The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Please join us for the   Fall 2024 Graduate Studies CLAS Research Symposium TOMORROW-- this Friday, November 15! This event highlights the outstanding and diverse scholarship being conducted by graduate students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Our very own Jaxon Parker will be among the presenters. When:  Friday, November 15 Time: 1 p.m. – 4 p.m. Where: Mullen Center Court Theatre (Oral Presentations)               Mullen Center Lobby (Poster Presentations)                                      Oral presentations will begin at 1 p.m. in the Court Theatre of the Mullen Center. Poster presentations commence thereafter in the lobby at 3 p.m. Please see the list of presenters below and make plans to support your classmates! Ligh...

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...

Undergrad English major Lauren Kourey wrote an article for  The Villanovan  on Professor Quigley's recent talk, "A Feminist  Waste Land ."  Check it out here.

  Travis Foster presented a lecture titled, " White Supremacist Submission:  Interracial Desire, Transfemininity, and the Biopolitics of Penetration" online at University of Wisconsin-Madison, on April 18 . Here's the abstract for the lecture: Scholars tend to envision the sexual politics of settler  colonialism and slavery through masculinist  conceptions equating penetration with mastery and  receptiveness with subjugation. This talk tracks instead how white desires for sexual submission to Black and brown men operate as white supremacy. It augments white trans and queer conceptualizations of bottoming with theories of white submission found in Black thought, particularly those of Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin—all of which find themselves anticipated in the mid-nineteenth century writings of Theodore Winthrop and the turn-of-the-century photography of F. Holland Day. For Winthrop and Day, bottoming fantasies facilitate transfeminine embodiment, staging a...

  Mary Mullen presented a lecture titled, " The Aesthetics of Interest in an Age of Question: Representing Ireland"  at Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University on Thursday, March 23. The talk  paired Edward Said’s reflection on the series of “interests” that underlie Orientalism with Sianne Ngai’s account of interesting as an aesthetic category, in order to consider the difficulty in sustaining British interest in colonial locations. The talk focuses on the novel as a form of “sustained interest”—drawing on work by William Carleton and Anthony Trollope—and the rhetorical form of the question—especially “The Irish Question”—to suggest that the very act of encouraging readers to take an interest in a foreign place can also direct their attention away from the people who inhabit this place.

Professors Joe Drury, Evan Radcliffe, and Kimberly Takahata will present their research at the 2022 ASECS Conference , taking place in Baltimore from March 31-April 2. Professor Joe Drury is presenting on the roundtable  "Do We Still Need the Human?" and the panel "The Unproductive--Sexualities." Professor Evan Radcliffe is presenting on the roundtable "Bad   Feelings in the Eighteenth Century." And Professor Kimberly Takahata will chair the   roundtable " Eighteenth - Century Studies in Dialogue with the Work of Dionne Brand, Saidiya   Hartman, and Christina Sharpe" (as co-chair of the Race and Empire Caucus) and present in the roundtable " Publish or Perish? Perspectives on Publishing in Grad School." Professor Chelsea Phillips, from Villanova's Theatre department, is  presenting on the panel "Reproduction and Futurity I" and chairing  the panel "Reproduction and Futurity II."

 Congrats to our grad students Em Friedman MA '21 and Christoforos Sassaris MA '21, who presented posters at the Villanova Graduate Research Symposium this fall. Em's topic was Feminist Abolitionism Across Time , and Christoforos's was Locating the Byzantine in Medieval English Literature: The Auchinleck Manuscript . More information about the graduate research symposium can be found here . Here is Em's abstract: The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) was an interracial women's abolitionist group active in Philadelphia from 1833-1870. This project explores the PFASS's ideological and rhetorical strategies by close reading documents in their archive, including annual reports, minutes, correspondence and personal letters to other abolitionists, speeches and financial records. The PFASS's archive is housed with the Abolitionist Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. By focusing on the three Women's Anti-Slavery Conferences —hel...

 Second-year MA student Isobel McCreavy will be presenting her paper " Focalizing on Young Adult Literature: The Dangers of Ignoring Focalization" at the 118th Annual PAMLA Conference in Las Vegas on November 11th!  Isobel's essay "examines the use of tropes and narrative roles in young adult fiction to examine the messaging in four young adult works - John Green’s Paper Towns, J. K. Rowling’s the Harry Potter series, Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instrument series, and Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower. Each work has three narrative roles that dictate the perceptions and identity formations of its characters. The roles of narrator, focalizer and focalizee create dynamics in the works where characters exist only in relation to other characters, and their identities are tied to these roles. Embedded in tropes like the Girl Quest Tale and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, these roles confine the autonomy of its characters and hint at the dangers of focalization, i...

Held in conjunction with Villanova University's 46th annual Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference will be the Delaware Valley Medieval Association Graduate Workshop. The event will take place on October 16th in Room 101 of The Inn at Villanova from 10am to 3pm, featuring a plethora of interesting presentations –  including one from Villanova MA student Em Friedman! Em will be presenting their work titled "Somatemporal ecstasy: technologies of eternity in 13th century women's mysticism."  If you are interested in attending or are curious about the workshop, you can register/learn more here . 

Villanova MA student Christoforos Sassaris will present at West Chester University's "Object Talks," a monthly series on book history hosted by the WCU Center for Book History and WCU Special Collections. Christoforos will be presenting on "Yerasimos Vlachos' Thesauros Tetraglossos: Hellenic Identity in Eighteenth-Century Venice." The event will take place tomorrow, June 15th, from 6 to 7 pm. If you are interested in attending, you can register through their website .  

First-year student Christoforos Sassaris recently participated in a Zoom event about the project of transcribing the letter-books of William Darlington, a historical figure local to Chester County. Christoforos's transcription project was a part of his internship at West Chester University's Special Collections Library in spring 2020. More information about the event can be found here .

Second-year MA student Anne Jones presented at the virtual Graduate Student Research Symposium last week, sharing her work from her Summer Research Fellowship. Here is the abstract for Anne's paper, entitled "Unraveling the Empire: The Spinning Wheel as an Actor in Gandhi’s Writings and the Imperial Network": "M. K. Gandhi’s writings have been crucial to the ideologies that informed the Indian independence movement. In works like "Hind Swaraj," he outlined his belief that political self-rule for India had to be bound with economic independence and civil disobedience. For Gandhi, these tenets materialized through the use of a crucial object: the charkha or spinning wheel. Spinning one’s own cotton/cloth, he argued, would mobilize India’s rural population and assist India’s economic independence by rejecting imported British cloth. Using the hermeneutics of Actor-Network Theory, my research traced how the spinning wheel gained anticolonial agency and created ...

Our own Avni Sejpal will be presenting at the Graduate Student Research Symposium on September 13th at 3PM in the Haverford Room of the Connelly Center. Here is the abstract of her presentation: “Indentured Imaginaries: Global Migration, Worldmaking, and Postcolonial Literature examines neglected colonial narratives and bureaucratic archives of indenture at the British Library. It puts historical records into conversation with postcolonial literary narratives to produce an account of nineteenth-century globalization. Little attention has been paid to the ways in which dispossessed communities engaged with transnationalism. This project corrects that oversight by studying globalization from below. It shows that impoverished colonial subjects, forgotten by history, did not merely experience the world at large, they actively produced it. Finally, it demonstrates that this transnationalism necessarily transforms contemporary notions of both globalization and world literature.” Way to go...

Dr. Tsering Wangmo gave a talk at Temple University on March 27 entitled “Tibet: Unity in Exile and the Establishment of the ‘Right’ Vision.” In the talk, she presented on two political manifestoes (produced by Tibetan refugees in India in the mid-1960s) that shaped the discourse on unity and democracy within Tibetan exilic life. She outlined how unity was an exclusionary discourse that became the dominant framework for thinking about the boundaries of belonging, refugee-citizenship in exile, and the values of the Tibetan people. The talk was sponsored by the departments of Religion, Global Studies, and Gender Sexuality and Women’s Studies.