The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Although people often think humanities research is conducted by individuals, it is always collaborative. For Professor Mary Mullen, there is no greater pleasure than thinking with other people and refining research and writing with them. Professor Mullen's recently published co-edited volume, with Professor Renee Fox, titled   Race, Violence, and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland , is the product of several collaborative conversations at the University of Notre Dame, Villanova University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. The volume is dedicated to Sara Maurer, Mary's undergraduate professor, mentor, and friend, who dreamed up ideas behind the book.  For more about this important volume, see  this recent blog  post from Liverpool University Press.

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...

  Dr. Tsering Wangmo braved the weather this past weekend in order to facilitate a packed poetry workshop at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. Professor Wangmo's workshop was part of a series, titled "I See You Face to Face," named in honor of Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," referencing that Whitman once worked at the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library, which ultimately became the Brooklyn Museum. The  series of workshops  takes place in art galleries within the museum, allowing poets to draw from the art they see around them in crafting their verse.  Dr. Wangmo's workshop took place in the Rubin Museum Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room. According to the Brooklyn Museum's  website , "The Rubin Museum Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room presents more than 100 artworks and ritual objects as they would be displayed in an elaborate Tibetan Buddhist household shrine—a space used for devotional prayer, offerings, and rituals. Scroll paintings (thangk...

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...

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...

 The English Department is proud to share the release of Dr. Lauren Shohet's new edited collection,  Queering Early Modern Death in England: Figuration, Representation, Matter.  This new collection, edited by Dr. Shohet and Dr. Christine Varnado of the University of Buffalo, analyzes a variety of celebrated texts, including  The Duchess of Malfi ,  The Alchemist ,  The Spanish Tragedy ,  The Winter's Tale ,  Richard III , and  A Midsummer Night's Dream , using queer theoretical methodologies to offer fascinating insights regarding early modern conceptualizations of humanity, embodiment, and temporality, among others. Dr. Shohet and Dr. Varnado utilize queer logics to suggest poignant understandings of early modern death as non-dualist, non-linear, a-teleological, and fruitfully muddled, showcasing the fascinating expansiveness of death through a queer lens. A worthy addition to the collection of anyone interested in questions of queernes...

Our very own Lisa Sewell will be reading, along with Ethel Rackin, at Main Point Books, on Thursday, April 10th, in celebration of National Poetry Month. We hope you will be able to make it!

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

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!

 Dr. Lauren Shohet has just published an article in the journal Anglia titled "Touching the Shield of Achilles: Ekphrasis and/as Re-Mediation." Here is the abstract: Homer’s treatment of the Matter of Troy illuminates the foundational impossibility of representation in ways that sponsor examination of the semiotic choices, the costs and benefits and tradeoffs, of different practices. Homer’s ekphrastic description of the shield of Achilles highlights a variety of available semiotic systems focused on different media of representation. This article explores Homeric ekphrasis in relation to later theories of media intersection, interaction, and transformation. Not only word, image, music, and dance, but also human perception as such, are subject to mediation. You can view more information on the article here . The shield's design as interpreted by Angelo Monticelli, ca. 1820, image courtesy of Wikipedia

The Taught by Literature Project--as well as Dr. Jean Lutes, Trinity Rogers '24 CLAS, and Matt Villanueva '24 MA--has been featured in a recent podcast episode of the series Research that Resonates, which is produced for Villanova's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.  Following the legacy of African American writer and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson, researchers Trinity Rogers '24 CLAS, Matt Villanueva '24 MA, and Jean Lutes, PhD, professor of English and Luckow Family Endowed Chair in English Literature, aim to recenter the work of Black female intellectuals through the Taught by Literature project. From uncovering lost literature to transcription and video production, the researchers have grown the project into an outreach effort and collaborate with other scholars, schools and programs to makes these important stories available to a wider audience. For more information on the project, you can read  previous  coverage  on our  blog , and please listen to...

By Katie Lewis What does it mean to be Asian American? This is the central question asked by Professor AJ Yumi Lee in a new undergraduate English course as of Spring 2024, ENG 4649: Introduction to Asian American Literature. The course explores how literature has represented and shaped Asian American identity since the 20 th  century.   The course is the first course to be offered by the English Department that focuses entirely on Asian American literature.   “It has been really fun teaching this class, and the students have been really excited,” said Professor Lee. “I have to give a shout-out to the class of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences dean's office. When I was developing the course, I was able to get a grant, since this is something that contributes to diversity efforts within the college. I definitely want to teach this class again and build off the conversations this semester.”   The beginning of the semester covered Asian American history, an area f...

By Melody Gleason, MA '25 What better way to wrap up Women’s History Month than honoring Villanova English’s first full-time woman professor: Margaret Powell Esmonde? Margaret Powell Esmonde taught at Villanova from 1974 until her death in 1983. She was a specialist in Renaissance literature who also taught various courses in science fiction and children’s literature. Beyond her contributions to Villanova, Margaret Powell Esmonde was an active member of the Children’s Literature Association, working on the board and eventually serving as president from 1978-79. She was awarded various fellowships through this association, one in 1982 for a study of the role of girls and women in children's science fiction. Margaret Powell Esmonde’s impact remains for girls and women in the literary scene. The Villanova English Department continues to honor her legacy through the Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award which is given annually to the most distinguished graduate essay written in a ...

 By Melody Gleason MA '25 Over the past two semesters, Dr. Dailey, Dr. Chelsea Phillips from the Theater department, and a group of students from various programs and departments have been working together to examine the theme of revenge and justice as a tragic element. The first half of this project started as class in the fall 2023 semester called, Legacies of Revenge – Across Time, Space, Genre, & Media. The course engaged both graduate and undergraduate students from multiple disciplines including English majors, minors, and theatre majors. Students in the course studied narratives of revenge across a plethora of entertainment mediums: from classical drama, to contemporary fiction, to modern film. The class especially focused on the play,  The Spanish Tragedy  written in the 1580s.   Dr. Dailey describes  The Spanish Tragedy  as  “the precursor to  Hamlet  and to a whole extensive revenge tragedy genre that enters the Elizabethan Thea...

Mary Mullen will present her research on Irish famine novels on Wednesday, April 3 at the Novel Theory Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She will participate alongside scholars Claire Connolly and Mary Burke in an event titled,  "Irish Fiction Then and Now."  This is a hybrid event that will take in person and online. You can  register here. Here is the abstract for her talk: Irish famine novels often begin by addressing a skeptical public fatigued by stories of Irish suffering. Many authors passively “place” or “lay” their novels before the public, insisting that however strange their narrative seems, they depict the truth. The preface to William Carleton’s  The Squanders of Castle Squanders  (1852) is defensive, suggesting that despite his concern “for the general welfare of my countrymen,” he expects that all parties will be disappointed with the novel’s politics. Considering these prefaces and other public addresses within Iris...

Travis Foster just published an article titled   "White Supremacist Submission"   in   Transgender Studies Quarterly.  The article received the   American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize   honorable mention for the year’s best essays on American literature, tenured category.   Here's the abstract to the article: Scholars tend to envision the sexual politics of settler colonialism and slavery through masculinist conceptions in which penetration designates mastery and receptiveness subjugation. This article asks instead how white desires for sexual submission to nonwhite men operate within white supremacy. It augments white trans and queer studies' conceptualizations of bottoming with theories of white submission found in Black thought, particularly Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin. And it argues that both sets of ideas find themselves anticipated in the mid-nineteenth-century writings of the white, gender-variant author Theodore Winthrop—particularly...

 Professor Joe Drury has a chapter coming out next week in the new  Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English , edited by Nicole Aljoe, Sarah Eron, and Suvir Kaul. The title of Professor Drury's essay is “Humans, Machines, and Automatons.” Here is the abstract of Professor Drury's chapter: Lord Macartney’s assumptions about the Chinese taste for spectacular ornamental machinery during his unsuccessful 1793–1794 embassy reflected changing attitudes toward technology within Britain’s Industrial Enlightenment. Where machines had previously been valued for their aesthetic qualities, the labor required to produce them, and the luxurious consumption they excited, late eighteenth-century commentators such as Adam Smith increasingly emphasized their utility, the productive labor they saved, and the frugality required of the capitalists who introduced them. Responding to this shift, Frances Burney’s  Evelina  and William Beckford’s  Vathek  re...

On February 21st, VU English Professor Kimberly Takahata moderated a discussion on approaches to including and teaching Lenape materials in the classroom, featuring Adam DePaul, the Chief of Education and tribal storykeeper of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania. This discussion followed a panel on the impact of Land Acknowledgements at academic institutions and why they are merely a starting point to supporting indigenous communities. The panelists included Adam DePaul, Chief of Education and Tribal Storykeeper; Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania; as well as Modonna Kongal, Meg Martin, and Autumn Coard from N.I.S.A, the Native Indigenous Students Association. Elisha Chi, a white settler descendant of the Iñupiat of the Bering Straits region, moderated the panel.  Kimberly Takahata and Adam DePaul

The Taught by Literature project has a new website full of interesting content that Villanova students, both undergraduate and graduate, have helped produce. Founded in 2021 and funded by the Idol Family Fellows Program of the McNulty Center for Women’s Leadership at Villanova, the Taught by Literature Project honors the legacy of Black author, educator, and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935). In partnership with the University of Delaware’s Department of Special Collections, the project is producing a freely accessible digital edition of “The Annals of ‘Steenth Street,” a short-story collection Dunbar-Nelson wrote based on her work teaching Black children at the White Rose Mission in New York City in the 1890s. The project also conducts professional development training on early Black women writers for teachers in the School District of Philadelphia, and is collaborating with award-winning producer and director Hezekiah Lewis, a Communication professor at Villanova, to produce ...