The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

The Taught by Literature Project--as well as Dr. Jean Lutes, Trinity Rogers '24 CLAS, and Matt Villanueva '24 MA--has been featured in a recent podcast episode of the series Research that Resonates, which is produced for Villanova's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.  Following the legacy of African American writer and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson, researchers Trinity Rogers '24 CLAS, Matt Villanueva '24 MA, and Jean Lutes, PhD, professor of English and Luckow Family Endowed Chair in English Literature, aim to recenter the work of Black female intellectuals through the Taught by Literature project. From uncovering lost literature to transcription and video production, the researchers have grown the project into an outreach effort and collaborate with other scholars, schools and programs to makes these important stories available to a wider audience. For more information on the project, you can read  previous  coverage  on our  blog , and please listen to...

Coming soon! Villanova undergrad English major Jenine Hazlewood will be presenting to the school district of Philadelphia on the topic of "What were they made for? A Timeline of the 'Black Barbie' Doll."  This free virtual professional development workshop will take place on March 16 from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. To learn more and to register, please visit the virtual form .

The Taught by Literature project has a new website full of interesting content that Villanova students, both undergraduate and graduate, have helped produce. Founded in 2021 and funded by the Idol Family Fellows Program of the McNulty Center for Women’s Leadership at Villanova, the Taught by Literature Project honors the legacy of Black author, educator, and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935). In partnership with the University of Delaware’s Department of Special Collections, the project is producing a freely accessible digital edition of “The Annals of ‘Steenth Street,” a short-story collection Dunbar-Nelson wrote based on her work teaching Black children at the White Rose Mission in New York City in the 1890s. The project also conducts professional development training on early Black women writers for teachers in the School District of Philadelphia, and is collaborating with award-winning producer and director Hezekiah Lewis, a Communication professor at Villanova, to produce ...

Professor Jean Lutes has co-authored an article that investigates a fascinating unpublished manuscript by turn-of-the-century African-American author Alice Dunbar-Nelson. The article appears in  American Literary History , Volume 36, Issue 1, Summer 2024, and is titled"An Unpublished Tale about African American Poetry: Alice Dunbar-Nelson's 'The Grievances of the Books' (1897)." The article acknowledges three Villanova students who helped to transcribe the unpublished manuscript that Professor Lutes and her co-writer, Professor Sandra A. Zagarell, wrote about: Current English major Jenine Hazlewood, '26; current master's student Matthew Villanueva, MA '24; and recent English major graduate Adrianna Ogando, '23.  Here's an excerpt from the article that provides a flavor of Dunbar-Nelson's original piece: In April 1897, an ambitious young author drafted a hallucinatory narrative that was never published. Its unnamed narrator falls asleep and ...

Professor Jean Lutes has been working in collaboration with Villanova undergraduate students and others on a project to recover a book of short stories about Black children in turn-of-the-century New York. The book was written by the pioneering Alice Dunbar-Nelson, but was never published as a complete collection as had been intended.  The project has received support from the  Anne Welsh McNulty Institute at Villanova, which seeks to build "a community and network that supports gender-based initiatives throughout the University and beyond." To quote from the Institute's statement on the project, "This public-facing humanities project aims to recover a lost short story collection written in the 1890s by Black author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson, based on her experience teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in New York City. 'The Annals of ‘Steenth Street,' as Dunbar-Nelson titled the planned collection, features the youngest residents o...

Professor Yumi Lee will be facilitating an event on March 29 featuring Professor Nick Mitchell from the University of California, Santa Cruz. The event will be a conversation on policing, abolition, critique in/of the university, and the institutional projects of Black Studies and Women’s Studies. The discussion will probe such topis as: why do universities have police forces? What is the relationship between universities and prisons? What does an abolitionist vision of the university look like? You can pre-register for the event, which will be conducted online via Zoom, here .   

One of our new graduate students, Christoforos Sassaris, has recently worked on an exhibition exploring the history of race, health, and epidemics. According to Sassaris, "As one of the interns in the Mellon Scholars Program at the Library Company of Philadelphia, I had the opportunity to work on this exhibition, which is highly relevant . I am very thankful to have taken part in this project." You can explore the digital exhibition here . 

Congratulations to Dr. Yumi Lee, whose article, " Repairing Police Action after the Korean War in Toni Morrison's Home ," was just published in the journal Radical History Review . Dr. Lee's timely essay looks at the way Toni Morrison's 2012 novel Home  links the violence of US military “police action” in Korea in the early 1950s to the long history of police violence at home.  She argues that the novel's  critical portrayal of the Korean War punctures two enduring myths with origins in the 1950s: the myth of a peaceful domestic “color-blind” society and the myth of heroic US military intervention abroad. In Dr. Lee's reading,  Home  is an allegory that invites readers to imagine forms of justice outside of a policing framework, both globally and domestically, through its narrative of repairing trauma and harm through community care rather than punishment or retribution. Morrison’s rewriting of the 1950s in  Home  therefore places the contem...

The Villanova English  Department stands in solidarity with our Black students, staff, and faculty and their allies against anti-Black racism, police violence, and racial injustice. The faculty intend to contact students with  an action plan before the fall semester begins, and we will be asking for student input as we proceed. In the meantime, if you have specific suggestions or questions about our department response, please direct them to  Dr.  Jean   Lutes , chair of our department Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee, at   jean . lutes @villanova.edu . As a first step in our response to the rising Black Lives Matter movement, we invite you to consider  this reading list  on white supremacy, policing, and racial justice: James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963) [available online via Falvey Library], and Raoul Peck’s 2018 documentary I Am Not Your Negro [available for purchase on Youtube and Amazon prime video] ...

Africana Studies is sponsoring a lecture by Dr. Tess Onwueme, University of Wisconsin Professor of Global Letters. As the seventh annual Senghor-Damas-Cesaire lecture in Africana Studies, she will be presenting "Erupting Silences: Dr. Tess Onwueme Speaks/Performs the Soul of Africana" on November 14 at 4:00 pm at the Connelly Cinema . Click here to view the event postcard The event is co-sponsored by the Cultural Studies Program and the Institute for Global Interdisciplinary Studies.