The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

The Shakespeare Association of America just announced that Professor Alice Dailey and Professor Chelsea Phillips's production of Thomas Kyd's  The Spanish Tragedy won honorable mention for the Shakespeare Publics Award. Per the Association's website , "This award recognizes pioneering and/or culturally significant efforts to foster, engage, support and sustain broad and diverse Shakespeare publics through teaching, scholarship, performance and/or activism." All the Association's prizes will be awarded at their annual conference, next month in Boston. Congratulations, Dr. Dailey and Dr. Phillips! You can read more about The Spanish Tragedy on the project's website . courtesy of spanishtragedy.villanova.edu

Ann Marie Jakubowski, Villanova English MA '17, has won the Fathman Award from the International T. S. Eliot Society for her paper, "Conversion as Revision: The Retrospective Poetics of Burnt Norton ." The Fathman Award is presented each year by the T.S. Eliot Society, at its annual meeting, to the best paper presented by an early-career scholar. Graduate students and recent PhDs are eligible. Ann Marie graduated with a Villanova MA in 2017 and a PhD at Washington University in St. Louis in 2024. She is currently a Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow at Valparaiso University, where she teaches literary and humanities courses in the undergrad honors college, Christ College. Congrats, Ann Marie! Kamran Javadizadeh, Ann Marie Jakubowski, and Megan Quigley

Attention Villanova MA students! If you have a piece of written work from one of your MA courses that you're especially proud of, please consider submitting it for consideration  for The Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award. This award comes with a prize of $250 and is given to the most distinguished scholarly or critical essay written by a graduate student in a Villanova English course within the last 12 months. The Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award is given annually to the most distinguished graduate essay written in a Villanova English course. The Esmonde Award honors Margaret Powell Esmonde, who taught at Villanova from 1974 until her death in 1983. She was a specialist in Renaissance literature who also taught courses in science fiction and children’s literature. You can learn more about her here . You can learn a bit more about last year's winner, Theo Campbell, MA '23, here . Format for Submissions • In addition to their essay, students should include a cove...

The English department hosted an award ceremony on Friday, May 5 to honor undergraduate and graduate award winners. Here are photos from the event of our two honored graduate students. Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award Best Graduate Essay: Theo Campbell, "'Not Man: Woman': Freeing Leopold Bloom from Her Closet" written for Dr. Joseph Lennon, English 8680, Fall 2022 Theo Campbell and Joe Drury Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award  Honorable Mention : Jamie Wojtal, "Legibility and Annotation: Reading Images and Words by Red Star, Thomas Harriot, and Theodore De Bry" Kimberly Takahata and Jamie Wojtal

J ean Lutes and Hezekiah Lewis, associate professor in Communication, received a two-year $24,000 grant from the new GRASP program in CLAS to  continue work on a series of short videos designed to make early Black women writers more accessible to K-12 teachers.   The video project involves selecting under-studied texts by 18th-, 19th, and early 20th-century African American women; recruiting contemporary Black women educators to read those texts and talk briefly what those texts mean to them personally; producing short videos – no more than 10 minutes each – designed for K-12 classroom use; and making the videos available and freely accessible online, along with accompanying explanatory materials.  The videos will be made available on the  Just Teach One-Early African American Print initiative   on the American Antiquarian Association website.   This video series is part of Taught by Literature: Recentering Black Women Intellectuals, a collaborati...

Congratulations to Anne Jones, M.A. ’21, this year's recipient of the Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award for best graduate essay. Anne earned this award for her essay, “The Vexed Position of the Black Secret-Bearer: Concealments and Revelation in Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman's Narrative .” The essay examines how Hannah Crafts’ 1850s novel theorizes secrecy both as a form necessary for enslaved peoples and as a tool of racial subjugation. While Hannah, the novel’s enslaved narrator, initially uses secrecy to facilitate intimacy within her community and resistance against slavery’s dictates, the essay demonstrates how and why Hannah becomes increasingly hesitant towards bearing the secrets of others. On the other hand, while wary of shared secrets, Hannah still uses personal secrets for her own survival. The essay argues that “Hannah longs both for the freedom attainable only through secrecy and for freedom from the chokehold of secrecy. Through the functioning of this dialec...

This past fall, Ann Marie Jakubowski, who completed her MA at Villanova in 2017 and is now a graduate student in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, won the 2020 T. S. Eliot Studies Annual Prize for “‘Never anything anywhere’: Whiteness in Eliot’s Literary Imaginary.” The prize is awarded annually to the best seminar paper presented by an early-career scholar at the Annual Meeting of the International T. S. Eliot Society. Ann Marie's paper was presented as part of a peer seminar on ‘Eliot and Racial Others.’  Congratulations, Ann Marie!

The Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award, which comes with a prize of $250, is given to the most distinguished scholarly or critical essay written by a graduate student at Villanova. The prize-winning essays (undergraduate and graduate) are published in a booklet. For previous winners, as well as information about Margaret Powell Esmonde, see our awards page . To be eligible , essays must have been written within a year preceding the deadline; written either for any Villanova English course that was taught by a member of the Villanova English faculty. It is permissible to revise or expand papers beyond what was submitted for the course. Submissions may be excerpted from an M.A. Thesis. Format In addition to their essay, students should include a cover page including the course and professor for which the paper was written, as well as their local address, email, and telephone number. Students should also submit the essay assignment or an approximation of the assig...

Huge congratulations to Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, who has been awarded this year's William Riley Parker Prize for the best article published in  PMLA , the leading journal for literary studies!  His article “The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject” appeared in the May 2019 issue of  PMLA .  Dr. Javadizadeh will  be presented with his award on 11 January 2020, during the association’s annual convention, to be held in Seattle. The members of the selection committee were Elizabeth Bearden (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison); Christopher D. Castiglia (Penn State Univ., University Park), chair; Beth Piatote (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Melissa E. Sanchez (Univ. of Pennsylvania); and John H. Smith (Univ. of California, Irvine). In their citation the committee wrote: "' The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads' rose gracefully from a comparison of a line appearing in poems written by Claudia Rankin...

Congratulations to Villanova's own Alexandria Einspahr, who won the Rosenbach Museum's Bloomsday Essay Contest with her paper, "The Tap-Dancing Tuning Fork: Disability and Narrative Structure in Ulysses ." The contest is open to undergraduate and graduate students from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, and awards two prizes, one for a graduate paper and one for an undergraduate paper. A Villanovan won last year's prize as well. Christie Leonard, who recently graduated from Villanova's MA program, won the contest with her paper, "'Corpse of Milk': The Abject in Hades and Lestrygonians." Congratulations to these students! Lenni Steiner, a Bloomsday sponsor, stands with Alex Einspahr  and a cut-out of one of the Rosenbach brothers

Avni has been awarded a Graduate Student Summer Research Fellowship for summer 2019, which will take her to London.  Here’s Avni’s description of her research project: "This project, 'Indentured Imaginaries,' studies postcolonial literary narratives and memoirs alongside colonial records of labour and migration archived at the British Library in London. By engaging this archive, I will look closely at the ways in which dispossessed subjects of empire—in particular, indentured workers shunted from British colonies in Asia to sugar plantations in Africa and the Caribbean—are figured in both historical documents as well as the postcolonial writing of Amitav Ghosh and Gaiutra Bahadur. In doing so, I seek to understand how literary texts from the Global South narrate the advent of colonial modernity and cosmopolitanism from below in ways that subtend, exceed, and even subvert the historical record as well as national literary paradigms." Congratulations, Avni!

Congratulations to Angela Christaldi , who was just selected as a recipient of the Graduate Studies Service Award for academic year 2018-2019! This award recognizes individuals whose contributions to graduate studies have enhanced the scholarly activities undertaken in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.  Angela is receiving this award in recognition of her valuable contributions as one of the student editors of the 2019 issue of CONCEPT. Way to go, Angela!

Don James McLaughlin, ‘09, was awarded the Diane Hunter Prize for best dissertation in English from the University of Pennsylvania. The award, which Don James received in September 2018, goes to the best dissertation in English submitted during the previous academic year. His dissertation is entitled Infectious Affect: The Phobic Imagination in American Literature.  Don James was awarded his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in July 2017. He held a Visiting Assistant Professorship in English at Swarthmore College in 2017-2018. Following this appointment, he has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professorship in 19th-Century American Literature at the University of Tulsa, beginning in the fall of 2018. Don James has also been awarded the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, 2018-2019, for the purpose of conducting research in their collection of early American newspapers, rare books, and manuscripts, as he turns his dissertation into a...

Don James McLaughlin, ‘09, was awarded the Diane Hunter Prize for best dissertation in English from the University of Pennsylvania. The award, which Don James received in September 2018, goes to the best dissertation in English submitted during the previous academic year. His dissertation is entitled  Infectious Affect: The Phobic Imagination in American Literature . Don James was awarded his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in July 2017. He held a Visiting Assistant Professorship in English at Swarthmore College in 2017-2018. Following this appointment, he has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professorship in 19th-Century American Literature at the University of Tulsa, beginning in the fall of 2018. Don James has also been awarded the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, 2018-2019, for the purpose of conducting research in their collection of early American newspapers, rare books, and manuscripts, as he turns his dissertation into...

The department is proud to announce that Prof. Lauren Shohet 's 2004 essay, "The Banquet of Scotland (PA)," initially published in Shakespeare Survey 57, has been chosen for The Peter Holland Collection, the editor's selection of the best essay published in this journal of record for each of the past 20 years. The collection is available for free here .

Congratulations to second-year student William Repetto for winning this year’s Meyer Innovation and Creative Excellence Award from the Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship (ICE) Institute . The ICE Awards were created to recognize a spirit of innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship that enhances Villanova University. The annual award of a trophy and $1,000 goes to one graduating student from each college (as well as to one faculty member). William won the award for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences for serving as the project lead for the launch of the Diversity and Inclusion Resource Guide at Falvey Library. As stated on the guide’s home page, it is intended to aid students in exploring a “vast range of social, political sexual, racial, and gendered issues in today’s world. This page offers a point of entry for exploration and seeks to provide a space for genuine personal, intellectual and emotional growth. As a library community composed of diverse voices,...

The English Department announces the following prizes to be awarded for the best essays written for English classes.  Essays can be submitted by faculty or students.  They should be e-mailed to Sharon Rose-Davis, English Department administrative assistant ( sharon.rose-davis@villanova.edu ).    (1)    Undergraduate Award   - The Jerome J. Fischer Memorial Award ($250), given to the most distinguished scholarly or critical essay written by an undergraduate student at Villanova. (2)    Graduate Award   - The Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award ($250), given to the most distinguished scholarly or critical essay written by a graduate student at Villanova.  Eligibility Both competitions are open only to students taking courses at Villanova University.  To be eligible, essays must have been (1)  written within a year preceding the deadline; (2)  written either for a Villanova English course (...

Our very own William Repetto participated in Falvey Library's Creativity Challenge where he took the role of project lead to work his team through creating an Inclusivity Topic Guide, winning a grant to continue to develop the page. Read about the process and outcome of the project here ! Congrats!

Concept , Villanova's own Graduate Journal published its latest volume this April. We are proud to announce that the winner of this year's Graduate Research Prize went to our very own Kevin Halleran for his essay "Nothing But a Good Man Feeling Bad: How Toomer Sings the Blues in Cane ."