The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Last Friday, 2nd year English MA students Gia Allgoode and Mia Familetti presented their research in 3 Minute Thesis-style oral presentations at Villanova's annual Research Symposium. Gia's presentation, titled "Reading Three Voices in Harmony," analyzed medieval mystical texts through three different "voices:" the literary, the social, and the religious. Mia's presentation, titled  “' It Matters What You Call A Thing': The Effect of Linguistic Interference on Trauma Narratives,'" analyzed Iranian poet Solmaz Sharif's poetry collection Look to " uncover how governmental linguistic [re]construction after 9/11 disrupts the ability to integrate traumatic events into personal narrative...." Congratulations Mia and Gia! Gia Allgoode presents "Reading Three Voices in Harmony" Mia Familetti presents "It Matters What You Call a Thing"

 By  Alexis Stakem, MA ‘28 Julia Reagan MA '26 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 ...

The English Department is happy to announce Co-Working Wednesdays!  Wednesdays in the English Department office (SAC 402) from 5:30-7:15 PM.  First session is September 30th . See you there!  

       Last week, I sat down for a chat with Alexis Atwood ‘26 to discuss how one class from her first semester of courses in the Graduate English program inspired her to pursue a fascinating research topic. Alexis arrived at Villanova last fall and, as a first-year student, took the required ENG8000: Literary Theory with Dr. Heather Hicks, a survey course designed to introduce first-years to a wide variety of theoretical fields and frameworks. She told me how two particular classes in ENG8000—on Vulnerability Studies and Border Studies—helped her build upon her pre-existing scholarly interests and develop them further in a new context.       “I’ve always been interested in discourse in particular and the ways that discourse exposes systems of dominance, so I think that's kind of what brought me to Vulnerability Studies," said Alex.  "And then I found that poetry was a potent source to pull from when it came to understanding discourse and the...

  Left-hand row, front to back: Gia Allgoode, Ava Galal, Kieva Mark, Mia Familetti, Jacqueline Moyer, Emma Kearney Right-hand row, front to back: Maggie Murtha, Sean Karlen, Tate Gibbons, Renie Christensen, Guadalupe Martinez, Allison Hicks Not pictured: Tatiana Campos-Teixeira, Christopher Supplee, Sonia Singh

Please join us for the   Fall 2024 Graduate Studies CLAS Research Symposium TOMORROW-- this Friday, November 15! This event highlights the outstanding and diverse scholarship being conducted by graduate students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Our very own Jaxon Parker will be among the presenters. When:  Friday, November 15 Time: 1 p.m. – 4 p.m. Where: Mullen Center Court Theatre (Oral Presentations)               Mullen Center Lobby (Poster Presentations)                                      Oral presentations will begin at 1 p.m. in the Court Theatre of the Mullen Center. Poster presentations commence thereafter in the lobby at 3 p.m. Please see the list of presenters below and make plans to support your classmates! Ligh...

 The 14th Annual Thesis and Field Exam Symposium was held in SAC 300 on Wednesday, May 8, 2024, and featured research presentations by Megan Hayes MA '24, Sarah Gregory Herr MA '24, Matt Villanueva MA '24, and Eva Wynn MA '24.  Megan Hayes MA '24 presented her field exam, "Gothic Modernism: Exploring Race, Gender, and Sexuality Through Haunted Women." She described gothic modernism as a relatively new field, and fictional women as the topic where gothicism and modernism meet. She addressed questions such as: what constitutes haunting, and how are women haunted differently from men? Megan also provided advice for future students considering field exams. She said that she made her own syllabus at the beginning of her field exam, pairing one or two books per week along with secondary readings, and assigned herself response papers and summaries. Megan then spent three or four weeks in April writing. She found this structure extremely helpful in completing her ...

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...

By Melody Gleason, MA '25 What better way to wrap up Women’s History Month than honoring Villanova English’s first full-time woman professor: Margaret Powell Esmonde? Margaret Powell Esmonde taught at Villanova from 1974 until her death in 1983. She was a specialist in Renaissance literature who also taught various courses in science fiction and children’s literature. Beyond her contributions to Villanova, Margaret Powell Esmonde was an active member of the Children’s Literature Association, working on the board and eventually serving as president from 1978-79. She was awarded various fellowships through this association, one in 1982 for a study of the role of girls and women in children's science fiction. Margaret Powell Esmonde’s impact remains for girls and women in the literary scene. The Villanova English Department continues to honor her legacy through the Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award which is given annually to the most distinguished graduate essay written in a ...

 By Melody Gleason MA '25 Over the past two semesters, Dr. Dailey, Dr. Chelsea Phillips from the Theater department, and a group of students from various programs and departments have been working together to examine the theme of revenge and justice as a tragic element. The first half of this project started as class in the fall 2023 semester called, Legacies of Revenge – Across Time, Space, Genre, & Media. The course engaged both graduate and undergraduate students from multiple disciplines including English majors, minors, and theatre majors. Students in the course studied narratives of revenge across a plethora of entertainment mediums: from classical drama, to contemporary fiction, to modern film. The class especially focused on the play,  The Spanish Tragedy  written in the 1580s.   Dr. Dailey describes  The Spanish Tragedy  as  “the precursor to  Hamlet  and to a whole extensive revenge tragedy genre that enters the Elizabethan Thea...

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 ...

 By Matt Villanueva, MA '24 Over winter break, I had the privilege to attend the 139 th annual MLA conference in downtown Philadelphia. Throughout the four-day conference I was able to attend many panels and special sessions on various topics and presented on a special session “Recentering Black Women Intellectuals: A Philadelphia School District Collaboration” to discuss our research project with other scholars and educators and to debut the Taught by Literature website (taughtbyliterature.org). The conference days were, admittedly, tiring and overwhelming at times. Every block time had multiple sessions that I wished to attend and for three days, I bopped around the center city Marriot and Loews hotel conference rooms to hear fellow grad students adjacent to established scholars share their work. The two days I attended a myriad of sessions for the whole day ranging from topics of representation in digital humanities, the storytelling power of music, postcolonialism, and Fil...

 Welcome to our new MA students for fall 2023! Counterclockwise from right: Ariel Hooks, Melody Gleason, Samantha Philipps, Jeanbry Torres, Jaxon Parker, Mahtab Chaudhry Not pictured: Rebecca Amrick, Annabella Nordlund, Nosike Okafor, Karina Renee We look forward to getting to know you all!

One of our grad students, Adam Riekstins, MA '24, recently interviewed Dr. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, currently Professor and chair in the Department of Religion and chair in Science and Technology Studies at Williams College. According to Adam, "A few weeks ago, I had an amazing opportunity to interview Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, a current academic 'celeb' who has laid a lot of the groundwork for metamodernism, a trending school of theory (both academically and publicly). I have written a lot about metamodernism in my graduate studies and presented on it at a few conferences as well." Adam initially reached out to Dr. Storm with a question about his work: "I approached reaching out to Dr. Storm very carefully, since his work has been the cornerstone of my graduate career so far and I didn't want to trigger a Wayne's World 'we're not worthy!' moment," he said. "I sent him an email with a few quick questions about metamodern...

Villanova Magazine  recently featured Professor Lutes's research on Black women writers. Learn more and read the full article  here .

  Pictured, left to right: Caitlin Salomon, Deidra Cali, Ethan Shea, Hannah Kahn Not Pictured: Theo Campbell

The Villanova English department held its (lucky) 13th Annual Thesis and Field Exam Symposium on the evening of Friday, May 5th.  We had four presenters: Theo Campbell “Customs Handed Down to Us”: Colonialism and Healthcare in Nurse Bridget Hedderman’s Glimpses of my Life in Aran Theo spoke about their study of Nurse Bridget Hedderman's autobiography on her time serving as a nurse in the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, and how that work has not previously been viewed as a post-colonial text, nor put into conversation with other, more famous works such as J.M. Synge's The Aran Islands . Theo emphasized Bridget Hedderman's heretofore underreported Gaeltacht background. The complicating factor of medical aid as a colonial intervention was also investigated and discussed. Hannah Kahn The Mediated, Medicalized, and Mortal: Tracing the Body Through Don DeLillo's White Noise and The Day Room and Noah Baumbach's White Noise Hannah Kahn looked at Don DeLillo...

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

This is a profile written by current grad student Deidra Cali '23 MA about her classmate, Theo Campbell '23 MA. You can see the profile in its original context here . Thanks, Deidra, and congratulations, Theo! VILLANOVA, Pa. – Whether it is because of similar research interests, connections within the field or other, more nuanced factors, faculty play a large role in students’ choice of graduate school and are also instrumental in shaping the graduate student experience. Villanova English master’s student   Theo Campbell '23 MA   points to the kindness, generosity and support of Villanova faculty for helping them to flourish as a scholar and to gain acceptance to the English PhD program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they will be starting in the fall. For Campbell, building connections is essential. “I recommend that prospective students reach out to faculty members who work in the area they are interested in, even if they are not teaching a graduate semina...