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!

This past Thursday, October 30, the department hosted Dr. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo from NYU for our semester colloquium! Dr. Saldaña-Portillo's talk, entitled "What is the Time of the Decolonial? Who Speaks for the Dispossessed? Roma and the White Settler Colonial Paradigm," discussed Alfonso Cuarón's 2018 film, exploring dynamics of colonialism and decoloniality, politics and power, spiral time, the film's use of sound, and the depiction of the film's central character, Cleo. Dr. Saldaña-Portillo presents her paper Thanks to everyone who attended the colloquium!

Thanks to everyone who came our spring colloquium, featuring Dagmawi Woubshet from the University of Pennsylvania.  His talk was entitled “Outside the Temple: James Baldwin’s Changing View of Love and Sexuality" -- you can read his article, published in The Atlantic this past January, here ! Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh introduces Dr. Woubshet

Our upcoming spring colloquium will feature Dagmawi Woubshet from the University of Pennsylvania.  His talk is entitled “ Outside the Temple: James Baldwin’s Changing View of Love and Sexuality ." From the poster: Dagmawi Woubshet is Ahuja Family Presidential Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he works at the intersections of African American, LGBTQ, and African studies. He is the author of The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) and the co-editor of Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture , a special issue of the journal Callaloo (2010). His writing has appeared in many publications, including Transition, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Aperture, The Atlantic , and African Lives: An Anthology . He is currently completing a second book, Here Be Saints: James Baldwin’s Late Style . See you there!

This past Monday, April 9, the department hosted two visiting professors for our annual English Department Colloquium. Dr. Pearl Brilmyer , from the University of Pennsylvania, is currently working on a book project entitled that concerns the philosophical implications of the disarticulation of character from plot in late Victorian realism.  She has recently published in PMLA, Representations, and Victorian Studies . For the Colloquium, Dr. Brilmyer presented on "George Eliot and the Body Semiotic." Dr. Cristobal Silva , from Columbia University, is currently writing a book titled  Republic of Medicine , which is a literary history of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world that examines the interchange of pathogens, treatments, and medical narratives that shadowed the slave trade. He is also the author of Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative . For the Colloquium, Dr. Silva presented on "The Silent History of No...

Herman Beavers is a Professor of English and Africana Studies at Penn.  His latest book, C hanging the Order of Things: Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison , will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. He has published numerous scholarly articles on August Wilson, Charles Johnson, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. He has also published poetry in  MELUS ,  The Langston Hughes Colloquy ,  Versadelphia, Cleaver Magazine , and  The American Arts Quarterly .  Suzana Berger is a theatre artist and educator who focuses especially on community-based (and community building!) arts. She is Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Dragon’s Eye Theatre, and has directed numerous plays. She has developed thought-provoking, original theatre with young people through Philadelphia Young Playwrights, Mural Arts Program, and InterAct Theatre Company, Epic Theatre Ensemble and Vital Theatre (New York), and Shakespeare Theatre Compa...

On Thursday December 1st the English Department was pleased to host Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (University of North Florida), who presented “What Was Distant Reading?: Critical Counting and Poetic Making in Caroline Spurgeon’s ’The Art of Reading’ and Shakespeare’s Imagery." Buurma and Heffernan wrote: This talk is drawn from our book project “The Teaching Archive: A New History of Literary Study.” “The Teaching Archive” offers a new archive for disciplinary history: the twentieth-century English literature classroom’s syllabi, lecture notes, exams, and assignments. Our presentation turns to the teaching and research of Caroline Spurgeon, the first female professor in the UK and author of Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935).  Shakespeare’s Imagery, we argue, is important early work of distant reading. To prepare it, Spurgeon and her research team spent more than a decade combing through Shakespeare’s corpus in order to index t...