The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Although people often think humanities research is conducted by individuals, it is always collaborative. For Professor Mary Mullen, there is no greater pleasure than thinking with other people and refining research and writing with them. Professor Mullen's recently published co-edited volume, with Professor Renee Fox, titled   Race, Violence, and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland , is the product of several collaborative conversations at the University of Notre Dame, Villanova University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. The volume is dedicated to Sara Maurer, Mary's undergraduate professor, mentor, and friend, who dreamed up ideas behind the book.  For more about this important volume, see  this recent blog  post from Liverpool University Press.

Mary Mullen will present her research on Irish famine novels on Wednesday, April 3 at the Novel Theory Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She will participate alongside scholars Claire Connolly and Mary Burke in an event titled,  "Irish Fiction Then and Now."  This is a hybrid event that will take in person and online. You can  register here. Here is the abstract for her talk: Irish famine novels often begin by addressing a skeptical public fatigued by stories of Irish suffering. Many authors passively “place” or “lay” their novels before the public, insisting that however strange their narrative seems, they depict the truth. The preface to William Carleton’s  The Squanders of Castle Squanders  (1852) is defensive, suggesting that despite his concern “for the general welfare of my countrymen,” he expects that all parties will be disappointed with the novel’s politics. Considering these prefaces and other public addresses within Iris...

A number of exciting opportunities to study or intern in Ireland have application due dates which are fast approaching at the moment. You can read about these opportunities on the relevant webpage offered by Irish Studies. You can also view a flyer, below, about the Jackie Clarke internship, which has a February 15th deadline. Please bear in mind that candidates need not have specific Irish experience (though that could help). It is possible to approach these opportunities from a variety of disciplines or areas of expertise, such as modernism, post-colonial studies, performance studies, et cetera. Many of our English MA students have availed themselves of chances to study in Ireland in recent years. Theo Campbell conducted research in Ireland , Jesse Schwartz interned there with the Jackie Clarke internship, and Caitlyn Dittmeier completed the Irish Theater Summer Studio . You can learn about their adventures in the above, linked articles and videos from the YAWP!

Sometimes our grad students’ research interests take them far from home, and we are fortunate enough to hear from them about their experiences. This year, Theo Campbell, MA ’23, earned a graduate summer research fellowship and pursued research abroad in Ireland and in the UK. Here is their story: “The research I did this summer was a continuation of a project that started as my term paper for the Literary Theory class last fall. For that paper, I read the memoir of B. N. Hedderman, a district nurse who worked in the Aran Islands in the 1910s, through lenses of vulnerability and post-colonial studies. My plan for my research this summer was to look at other accounts from district nurses in rural Ireland from around the same time period to see whether Hedderman’s memoir and the conclusions I drew from it are indicative of the district nursing program as a whole, or whether she’s an anomaly. “My research involved going to several different archives to try and find those other accounts. He...

Professor Megan Quigley was quoted in the New York Times on a new edition of James Joyce's  Ulysses with illustrations by Eduardo Arroyo: “I tell my students," said Professor Quigley, "to find anything they can that will help us to understand Joyce’s master novel — literature or music mentioned, historical references, later novelists influenced by Joyce (like Sally Rooney), maps, charts, previous minds who have tussled and argued and written about Joyce in everything from scholarly articles to blogs and fanfic. Joyce’s universe is one for the obsessive reader who will find any clues to chart their way through the novel. I’m happy to throw my hat in to support an edition of Ulysses  with images.”  You can check out the full article  here.

 Today is the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses in its entirety. Happy birthday to Leopold, Stephen, Molly, and the gang. If you're interested in reading a bit more about the book, especially in a Villanova context, why not check out a piece by Ethan Shea, a first-year graduate student here in the program, which is available on the Falvey Library blog . 

Professor Mary Mullen will participate in a two day, online symposium sponsored by the Rutgers British Studies Center and Berkeley's British Studies Center on "How Victorianists (Might) Talk about Race" on February 17 and 18th.  She will present her research on nineteenth-century Ireland in a paper titled, "Comparison, Colonial Unknowing, and Ireland." For more information about the event, and to register for the event, go  here (schedule coming soon).  

Professor Mary Mullen will be speaking at an upcoming CUNY C19 conference on “Hard Border(s): Ireland and the British Question,” to take place virtually on May 7. Professor Mullen will be speaking about Ireland and the Colonial Politics of Public Interest. The conference's speakers will touch on a variety of themes related to Ireland and its relationship to Great Britain, including "imperial hauntings," "nationalism," and "populism."  Professor Mullen is the author of Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Edinburgh, 2019), which won the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature from the American Conference for Irish Studies. She has published articles on settler colonialism, the politics of time, public humanities, fast-day literature, and nineteenth-century English and Irish writing. She is currently working on a new book project on the colonial politics of public interest, which considers how public i...

Shirley Wong , PhD, from Westfield State University, will deliver a talk titled, " Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Creative Economy,"   from her forthcoming book on globalization, place, and contemporary Irish poetry   Monday, February 15th at 7:00 P.M. EST. The talk is open to all!   In this lecture, Wong will discuss occasional poetry, which memorializes a specific event such as a funeral or military victory. Wong argues that contemporary Irish poets exploit the poem’s historic ties to patronage in order to critique the creative economy schemes (e.g. UNESCO City of Literature; Per Cent for Art Scheme; World Cities Culture Forum). Focusing on the work of Paula Meehan, she argues that occasional poetry dramatizes the capitalist crisis of contemporary Irish literature, which has been transformed by Ireland’s rapid financialization from the 1980s to the present. Wong makes the case that contemporary Irish poetry proves an exemplary site to explore how the ...

Boston College's Comhfhios Irish Studies conference is looking for proposals for a virtual conference this March. In the past, a number of Villanova grad students have presented at this conference. This year, the conference will be virtual, but if there are costs, the Irish Studies Program can provide support. See the original CFP below: Call for Papers Comhfhios Boston College Conflict and Resolution: Looking Back and Looking Forward March 5th, 2021 Boston College, Connolly House, Chestnut Hill, MA The Irish Studies Graduate Students of Boston College, in conjunction with the Irish Studies Program, are pleased to be hosting the fourth annual Comhfhios Boston College conference. Comhfhios (pronounced “co-is”) meaning “knowledge together,” or “open to all knowledge,” invites emerging scholars in all Irish Studies fields to gather again in Boston. This year, we will discuss the themes of conflict and resolution in Irish Studies; from military struggles to social quarrels, from cent...

 Dr. Mary Burke (UConn) is requesting papers for a 20-minute presentation in a panel on the Irish-American actress Grace Kelly. The panel will take place in March in Philadelphia at NeMLA, which is slated to be conducted in person.  According to the call for papers, "In the scholarship of Irish America, there is a startling absence of work on Grace Kelly (Princess Grace of Monaco), a cultured woman whose interest in her heritage led her widower to endow an Irish literature library in her honor. Irish American Studies has traditionally been preoccupied with narratives of Irish suffering or with prominent and powerful men, which does not gel with the story of an exceedingly photogenic woman from an immediate background of some privilege. Nevertheless, this glamorous veneer is the end-point of a multi-generation family story that follows the broad contours of post-famine Irish immigrant experience." More details can be found here . 

Congratulations to Dr. Mary Mullen, who has won the 2019 Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature from the American Conference for Irish Studies for her book Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism . Here's what the judges wrote: "Mary Mullen's Novel Institutions is a fascinating study that reassesses both literary histories and current scholarship about the realist novel. In clear, persuasive prose, it reads Irish realist novels to offer a transnational understanding of realism as a genre. By identifying the temporal anachronisms in Irish realism, the book draws provocative conclusions about how the unruly features of all realist novels disrupt their texts' dominant institutional politics, and about how we ourselves might disturb the demands of the institutions we inhabit by being likewise 'untimely.' Mullen's work is rigorous and original, and her ideas about how to push back against the strictures of academic in...

Emerald Isle Edition By Guest Contributor Jesse Schwartz This past summer, I had the privilege of spending 8 weeks as an archival intern at the Jackie Clarke Collection in Ballina, Ireland. I had this opportunity because of the Irish Studies Program at Villanova, which sends (and funds!) two or three students from Villanova to the Jackie Clarke every summer. I had never been to Ireland before, and it was an amazing experience to live and work in Ballina, which is a small town in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. The museum is a small, publicly funded, non-profit collection of historical materials that formerly belonged to Ballina resident, Jackie Clarke. The museum has three full-time employees, and a rotating part-time staff of six other workers, all of whom were lovely to get to know and work with. In his lifetime, Jackie Clarke collected over 100,000 pieces of Irish history, and turned his collection over to the town after his death in 2013. My job was two-fold: half of the...

The Irish Studies Graduate Students of Boston College, in conjunction with the Center for Irish Programs, are pleased to be hosting the third annual Comhfhios Boston College conference. Comhfhios (pronounced “co-is”) meaning “knowledge together,” or “open to all knowledge,” invites emerging scholars in all Irish Studies fields to gather again in Boston. This year, we will discuss the role of women ( mná , pronounced “ma-naw”) in Irish Studies; from history to social media, literature to politics, activism to academia, we will focus on the impact women have had on Ireland. The conference will feature a keynote address by Leeann Lane (Dublin City University) and will include a panel presentation as well as roundtables. We invite proposals for presentations from any Irish Studies discipline pertaining to this year’s theme, “In Awe of all Mná : A Study of Irish Women.” We especially encourage submissions from junior scholars, recent graduates, and current graduate students. Topic...

Spots still available! Contact Mike Malloy or Joseph Lennon for more information!

This post by guest blogger and first year grad student Caitlyn Dittmeier. This past Monday I had the opportunity to interview Professor Jill McCorkel, a professor of Sociology and Criminology at Villanova, for the Irish Studies Anniversary podcast series. As a former Irish studies minor and now a graduate student continuing my studies in Irish literature, I was so interested to learn more about her research in Ireland last year. Professor McCorkel has been investigating the U.S. criminal justice system for many years, visiting prisons and serving as an advocate and consultant for wrongful conviction cases. For any new place McCorkel travels to, she makes sure to visit the prisons in the area-performing participant observation and having honest interviews with prisoners and prison staff. I really admire her ethnographic approach to research because it allows her to listen closely to the individual stories and experiences that speak to larger issues of injustice. As Professor McC...

The Referent of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century February 21, 2020 9:30 AM -5:00 PM Reception at 5 Villanova University Garey Hall 10A Register in Advance here This conference builds on fresh work on reference—or how the text refers to a world outside of the text—in order to rethink the aesthetics and politics of nineteenth-century Irish literature. Responding to a set of shared readings, participants will ask big questions: What does literature about nineteenth-century Ireland refer to, and what are its habits of reference? Does the referent change for readers across time? Now that old saws about Ireland’s failed realism have been put to bed, what purposes might be served by thinking about Irish referential habits? Does thinking about Ireland and reference strand nineteenth-century Ireland in old paradigms of representation that preclude us thinking about mediation ? How does the nineteenth-century literature and culture of Ireland refer to our own culture and...

Ashley DiRienzo completed the Summer Studio last summer (2018). Check out what she has to say about her experience! "Thinking about doing the Irish Summer Studio program this summer? Or just generally unsure about summer plans but want to make good use (to say the least) out of your time? Then here are a few reasons why enrolling in this program is an incredible opportunity based on this brief testimonial. I went on the trip last year and it was a highlight of my Villanova career as an English graduate student. Even if you aren’t necessarily invested in Irish literature or theatre specifically this trip is exciting for anyone interested in expanding and learning about what a literary city like Dublin has to offer. As a group, we got to learn the complete ins and outs of developing productions through classes that were engaging and hands-on. We also completed playwriting workshops, put on a production as a team, and worked with other graduate students from Dublin. We also had the...

Students interested in participating in Villanova’s Irish Summer Studio program are encouraged to attend an informational meeting on Tuesday, October 2nd, at 3:30 pm in the Theatre Department's Green Room in the ground floor of Vasey Hall. Dr. Valerie Joyce (Theatre) and Dr. Joseph Lennon (English), as well as students who have participated in the program, will be present at the meeting to explain the program and how students can go about getting involved. The Irish Summer Studio From the studio to the stage, students in the program will study the workings and history of Ireland's world-class national theatre while developing their own theatre skills, knowledge, and practice. Students from Villanova will work alongside students from Irish and other universities and be taught by practitioners and professors from Ireland and the US. Student work will culminate in a showing of final work at the Lir, Ireland's National Academy of Dramatic Art and guided by Abbey Theatre p...