loved being a student; she is, in her own words, “hungry for information.” Her intellectual journey has brought her to Villanova in multiple ways: first as an MA student, and now as an instructor of undergraduates in the ACS program.
Prior to starting at Villanova in the fall of 2024, she had already earned an MA in German, focusing on German literature, from UC Berkeley. Reagan spent a year living in Germany after receiving a Fulbright scholarship, taking literature courses at various universities and studying political fairy tales from the 1930s – which were a response to the political frustration and electoral gridlock Germany was encountering during the Weimar era. Coming to Villanova felt to Reagan like an opportunity to tie up a “loose end” or scratch “an unscratched itch” because of its emphasis on studying English literature.
These threads soon multiplied, as a new interest of Reagan’s emerged – 20th-century economic theory. Economic theory also provided her with a thrilling challenge: to think and learn about how a new, fairly foreign, field functioned. Reagan was awarded a Summer Research Fellowship, during which she did “a lot of reading, basically, about… Keynesianism, then the neoliberal backlash to that, and the so-called tax revolution.”
Wanting to understand the economy through the lens of literature, and more closely connect her political interests with her scholarship, Reagan notes that the two fields have historically been intertwined, “The way economics is taught has become very mathematical and formulaic – a little bit technologically mystified – I think on purpose to make it seem like this special arcane branch of knowledge. But [economics] started, in the beginning, with people like Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, who were also readers. They didn’t see themselves as being so divorced from humanity.”
Post-graduation, Reagan sustains her belief in the interestingness of every far-flung corner of the greater humanities realm by teaching ACS 1000: Ancients at Villanova. In approaching her teaching, whether at Villanova or elsewhere, she explains, “I just assume everything is interesting, and I am really convinced that it is. So, I tend to not spend too much time trying to sell [the material] as interesting – I start from the assumption that it is.”
Curiosity has oriented so much of Reagan's time at Villanova, demonstrating not only a deep and thorough commitment to learning but, perhaps most fervently, presenting a persuasive case for finding just about everything interesting.
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