The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Second-year MA student Anne Jones presented at the virtual Graduate Student Research Symposium last week, sharing her work from her Summer Research Fellowship. Here is the abstract for Anne's paper, entitled "Unraveling the Empire: The Spinning Wheel as an Actor in Gandhi’s Writings and the Imperial Network": "M. K. Gandhi’s writings have been crucial to the ideologies that informed the Indian independence movement. In works like "Hind Swaraj," he outlined his belief that political self-rule for India had to be bound with economic independence and civil disobedience. For Gandhi, these tenets materialized through the use of a crucial object: the charkha or spinning wheel. Spinning one’s own cotton/cloth, he argued, would mobilize India’s rural population and assist India’s economic independence by rejecting imported British cloth. Using the hermeneutics of Actor-Network Theory, my research traced how the spinning wheel gained anticolonial agency and created ...

Our own Avni Sejpal will be presenting at the Graduate Student Research Symposium on September 13th at 3PM in the Haverford Room of the Connelly Center. Here is the abstract of her presentation: “Indentured Imaginaries: Global Migration, Worldmaking, and Postcolonial Literature examines neglected colonial narratives and bureaucratic archives of indenture at the British Library. It puts historical records into conversation with postcolonial literary narratives to produce an account of nineteenth-century globalization. Little attention has been paid to the ways in which dispossessed communities engaged with transnationalism. This project corrects that oversight by studying globalization from below. It shows that impoverished colonial subjects, forgotten by history, did not merely experience the world at large, they actively produced it. Finally, it demonstrates that this transnationalism necessarily transforms contemporary notions of both globalization and world literature.” Way to go...