The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

  On Wednesday, February 19 at 5:30 pm in Falvey 205 Dr. Greta LaFleur of Yale University will give a talk titled, "Beyond the Natural: Engineering Sexual Diversity in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century North America." The event is sponsored by the English Department and Program in Gender and Women's Studies and supported by the Esmonde Family Fund.  Dr. LaFleur is the author of The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins, 2018). They are currently finishing up a book of essays on birding, co-written with anthropologist Cal Biruk, for the Duke University Press Practices, as well as their second monograph, How Sex Became Good: The Feminist Movements and Racial Politics that Made Modern Sexuality (under contract, University of Chicago Press).  

Two exciting Digital Seeds lectures, offered by Falvey Library, will be held this coming April, and may be of particular interest to our graduate students.  According to Falvey Library's website, "The Digital Seeds Speaker Series is a library funded program that supports the invitation of guest speakers in the digital scholarship community to speak at Falvey Library about their research and/or give a workshop on a topic of their choice. The goal of the speaker series is to provide an opportunity for Villanova faculty, staff, and students to learn more about digital scholarship and research at the intersection of social science, humanities computing, and data science. The lectures are open to the public and all Villanova faculty, staff, and students to attend. The series is a great way to make connections, build community, and facilitate conversation." The two upcoming lectures are Dr. Sarah Lang on “Leveraging Large Language Models to Unveil Seventeenth-Century Books of S...

Coming soon! Villanova undergrad English major Jenine Hazlewood will be presenting to the school district of Philadelphia on the topic of "What were they made for? A Timeline of the 'Black Barbie' Doll."  This free virtual professional development workshop will take place on March 16 from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. To learn more and to register, please visit the virtual form .

 This coming Monday!  

VU English professor Yumi Lee, who is on leave from Villanova this year, will be giving a colloquium talk at the University of Pennsylvania this coming Thursday, at 12:00 p.m. This talk examines the newfound visibility of the Korean War in American literature from the late 1990s to the present. Why and how, after going “forgotten” for decades, did the Korean War re-emerge as a topic of interest in contemporary American literature? To answer this question, Professor Lee considers the vexed temporality of the war, which never formally ended, instead remaining suspended in a status that poet Don Mee Choi has described as “ever-pending” (DMZ Colony, 2020). Lee suggests that if we alter our understanding of the time frame of the Korean War, moving from the bounded periodization of 1950-1953 to a more expansive, yet more literal, timeline that extends the war and its effects into the present, then we can read these texts from the 1990s and 2000s not as belated or historical in their approach...

Dr. Carissa Harris, an Associate Professor at Temple University, will be presenting a talk entitled "Twice Militant: Women's Intersectional Anger from the 1381 Uprising to #SayHerName." This event will be held in the Idea Accelerator in Falvey Library on Oct. 25th at 5:30 p.m. The wearing of masks will be required.  Extra thanks to grad student Theo Campbell for designing the excellent flyer, which you can see below.

  On Tuesday, Dr. Rob Nixon, professor in the Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University, delivered Villanova English's Annual Luckow Family Lecture:  "The Less Selfish Gene: Forest Altruism, Neoliberalism, and the Tree of Life." . About 85 students and faculty attended the lecture, delivered by Zoom, which was followed by a lively Q & A. In his talk, Dr. Nixon argued that the recent surge of interest in popular science writing about forest ecosystems and plant communication reflects public curiosity in models of the natural world and modes of flourishing opposed to the egotism and individualism popularized by neoliberalism.  

This post by guest blogger and first year grad student Caitlyn Dittmeier. This past Monday I had the opportunity to interview Professor Jill McCorkel, a professor of Sociology and Criminology at Villanova, for the Irish Studies Anniversary podcast series. As a former Irish studies minor and now a graduate student continuing my studies in Irish literature, I was so interested to learn more about her research in Ireland last year. Professor McCorkel has been investigating the U.S. criminal justice system for many years, visiting prisons and serving as an advocate and consultant for wrongful conviction cases. For any new place McCorkel travels to, she makes sure to visit the prisons in the area-performing participant observation and having honest interviews with prisoners and prison staff. I really admire her ethnographic approach to research because it allows her to listen closely to the individual stories and experiences that speak to larger issues of injustice. As Professor McC...

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!

The Department of Philosophy at Haverford College is delighted to invite you to the 2019 Altherr lecture, which will be given by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor in English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. Professor Spivak’s lecture, titled “Complicity,” will take place on Saturday 23 February, 4:00 pm-5:45 pm in Stokes Auditorium. The lecture will be followed by a public reception in Stokes Lobby from 5:45pm pm-6:45 pm. Gayatri Spivak is a leading figure in the humanities, and her work is foundational in postcolonial studies. Her writings include "Can the Subaltern Speak?", A Critique of Postcolonial Reason,Outside in the Teaching Machine, The Post-Colonial Critic, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics , and an influential translation of, and introduction to, Derrida's Of Grammatology . In 2012 she was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy.

The Wednesday after Thanksgiving, GWS is hosting an event titled "Public Disclosures of Private Realities": LGBTQ History and the Archive of Everyday Life by Dr. Stephen Vider of Bryn Mawr College. This is a great chance to meet and mingle with an expert as well as attend an important lecture within the field of Gender and Sexuality Studies. When : Wednesday, November 28 at 6PM Where : Bartley 1010

Upcoming GWS Event! Mothers at Work: Who Opts Out? Presented by Dr. Liana Christin Landivar, Sociologist and Faculty Affiliate, Maryland Population Research Center, University of Maryland, College Park When: Tuesday, November 13th, 6pm GWS recruitment and information session at 5:30 Pizza will be served! Where: Tolentine 215 Liana Christin Landivar is the author of Mothers at Work: Who Opts Out? This book examines mothers’ employment rates and work hours in 55 occupations and shows that women in managerial and professional occupations were the least likely to opt out of the labor force but most likely to scale back on work by a few hours per week when they had children.

On Tuesday, the Villanova English community was treated to a fantastic lecture on Joyce's correspondences from guest speaker Dr. Kevin Dettmar. Dettmar discussed the profuse use of correspondences throughout Joyce's fiction, the mode of the correspondences Joyce himself wrote during his lifetime, and, in particular, the illuminating importance of the letters exchanged between Joyce and Grant Richards, his publisher.  Dettmar also discussed his in-progress project: the gathering, transcription, and publication of a massive collection of Joyce's previously unpublished letters. Thank you to Drs. Megan Quigley and Kamran Javadizadeh for organizing! English Colloquium faculty and guest speaker Dr. Kevin Dettmar / Prof. Megan Quigley / Prof. Kevin Dettmar (Pomona) / Prof. Mary Mullen / Alex Brodin / Prof. Kamran Javadizadeh / Prof. Paul Saint-Amour (Penn) / Christie Leonard (behind camera)

Come by tomorrow, Wednesday February 22 at noon for a great lecture by our own Dr. Joseph Drury. Co-sponsored by the Gender & Women's Studies and English departments. "Libertines and Machines in Enlightenment Britain" Dr. Drury's talk is drawn from a section of his forthcoming book, Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain. It reads the seduction fiction of Eliza Haywood, published in the 1720s, as a critique of male libertinism that responds to the two competing interpretations of Hobbes's materialism circulating in early eighteenth-century Britain. Like Hobbes, Haywood's characters are machines, whose wills are entirely determined by the desires produced in them by external objects. But her characters draw very different conclusions from this basic premise. Her male characters tend to be "libertine machines," who claim that because their transgressions are determined by external causes, they cannot be blamed or...

Lauren Shohet, Luckow Family Professor of English, presents: “The Fragrance of the Fall: the Semiotics of Smell in Paradise Lost” Haverford Room, Connelly Center Wednesday, November 11 at 12:00PM Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP by November 6 to sharon.rose-davis@villanova.edu