The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

 The 14th Annual Thesis and Field Exam Symposium was held in SAC 300 on Wednesday, May 8, 2024, and featured research presentations by Megan Hayes MA '24, Sarah Gregory Herr MA '24, Matt Villanueva MA '24, and Eva Wynn MA '24.  Megan Hayes MA '24 presented her field exam, "Gothic Modernism: Exploring Race, Gender, and Sexuality Through Haunted Women." She described gothic modernism as a relatively new field, and fictional women as the topic where gothicism and modernism meet. She addressed questions such as: what constitutes haunting, and how are women haunted differently from men? Megan also provided advice for future students considering field exams. She said that she made her own syllabus at the beginning of her field exam, pairing one or two books per week along with secondary readings, and assigned herself response papers and summaries. Megan then spent three or four weeks in April writing. She found this structure extremely helpful in completing her ...

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...

Professor Jean Lutes has co-authored an article that investigates a fascinating unpublished manuscript by turn-of-the-century African-American author Alice Dunbar-Nelson. The article appears in  American Literary History , Volume 36, Issue 1, Summer 2024, and is titled"An Unpublished Tale about African American Poetry: Alice Dunbar-Nelson's 'The Grievances of the Books' (1897)." The article acknowledges three Villanova students who helped to transcribe the unpublished manuscript that Professor Lutes and her co-writer, Professor Sandra A. Zagarell, wrote about: Current English major Jenine Hazlewood, '26; current master's student Matthew Villanueva, MA '24; and recent English major graduate Adrianna Ogando, '23.  Here's an excerpt from the article that provides a flavor of Dunbar-Nelson's original piece: In April 1897, an ambitious young author drafted a hallucinatory narrative that was never published. Its unnamed narrator falls asleep and ...

On February 22, 2024 at 5:00 p.m., Professor Kimberly Takahata will give   a talk  titled   “ Not Witnessing John Gabriel Stedman's   A Narrative of a Five Years Expedition. ”  It will take place in the  grad lounge (Fisher Bennett Hall 330)  at the University of Pennsylvania's English department.

Villanova Magazine  recently featured Professor Lutes's research on Black women writers. Learn more and read the full article  here .

Professor Megan Quigley recently published "Kenner as an Eliot Fan"   at Nonsite.org . It is her first scholarly piece on fanfiction. It " works to break down the border between scholarship and fandom, impersonality and attachment, objective annotation and invested interpretation." Read the full article  here .

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.

Dr. Lauren Shohet is the Subject Editor for Literature and Drama in English for the new  Routledge Online Resources: The Renaissance World.  This project seeks to provide resources for students and scholars of the early modern period, while also questioning ideas of "the Renaissance" and "Renaissance Studies."  The current "freemium" version  shows you a small fraction of what eventually will be available! Check out topics like "Shipwreck, Wet Globalization, and the Blue Humanities"; "French Sexual Cultures"; "Buddhism and Globalization"; "Infanticide in Italy 1500-1800"; "Renaissance Poetry in Colonial Peru: The Antarctic Academy (1586-1617)"; and "Elizabethan Courtly Fashion."

J ean Lutes and Hezekiah Lewis, associate professor in Communication, received a two-year $24,000 grant from the new GRASP program in CLAS to  continue work on a series of short videos designed to make early Black women writers more accessible to K-12 teachers.   The video project involves selecting under-studied texts by 18th-, 19th, and early 20th-century African American women; recruiting contemporary Black women educators to read those texts and talk briefly what those texts mean to them personally; producing short videos – no more than 10 minutes each – designed for K-12 classroom use; and making the videos available and freely accessible online, along with accompanying explanatory materials.  The videos will be made available on the  Just Teach One-Early African American Print initiative   on the American Antiquarian Association website.   This video series is part of Taught by Literature: Recentering Black Women Intellectuals, a collaborati...

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 ...

Some folks may be wondering what Villanova's English faculty has been up to in between Zoom meetings, doomsurfing the internet, and homeschooling their kids. As it happens, department chair Dr. Heather Hicks, whose second book was on contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction , has been busy working on an essay that turned out to be more topical than she had anticipated. Dr. Hicks said: "I just wrote a whole article on "Disaster Response in Post-2000 American Apocalyptic Literature" for a Cambridge University Press volume on Apocalyptic Literature in American Literature and Culture. Now of course I wish I could write a post-script. But the point of the article is that Disaster Studies as a field indicates that most people are highly cooperative and compassionate during disasters, rather than taking up cudgels as per many post-apocalyptic visions. I think most of what has happened reflects this tendency for people to be mutually supportive, though the vigilan...

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...