The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

I recently had the chance to speak with Professor Adrienne Perry about her forthcoming co-edited poetry anthology, Other Legacies: Great Unsung American Poets . The book, co-edited by Kevin Prufer and Martin Rock, features contributions from 35 contemporary poets, each introducing a poet of their choice whom they feel has been neglected in literary conversations. The book arose out of Professor Perry and her co-editors' work on the Unsung Masters Series, an annual publication highlighting the work of an under-appreciated poet. The publication has an associated reading series, for which Professor Perry served as co-host, in which several scholars and writers are invited to come together to read the work of one such neglected poet. Recognizing the value these readings brought to discussions of American poetry, Professor Perry and her co-editors sought to build upon this unique experience in the form of a poetry anthology–one that would notably differ from traditional poetry anthologi...

Dr. Alice Dailey developed a photography-writing project, titled “Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations,” in collaboration with her son, Adam Dailey. This past August, Tupelo Quarterly published this project in a folio on collaboration.  Page 8 of "Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations" Led by a fascination with creating analog spiritualistic photographs, Dr. Dailey found herself experimenting with several mediums outside of the process of photography itself. What started as a project to recreate Victorian spiritualist photographs transformed into her recently published photography-writing project, “Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations.” Dr. Dailey describes this project as originating from a desire to understand the creation of analog spiritualist photographs alongside the theory of embodied practice as a form of historical knowledge.  “The project thus began with no writing or narration planned. I simply wanted to make pictures,” explains Dr. Dailey when...

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.

 The English Department is proud to share the release of Dr. Lauren Shohet's new edited collection,  Queering Early Modern Death in England: Figuration, Representation, Matter.  This new collection, edited by Dr. Shohet and Dr. Christine Varnado of the University of Buffalo, analyzes a variety of celebrated texts, including  The Duchess of Malfi ,  The Alchemist ,  The Spanish Tragedy ,  The Winter's Tale ,  Richard III , and  A Midsummer Night's Dream , using queer theoretical methodologies to offer fascinating insights regarding early modern conceptualizations of humanity, embodiment, and temporality, among others. Dr. Shohet and Dr. Varnado utilize queer logics to suggest poignant understandings of early modern death as non-dualist, non-linear, a-teleological, and fruitfully muddled, showcasing the fascinating expansiveness of death through a queer lens. A worthy addition to the collection of anyone interested in questions of queernes...

 Olivia Martel '00, English, and MA '03, English, has just published her debut novel, How to Fly .  From Olivia's website:  "Twenty-nine-year-old Chelsea Pearl is thrown for a loop when her therapist asks her that one simple question. Always a helper, Chelsea isn’t one for self-reflection. She’s fooled herself into believing that planning social events for graduate students at elite Swank University and hanging with friends is enough. But is it? Even her two best friends—Raquel, a globe-trotting stunt woman, and Matteo, a former love interest—are worried about her lately... "Chelsea’s most challenging student, Ivana Volkov, has issues of her own and isn’t into Chelsea’s so-called help. When Chelsea finally meets a great guy, her ability to keep playing by the rules is threatened. He’s off limits, and she runs the risk of losing her job. But if she doesn’t take a chance, she fears she’ll stay stuck and miss out on growing into who she is really meant to be. "I...

 Alexandra Edwards, a 2012 graduate of Villanova's MA English program and an instructor at Texas Christian University, was recently awarded an honorable mention from the Modern Language Association for their Prize for Contingent Faculty and Independent Scholars. Alex received the mention for her book,  Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom . According to Edwards's book's  website , her book "investigates the overlapping cultures of fandom and American literature from the late 1800s to the mid-1940s, exploding the oft-repeated myth that fandom has its origins in the male-dominated letter columns of science fiction pulp magazines in the 1930s." In the words of the MLA prize committee: “ Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom makes an ambitious intervention and speaks across genres and disciplines. Alexandra Edwards’s study will become required reading in the growing genre of fanfiction studi...

 Dr. Lauren Shohet has just published an article in the journal Anglia titled "Touching the Shield of Achilles: Ekphrasis and/as Re-Mediation." Here is the abstract: Homer’s treatment of the Matter of Troy illuminates the foundational impossibility of representation in ways that sponsor examination of the semiotic choices, the costs and benefits and tradeoffs, of different practices. Homer’s ekphrastic description of the shield of Achilles highlights a variety of available semiotic systems focused on different media of representation. This article explores Homeric ekphrasis in relation to later theories of media intersection, interaction, and transformation. Not only word, image, music, and dance, but also human perception as such, are subject to mediation. You can view more information on the article here . The shield's design as interpreted by Angelo Monticelli, ca. 1820, image courtesy of Wikipedia

Travis Foster just published an article titled   "White Supremacist Submission"   in   Transgender Studies Quarterly.  The article received the   American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize   honorable mention for the year’s best essays on American literature, tenured category.   Here's the abstract to the article: Scholars tend to envision the sexual politics of settler colonialism and slavery through masculinist conceptions in which penetration designates mastery and receptiveness subjugation. This article asks instead how white desires for sexual submission to nonwhite men operate within white supremacy. It augments white trans and queer studies' conceptualizations of bottoming with theories of white submission found in Black thought, particularly Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin. And it argues that both sets of ideas find themselves anticipated in the mid-nineteenth-century writings of the white, gender-variant author Theodore Winthrop—particularly...

 Professor Joe Drury has a chapter coming out next week in the new  Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English , edited by Nicole Aljoe, Sarah Eron, and Suvir Kaul. The title of Professor Drury's essay is “Humans, Machines, and Automatons.” Here is the abstract of Professor Drury's chapter: Lord Macartney’s assumptions about the Chinese taste for spectacular ornamental machinery during his unsuccessful 1793–1794 embassy reflected changing attitudes toward technology within Britain’s Industrial Enlightenment. Where machines had previously been valued for their aesthetic qualities, the labor required to produce them, and the luxurious consumption they excited, late eighteenth-century commentators such as Adam Smith increasingly emphasized their utility, the productive labor they saved, and the frugality required of the capitalists who introduced them. Responding to this shift, Frances Burney’s  Evelina  and William Beckford’s  Vathek  re...

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 ...

Sam Covais, MA '22, recently published  "'A Guy Needs Somebody': A Study of   Philia   in   Of Mice and Men."  You can read the article here . Congrats, Sam!

Lisa Sewell's poem, "The Land of Nod" was published on  t he Academy of American Poets poem-a-day site on December 6.  Read the full poem here .

Professor Michael Dowdy just signed a book contract with University of Nebraska Press. They will publish his collection of essays on fathering in anxious times,  Tell Me About Your Bad Guys , in spring 2025. For more about this collection and his other essays, see his  personal website.

 Professor Kamran Javadizadeh reviews Ben Lerner's  The Lights  in  The New Yorker.  Check out his essay here .

Professor Megan Quigley recently published "Kenner as an Eliot Fan"   at Nonsite.org . It is her first scholarly piece on fanfiction. It " works to break down the border between scholarship and fandom, impersonality and attachment, objective annotation and invested interpretation." Read the full article  here .

  Check out Kamran Javadizadeh's recent essay,   "On Diane Seuss"   in the London Review of Books.

  Professor Joseph Drury wrote the afterword for a recently published collection of essays,  British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830.   The afterword, “On the Uses of the History of Technology for Literary Studies and Vice Versa,” takes the essays in the collection as an occasion to reflect on what literary scholars can learn from the history of technology and what historians of technology can learn from literary studies (per Drury, it "kind of does what the title suggests"). It argues that the history of technology provides valuable models and terminology for thinking about the uses of literary forms and that literary studies can provide historians with insight into the cultural meanings and imagined uses of technologies, both of which can have a significant impact on their actual development in the real world.

 Professor Kamran Javadizadeh has another piece in The New Yorker , this time a review/essay centered on the recently released book of poems Couplets: A Love Story , by Maggie Millner. Javadizadeh's essay delves into Millner's use of rhyme and other poetic conventions, the relationship of rhyme to eroticism, and the transformation of the self in romantic relationships (among other things). Be forewarned, you will never look at IKEA beds the same way after reading this piece! You can read the piece in full on The New Yorker's website . 

Villanova MA student Adam Riekstins has published a novel with his publishing company, Parsley Wake Publishing. The book, Robin and the Great White Heron , is available in Kindle and paperback versions, both online and in select stores. Robin and the Great White Heron will also soon be released to Barnes and Noble and other major book retailers.  Robin and the Great White Heron is a philosophical adventure that explores the meaning in our lives against the excesses of society, religious fanaticism, comical grief and bad art. When Robin’s friend dies, she is faced by a wave of existential reckoning and must come to terms with not only her own indifference to life but with the world around her that has become so strange and alienating.   The novella takes influence from postmodern and philosophical authors such as Albert Camus, Nathanael West, Anthony Burgess and Vladimir Nabokov. The narrative aims to diagnose the modern problems of asserting singular identity in a sea of (no...

Professor Lauren Shohet recently contributed a chapter to the newly released Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface .  According to Routledge, "The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface provides a ground-breaking investigation into media-specific spaces where Shakespeare is experienced. While such operations may be largely invisible to the average reader or viewer, the interface properties of books, screens, and stages profoundly mediate our cognitive engagement with Shakespeare." Professor Shohet's chapter is called "The Heuristics of Interface: Shakespeare's Cymbeline ." Here is the abstract to Professor Shohet's chapter: "This chapter considers interfaces as liminal spaces where significantly different entities are mediated in ways that allow users to undertake some work across the gap between them, and investigates the heuristic as an essentially narrative tool for navigating that gap. The chapter explores what digitally ...