The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

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...

This past Tuesday we celebrated the holiday of hearts with an English Department Coffee Break. Grads, undergrads, faculty, and staff got together for cookies, candies, coffee and good company.

To kick off the 19th Annual Villanova Literary Festival, we are pleased to host poet James Richardson at Tuesday January 31st at 7PM. James Richardson's newest collection, During , which appeared in January 2016, was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola prize for the best manuscript in progress. His other books include By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms , which was a 2010 National Book Award finalist and a Publishers Weekly "Best Book of 2010;" Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms , which was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. The reading will be held in the Radnor/St. David's Room in the Connelly Center.

On Thursday December 1st the English Department was pleased to host Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (University of North Florida), who presented “What Was Distant Reading?: Critical Counting and Poetic Making in Caroline Spurgeon’s ’The Art of Reading’ and Shakespeare’s Imagery." Buurma and Heffernan wrote: This talk is drawn from our book project “The Teaching Archive: A New History of Literary Study.” “The Teaching Archive” offers a new archive for disciplinary history: the twentieth-century English literature classroom’s syllabi, lecture notes, exams, and assignments. Our presentation turns to the teaching and research of Caroline Spurgeon, the first female professor in the UK and author of Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935).  Shakespeare’s Imagery, we argue, is important early work of distant reading. To prepare it, Spurgeon and her research team spent more than a decade combing through Shakespeare’s corpus in order to index t...

Last Wednesday the English department hosted a holiday decorating party. Students, faculty, and staff stocked up the lounge with food, drink, and cheer! Vegetarian chili, three layer dip, vegetable meatballs and potstickers. Plus tons of festive dessert.  Grads and undergrads got together to decorate the office tree and cover the ceiling in glittering snowflakes. We're delighted at the turnout of what we hope will be an annual Villanova tradition. 

Chocolate-peanut butter wand pretzels and Snitch Chocolates The English Department took a break this past Wednesday to get a witchy with this Harry Potter themed coffee hour. Our own Brooke Erdman made the chocolate and peanut butter pretzel wands, as well as the (chocolate) golden snitches! It was a great opportunity to get grads, undergrads and faculty together. Additionally, the English department was a stop on the Harry Potter Scavenger Hunt hosted by Falvey Library! We can't wait to see you all next time. Grad Laura has caught the golden snitch! 150 Points to the English dept!

We are happy to welcome the newest member of the English department staff, Brooke Erdman. As Program Coordinator, Brooke will be working on a range of initiatives to improve the functioning of the graduate program as well as heighten its visibility. Brooke received her MA from the Villanova Liberal Studies program where she specialized in the Digital Humanities. She worked for two years after that in the Graduate Studies Office before joining us in English. We are delighted to have Brooke with us, and we hope you stop by soon to introduce yourself!

Every year in the beginning of the fall semester, English undergrads and grads work together to engage freshmen with an introduction to college-level literary discussion. Using a text most freshmen have read (this year was Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby , while last year tackled Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye ), students perform an excerpt from the work and then lead freshmen into small discussion groups in order to discuss the text, as well as answer questions about the English program here at Villanova. Freshmen students piling into the event Lead by the wonderful Dr. Jean Lutes, volunteers from the English department performed the famous scene of Gatsby and Daisy's reunion.  Our very own Nick, Daisy, Gatsby and narrator The event was a huge success, marking our best turnout-to-date, with 163 freshmen in attendance! Not only do events like "The Great Catsby" open a dialogue with freshmen considering taking English classes, they also offer a l...

After 29 years working at Villanova, our beloved Susan Burns has retired. Susan has worked as the administrative assistant of the Graduate Department, doing all the work behind-the-scenes that kept the English Grad program running so smoothly. Left to right: Dr. Heather Hicks, Susan Burns, current grad student Laura Tscherry and visiting Irish Scholar Victoria Brady You are sorely missed, Susan! Hope you're enjoying retirement!