The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

English faculty and graduate students are cordially invited to attend the Graduate English Conference at nearby Lehigh University on March 20th. The theme of the conference is literature and social justice, in particular in relation to health, and the keynote speaker is Dr. Travis Lau.  You can register by March 1st to attend by visiting Lehigh's registration form .

While everyone else was being festive, English professors were busy at the Modern Languages Association Conference in Toronto in January. Professor Kamran Javadizadeh, the chair of the executive committee for the MLA’s Poetry and Poetics Forum, chaired two panels on poetry. Professor Megan Quigley delivered a paper entitled “Modernist Impersonality in the Age of AI,” and was an official mentor for other faculty at the conference! Per Dr. Quigley, "It was cold but wonderful."

On Friday, December 5th, Dr. Tsering Wangmo presented virtually on "Chigdrel and the Politics of Sorrow" as part of  The Khyentse Foundation Buddhist Studies Lecture Series , sponsored by Northwestern University. According to the summary provided by Northwestern, Dr. Wangmo examined "a lesser-known chapter in Tibetan exile history through the story of the Group of Thirteen, a collective of Khampa chieftains and religious leaders who established settlements in India in the mid-1960s with a hope to protect their diverse regional and religious traditions. This decision set them apart from the majority Tibetan refugees who joined the settlements established by the Tibetan government. They were cast as being opponents to Tibetan unity." This presentation relates to subjects covered more extensively in Dr. Wangmo's recently published book,  The Politics of Sorrow . Focusing on the early years of Tibetan exile life in India and Nepal, this book marks a significant chan...

Jenna Kosnick '26 and Julia Reagan '26 presented last weekend at the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) conference. Julia’s paper was titled “Political Economy’s Failures in Thomas Malthus and Mary Barton ,” and Jenna’s was titled “The Gothic Reigns in Demerara .” Congrats, Jenna and Julia! And thanks to Dr. Mary Mullen (pictured below with Jenna and Julia) for providing the photos!

Villanova English major Ben Marcoulier '27, English MA student Julia Reagan '26, and Dr. Crystal J. Lucky presented together Friday, November 7th at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers 2025 Conference in Old City, Philadelphia. The roundtable highlighted the public humanities project Taught by Literature ( https://www.taughtbyliterature.org/ ), which works to honor the legacy of Black author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Taught by Literature was founded by Dr. Jean Lutes, Denise Burgher, and Dr. Brigitte Fielder to make Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s work digitally available and to support educators in teaching early Black women intellectuals in their classrooms, from kindergarten to college. Bringing together undergraduate and graduate students and professors, Taught by Literature invites Black women educators to present their work for a broader audience, engages students in the archives and the process of textual recovery, and works with public school teachers to d...

This past summer, many of our faculty traveled and gave talks all around the world. We’ll be featuring a few of them in the coming weeks—this time, we’ll be focusing on Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, who traveled to the UK and spoke about poetry in Oxford and Cambridge. Professor Javadizadeh was invited to give a lecture on June 5th at the American Literature Research Seminar in Oxford, and he presented on ‘The National Poetry Crisis.’ Dr. Javadizadeh drew from the conclusion to his forthcoming book for his talk, which centered on a poetry festival which had been organized at the Library of Congress in the fall of 1962, and which happened to coincide with the Cuban Missile Crisis. “After the first day of the conference,” explained Dr. Javadizadeh, “President Kennedy came on television and announced that there were these missiles in Cuba. The Poetry Festival was happening in the Library of Congress, which is right next to the capitol building itself.” The festival’s setting, and its status...

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

Calling all theater lovers... Current Villanova students AND alumni/ae can attend The Spanish Tragedy symposium for free! In academic year 2023-24, Villanova University faculty Dr. Chelsea Phillips (Theater) and Dr. Alice Dailey (English) launched a year-long interdisciplinary exploration of Thomas Kyd’s seminal Renaissance revenge play, The Spanish Tragedy  (1582). This extended pedagogical, scholarly, and creative endeavor began with a combined undergraduate-graduate course taught in fall 2023 titled “Legacies of Revenge.” It culminates in a  production of The Spanish Tragedy co-directed by Dailey and Phillips and staged in Villanova’s new John and Joan Mullen Center for the Performing Arts in April 2024 , along with a coinciding scholarly symposium on April 19-20, 2024. Through both academic study and performance, The Spanish Tragedy  Project seeks to foster engagement with the play as at once an historical and contemporary artifact ...

 By Matt Villanueva, MA '24 Over winter break, I had the privilege to attend the 139 th annual MLA conference in downtown Philadelphia. Throughout the four-day conference I was able to attend many panels and special sessions on various topics and presented on a special session “Recentering Black Women Intellectuals: A Philadelphia School District Collaboration” to discuss our research project with other scholars and educators and to debut the Taught by Literature website (taughtbyliterature.org). The conference days were, admittedly, tiring and overwhelming at times. Every block time had multiple sessions that I wished to attend and for three days, I bopped around the center city Marriot and Loews hotel conference rooms to hear fellow grad students adjacent to established scholars share their work. The two days I attended a myriad of sessions for the whole day ranging from topics of representation in digital humanities, the storytelling power of music, postcolonialism, and Fil...

This weekend, professors Kamran Javadizadeh and Megan Quigley put their poetry skills to work at the T. S. Eliot conference in Cambridge, MA. They co-taught a seminar on "T. S. Eliot and Close Reading” to a group of professors and graduate students at the Houghton Library at Harvard University on Friday. Megan later delivered a lecture, “Perfectly good, normal and right: Eliot, Attraction, and Intimacy,” in Emerson Hall, the same philosophy building where T. S. Eliot took his philosophy courses at Harvard a century ago. Speaking of close reading, for more close reads you can listen to Kamran’s podcast on  Apple  or  Spotify .

Second-year VU English MA student Caitlin Salomon recently presented at the NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association), on a panel entitled "The Future is Fragile," which "examined how the concept of fragility shapes our world and society." "My paper," said Salomon, "put Walter Miller’s (post)apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz in conversation with Judith Butler’s theory of vulnerability. I suggested that though Butler’s framework is an exemplary theoretical model to follow, Miller’s novel shows that even when we admit—and have tangible proof of—our own fragility, our flawed humanity leads us to protect ourselves at others’ expense. His inclusion of a posthuman character at the novel’s conclusion intriguingly poses that humanity can only be invulnerable when it’s no longer entirely human." Caitlin was kind enough to answer some additional questions about the conference for the YAWP. What was your impression of the conference itself? Th...

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...

Incoming MA student Adam Riekstins recently presented at a conference hosted by the Hidden Nabokov Society, as part of its first international conference in over two decades. The conference took place from June 15th to June 19th at Wellesley college, where Vladimir Nabokov once lectured.  According to Riekstins, "It was such a humbling experience to chat, dine and interact with Nabokov experts from everywhere around the world for nearly a week straight. It was, as most of us joked, a beguiling Nabokovian Summer Camp." Riekstins presented on Lolita as a gothic novel, tracing structural similarities it shares with Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde .  As part of the proceedings, presenters even had an opportunity to view Nabokov's personal butterfly collection, which is housed at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. "Thank you," said Riekstins, "to Wellesley College for hosting the event and to Harvard's Museu...

The 54th annual Northeast Modern Language Association convention will be held in Niagara Falls, NY, from March 23-26, 2023, at the University at Buffalo.  The 2023 NeMLA conference theme is RESILIENCE, an anchor term for critical and creative work that explores how we bear up under trauma, counter ableism, redress social and racial marginalization, environmental destruction, and how we celebrate bodily, cognitive, and neurological difference, access silenced voices, recover from the pandemic, and struggle to save the humanities, and humanity itself from the maw of neoliberalism. Session proposals are due April 29, 2022, and abstract proposals are due September 30, 2022.

Some of our students were recently reported on by the college of liberal arts and sciences; here is that report on Hannah Kahn and Caitlin Salomon: VILLANOVA, Pa. – First-year Villanova University English MA graduate students Hannah Kahn and Caitlin Salomon recently presented at The Conference on Christianity and Literature’s (CCL) 2022 Western Regional conference, “Literary Geographies – Space, Place, and Environments,” held at Biola University in La Mirada, California, April 7 to 9, 2022. Kahn discussed her work, “Embodied and Empowered: A Critical Analysis of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale .” "Presenting at the CCL conference was an enriching experience. Not only was I given the opportunity to share my scholarship on a topic that I'm passionate about but also was afforded the chance to partake in thought-provoking dialogue during the question-and-answer section," Kahn said. "It was a pleasure to meet other scholars from across the country and learn from eac...

From our friends in Gender and Women's Studies: Back from our reluctant two-year hiatus, we cordially invite you to  Villanova's 32 nd  Annual Gender & Women's Studies Conference,  which will take place on  Friday, March 25th, 2022  f rom  8:45am-4:00pm  in  the  Connelly Center!  We have an exciting full day of panels and performances by Villanova undergraduates and graduate students from across the university. Additionally, complimentary breakfast, lunch and snacks will be available throughout the day. We very much hope you will join us!  We are so pleased to announce that this year's  Keynote Luncheon  will feature a lecture by  Dr. Erin Murphy  of Boston University, entitled  "Amazons and Zombies: Margaret Cavendish’s Soldiers, Gender, and the Paradoxes of War."  To quote from a description of Dr. Murphy's lecture: "As demonstrated by ongoing debates about who can be a 'comba...

 The 2022 College English Association of Ohio conference will take place both in-person and digitally on Saturday, April 9. The conference will focus on changes in the disciplines of English and writing studies, particularly in the light of social changes emerging from the pandemic. They welcome proposals by Monday, February 15th. For more information, please visit their site here . 

Professor Mary Mullen will be speaking at an upcoming CUNY C19 conference on “Hard Border(s): Ireland and the British Question,” to take place virtually on May 7. Professor Mullen will be speaking about Ireland and the Colonial Politics of Public Interest. The conference's speakers will touch on a variety of themes related to Ireland and its relationship to Great Britain, including "imperial hauntings," "nationalism," and "populism."  Professor Mullen is the author of Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Edinburgh, 2019), which won the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature from the American Conference for Irish Studies. She has published articles on settler colonialism, the politics of time, public humanities, fast-day literature, and nineteenth-century English and Irish writing. She is currently working on a new book project on the colonial politics of public interest, which considers how public i...

Georgetown University's English Graduate Student Association is looking for presentation proposals for   their spring conference, upcoming at the end of April. The theme this year is The Humanities & The Age of COVID: ‘Disruption, Hesitation, Silence.’ In the light of the current pandemic climate, the conference will be held entirely asynchronously and virtually, so presenters will submit a video of themselves presenting their work. The requirements for submission are below, and the deadline for submission is Friday, March 26.  Georgetown University English Graduate Student Association (Online & Asynchronous) Conference The Humanities & The Age of COVID: ‘Disruption, Hesitation, Silence’  April 30, 2021 “I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence,” writes Louise Glück in her essay “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence.” A poem, she argues, represents a dual creation: a reader must acknowledge what is present on the pa...

This April, Carnegie Mellon University’s English Colloquia hosts their first-ever graduate conference on "Bridges and Borders: Navigating Problems and Possibilities in Language and Culture." They encourage any graduate student in the humanities to propose a paper, poster presentation, or roundtable. The conference keynote speaker is Dr. Jasbir K. Puar. The submission deadline is January 29, and the conference will be held virtually on April 23. Visit the conference website for the full call for papers and submission details.