The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

On Tuesday, October 29th, in SAC 300, Professors Megan Quigley, Kamran Javadizadeh, and Patrick Query discussed T.S. Eliot and his legacy with an audience of graduate students. The event marked the publication of Eliot Now (Bloomsbury, 2024), an important new collection of scholarly approaches to the life and writing of T. S. Eliot, co-edited by Professor Megan Quigley. During the colloquium, moderated by Professor Javadizadeh, Megan was in conversation about the book—and about new directions in Eliot studies—with Patrick Query, Professor of English at West Point. We look forward to seeing our graduate students at our next graduate event, Thursday evening's Teaching Roundtable!

Ann Marie Jakubowski, Villanova English MA '17, has won the Fathman Award from the International T. S. Eliot Society for her paper, "Conversion as Revision: The Retrospective Poetics of Burnt Norton ." The Fathman Award is presented each year by the T.S. Eliot Society, at its annual meeting, to the best paper presented by an early-career scholar. Graduate students and recent PhDs are eligible. Ann Marie graduated with a Villanova MA in 2017 and a PhD at Washington University in St. Louis in 2024. She is currently a Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow at Valparaiso University, where she teaches literary and humanities courses in the undergrad honors college, Christ College. Congrats, Ann Marie! Kamran Javadizadeh, Ann Marie Jakubowski, and Megan Quigley

Professors Quigley and Javadizadeh gathered with students to celebrate 100 years of   The Wasteland . Take a look at photos from the event below. Books! Readings! Tarot readings!! Professor Javadizadeh and Professor Quigley More tarot readings! cake!

Our own Dr. Megan Quigley will be featured in an upcoming BBC radio documentary, "Hold on Tight: The Women of the Waste Land," which will debut on Nov. 3rd. You can listen to the documentary, which will examine the influence of various women on T.S. Eliot's life and work, here . You can read more about the women in Eliot's life, particularly in light of the recent unveiling of his letters to Emily Hale, in The Guardian, here . Dr. Quigley is quoted at length in that article. Here is a small example: “What does it mean when ‘pills’ means almost nothing? Editing shows our values – what we think is important for scholars to know and for students to learn... When I was a student, we were told that a proper study of The Waste Land was about exploring references to mythology, religion and literature – but of course relating these subjects to Eliot’s life, and our reception of it in the present day, is also really revealing.” Professor Quigley

Visitors to the forty-third annual T.S. Eliot Society meeting, held recently in St. Louis and marking the centenary of The Waste Land , had an opportunity to see four 'generations' of Villanovans presenting: former Villanova professor Vincent Sherry, Professor Megan Quigley, MA alum Ann-Marie Jakubowski '17, and current MA student Ethan Shea '23. Ethan Shea presented on "Eliot Goes to the Cinema: Film, Mechanical Reproduction, and the City in The Waste Land ." He told the YAWP that "Attending the T.S. Eliot Society Meeting was an incredibly rewarding experience, and I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from so many scholars on such a wide array of topics concerning Eliot. I also received a lot of helpful feedback on my presentation that I hope to apply to my research in the future. Hopefully, I'll be back again next year." Ethan Shea presenting   Ethan Shea, Megan Quigley, Ann-Marie Jakubowski   Megan Quigley, Vincent Sherry, Eth...

Scholarships are available to the 12th annual T.S. Eliot International Summer School, managed by the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. The Summer School will take place this July. Please see the flyer below, and more information is available on their website . Thanks to Professor Megan Quigley for bringing this to our attention!

Professor Quigley published an essay, "What If?: New Insight into the Friendship of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot" about her research on T. S. Eliot in the Los Angeles Review of Books . She has been working in a recently unsealed archive of letters between T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale at Princeton University. In Professor Quigley's words: "Nearly two years ago, an archive of letters was unsealed at Princeton that radically changed the way scholars understand the life and work of T. S. Eliot. Two months later, with COVID-19 numbers soaring, this long-awaited archive slammed shut again. On Monday, October 18, 2021, I was the first external scholar finally to return to those papers. Unsurprisingly, the focus of readers so far has been on the shocking relationship memorialized in the letters between Eliot and Emily Hale, the American teacher with whom he was avowedly in love. But the Hale letters contain at least one other revelation, with profound and as yet unexplored ...

Professor Megan Quigley was recently elected to the Board of Directors of the International T. S. Eliot Society. This weekend she taught a seminar to scholars from India, the Philippines, and all over the US—one of the benefits of zoom! But on Tuesday she’ll be back in her Falvey classroom looking forward to the 100th birthday of The Waste Land with her graduate class here.

This past fall, Ann Marie Jakubowski, who completed her MA at Villanova in 2017 and is now a graduate student in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, won the 2020 T. S. Eliot Studies Annual Prize for “‘Never anything anywhere’: Whiteness in Eliot’s Literary Imaginary.” The prize is awarded annually to the best seminar paper presented by an early-career scholar at the Annual Meeting of the International T. S. Eliot Society. Ann Marie's paper was presented as part of a peer seminar on ‘Eliot and Racial Others.’  Congratulations, Ann Marie!

Our own Megan Quigley has edited and written for a special Print Plus edition of Modernism/modernity that investigates the legacy of T.S. Eliot in the era of #MeToo.  Quigley asks whether Eliot's poetry can still speak to contemporary readers, and inquires, "Should Eliot, who in 1957 married his secretary, 38 years his junior, now, in the era of #MeToo, be 'cancelled'?" Quigley goes on to note that "Eliot’s posthumously published racist verses, particularly in the aptly titled The Columbiad , may be reason enough to topple his still-towering status." And yet, notes Quigley, "Students born in the 1990s see their own experiences of sexual violence, economic precarity, and racism refracted in Eliot’s fragmented war-torn verse." Quigley then goes on to examine closely a reference to "pills" (and the subsequent scholarly annotation of that reference) in Eliot's "The Waste Land." According to Modernism/modernity , "The P...

Congratulations to Dr. Megan Quigley, whose short essay, " Reading 'The Waste Land' with the #MeToo Generation ," was just published in the journal Modernism/Modernity 's digital Print Plus platform. Dr. Quigley's essay reflects on the challenges of teaching modernist literature in a new era of feminist activism.

Prof. Megan Quigley was a Visiting Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, this summer, working in the Merton College Library and Oxford’s Bodleian Library.  Researching the relationship between the poet T. S. Eliot and the genre of the novel, Professor Quigley spent her time looking at the Frank Brenchley T. S. Eliot Collection, focusing on the private correspondence of Eliot (he was a student at Merton), as well as at drafts and editions (also fascinating was the diary of Vivienne Eliot,  Eliot’s first wife who collaborated on sections of The Waste Land and who died in an institution).  This work is for Dr. Quigley’s new book project on Eliot.  She has organized a round table at the Eliot society conference this September at Emory University, stemming from her work at Oxford, entitled, “Reading The Waste Land with the #MeToo Generation."

Grads and undergrads alike recently spent some time talking to other students about English and reading some T.S. Eliot. Junior English major Alex Forgion reports: "The event had a great turn out and it was a lot of fun! After we read the poem aloud, professors Javadizadeh and Quigley shared some fascinating background information about the poem and T. S. Eliot. Then, we broke up into groups and discussed specifics about the poem. All of our conversations were very productive and insightful; hopefully we inspired some people to declare English as a major!" Thanks to all who participated!

Dr. Megan Quigley delivered the annual East Coker lecture on  July 14th  at the T. S. Eliot summer school in the UK entitled, "Why  East Coker  is Still Shocking."  This lecture, part of a new project on Eliot and his influence on twentieth-century fiction, stems from archival work completed on two recent fellowships: at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA and at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, TX.  Dr. Quigley also organized a panel, "'That is not what I meant at all': Literary--Philosophical Correspondents,"for the annual Modernist Studies Association Conference, which took place at the University of Sussex.  Dr. Quigley's paper for that panel, delivered on  September 1st , was called "Rebabelization & Nonsense:  Finnegans Wake  in Basic English."