The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Dr. Lauren Shohet has been crisscrossing the country lately presenting on Shakespeare, Milton, AI, and more, so we thought it would be a good time to catch up with her and discuss her teaching and scholarship. To begin with, Dr. Shohet gave a lecture at the Huntington Library on January 31 st on “(In)Visibility and Mediation: Milton’s Eve,” in which she also discussed vanitas paintings (more on this later). Then, in February, she attended the Renaissance Society of America conference in San Francisco, where she gave a talk as part of the book history discussion group. In addition, while in San Francisco, Dr. Shohet also presided over Milton Society events. Finally, in early April, she attended the Shakespeare Association Conference in Denver and presented on Shakespeare and AI. Regarding mediation and Milton’s Eve, Dr. Shohet explained that she is in the middle of a long project that examines mediation in Paradise Lost-- as she put it, “What it is for angels and for the Son of God, t...

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

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 ...

  Villanova, PA –  In How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol (Cornell University Press, 2022), Villanova English Professor Alice Dailey, PhD, offers a study of Shakespeare’s English history plays that initiates a radical break from the interpretive practices that have dominated literary criticism for the past several decades. While those practices have traditionally prioritized the historical context from which a literary artifact emerges, Dr. Dailey’s book expands the plays’ context beyond the conditions of Shakespeare’s England, allowing readers to consider them among human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. How to Do Things with Dead People describes Shakespeare’s historical drama as—fundamentally—a reproductive technology by which living replicas of dead historical figures are animated and re-killed on stage. Considering the plays in such terms exposes their affinity with ...

 The Twenty-Fourth Annual British Graduate Shakespeare Conference is calling for papers for their hybrid conference to take place on June 23-25.  According to their website, "BritGrad is an interdisciplinary conference which provides a friendly and stimulating academic forum in which graduate students can present their research, hear plenaries from world-renowned academics and network with each other. From 1999-2019, the conference took place in an active hub for early modern research: The Shakespeare Institute, part of the University of Birmingham, based in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. In 2020, BritGrad took place online in an equally dynamic virtual space, which allowed the conference to include more participants than ever before. This continued with the 2021 conference, which initiated a hybrid format offering three days of online panels and events, as well as two days in-person at the Shakespeare Institute." This year's format will again be fully hyb...

For the first time ever, the Villanova English grad program put on their very own literary bake-off! All contestants had to bake a Shakespeare-inspired sweet for the Bard's 452nd birthday. Our graduate participants in front of their work! The entries were as delicious as they were creative! Traditionally made Elizabethan Lemon Cakes Romeo & Juliet inspired apple crumb Opeelia! - candied orange peels dipped in chocolate Coffee and Chocolate two layer cake "Blood will have blood" so says this Red Velvet cake And finally the bake-off winner, Laura Tscherry's There's Rosemary and Lemon Tart - That's for Remembrance

Please mark your calendars for March 23-24, when we'll be holding a series of fascinating workshops and performances of an 18th-century puppet-show adaptation of Hamlet by the critically acclaimed Austin, TX-based theater group Hidden Room. No tickets will be necessary. The workshops will be geared toward Villanova and Penn grad students in English, Theatre, and Creative Writing.  The Hidden Room Theatre’s der Bestrafte Brudermord On March 23-24, Villanova will host award-winning Texas-based theater group The Hidden Room to stage their original-practices puppet-show production of der Bestrafte Brudermord, the mysterious slapstick Hamlet found in a German manuscript in the 18th century. The Hidden Room's visit to Villanova will include two evening shows, each followed by an artist talk-back, and two workshops on theatre scholarship, dramatic practice, and arts entrepreneurship. This event is co-sponsored by Villanova and the University of Pennsylvania. All members of the...

Jon presented his paper, “Mercy through Catholicism: Apocrypha in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice,” at the New Voices Graduate Conference on Origins, Identity, and Authenticity at Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA in January 2014.

I hope that someone will be celebrating my birthday 450 years from now, though Shakespeare may not have expected this kind of fete: On April 23, Villanova's English Department, under the leadership of the wonderful Dr. Alice Dailey, celebrated Shakespeare's 450th birthday with a book-shaped cake, a Hamlet-inspired student film, and Shakespearean door prizes such as Hamlet finger puppets. A surprisingly large and energetic crowd filled the Old Falvey Library Reading Room, where a large screen held a projection of Dr. Dailey's "@Shakespeare" live tweets, and a birthday cake for Shakespeare sat next to birthday-cake flavored Oreos. This party whimsically assumed that Shakespeare would be quite caught up on both technology and 20th century desserts had he managed to live long enough. Old-fashioned readings of favorite passages were presented alongside a student film that, in a postmodern, non-chronological way, explored the what-ifs in Hamlet...

The students of Shakespeare in Performance (HON 5753) invite you to our free public performances of The Merchant of Venice on May 2 and 3. After a semester-long literary and dramatic exploration of Shakespeare's play, led by Dr. Alice Dailey (English) and Dr. Shawn Kairschner (Theatre), the honors students are pleased to present an hour-and-twenty-minute production that features the work of eleven student actors, original music, and a post-show talk by the cast. Click here to read the production flyer.