The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

POLIS, Villanova's Literary Magazine, is now accepting written and visual submissions for their Spring 2020 edition! Submissions can take the form of poetry, prose, visual art, and photography and can be emailed to polislitmag@gmail.com. The deadline to submit is April 1st. Please email them with any questions. They are excited to see your creativity and artistic expression!

Science Fiction & the Literary Studies Classroom ENG 9730 CRN 13021 Dr. Travis Foster Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4-7 PM Most of us are familiar with science fiction from Hollywood films: super heroes, space adventures, dystopian futures. These are no doubt important examples of the genre, but they just hint at its many possibilities. This course aims to help students discover a much more expansive sci fi universe. We’ll sample the genre from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” through—yes, a Marvel film—Ryan Coogler’s 2018 Black Panther, with a particular emphasis on how writers and filmmakers have explored science fiction’s decolonial, antiracist, and feminist possibilities. Students enrolled in the class will take a direct role in designing most of the syllabus, filling in the gaps between Hawthorne and Coogler by adding the short stories, novels, films, and poetry that most appeal to their interests. In addition, we’ll work together to curate a list of critica...

ENG 8000: Literary Theory Dr. Heather Hicks CRN 23045 Thursday 5:20-7:20 pm What's Hot? Introduction to Theory Across the Discipline of English This course will be run as a seminar in which each week, a different graduate faculty member will introduce you to a body of theory that is particularly important within current discussions in their field of specialization. What are some of the major theoretical approaches in medieval studies today? Early modern studies? What about 19th-century American literature and British literature? Modernism? Postcolonial Studies? Irish Studies? Contemporary literature? This class is an attempt to bring you immediately into dialogue with a wide variety of theories that are shaping literary study today. The course is intended to be a lively opportunity to meet most of the English faculty members who teach at the graduate level and to engage in dialogue about and analysis of the contemporary state of literary theory. Assignments will include bi...

Congratulations to Dr. Travis Foster, whose new book Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United Status was just published by Oxford University Press. Challenging the prevailing literary critical inclination toward what makes texts exceptional or distinctive, the book  underscores the urgent importance of genre for tracking conventionality as it enters into, constitutes, and reproduces ordinary life. In the wake of emancipation's failed promise, Dr. Foster argues, two developments unfolded: white supremacy amassed new mechanisms and procedures for reproducing racial hierarchy; and black freedom developed new practices for collective expression and experimentation. This new racial ordinary came into being through new literary and cultural genres--including campus novels, the  Ladies' Home Journal , Civil War elegies, and gospel sermons. Through the postemancipation interplay between aesthetic conventions and social norms, genre became a major influence in how ...

The Referent of Ireland conference was held at Villanova University on Friday, February 21st, 2020. Panelists read and responded to a series of shared articles with short papers, and will reconvene over the summer in Galway to continue their work. The conference was designed to build "on fresh work on reference—or how the text refers to a world outside of the text—in order to rethink the aesthetics and politics of nineteenth-century Irish literature." Panelists considered questions such as: "What does literature about nineteenth-century Ireland refer to, and what are its habits of reference? Does the referent change for readers across time? Now that old saws about Ireland’s failed realism have been put to bed, what purposes might be served by thinking about Irish referential habits? Does thinking about Ireland and reference strand nineteenth-century Ireland in old paradigms of representation that preclude us from thinking about mediation? How does the nineteenth-centur...

Three Minute Thesis (3MT) is a competition for master’s and doctoral students to develop and showcase their research communication skills. Developed by The University of Queensland, 3MT cultivates students’ academic, professional, presentation and research communication skills. To be successful, competitors must effectively explain their research in three minutes, in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience. This year, Villanova will be hosting its inaugural 3MT competition on Friday, March 27, 2020, in Driscoll 134 at 5 p.m. A panel of judges will select a first-place winner ($1,000 award), a second-place winner ($500 award), and audience members in attendance will select an audience choice winner ($250 award). In addition, the first place winner of Villanova’s 3MT® competition will be entered into the regional 3MT competition for the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools , taking place in Quebec City, Quebec, on April 16, 2020. All graduate students who have ...

The Activist History Review is looking for proposals for a conference to be held at Villanova this coming summer! See the original call, below: The Activist History Review ​ invites proposals for its bi-annual conference, “Race and Equity in Higher Ed.,” to be held on June 13, 2020 [Saturday is best, though we are flexible on this date]. As the story goes, a college education facilitates the American dream. Accessible to all, we’re told, higher education drives social mobility and ensures that the best and the brightest all rise to the top. But from crippling student debt to racial disparities in access and the admissions rigging system that ranges from SAT prep to outright bribes, college access is bound by the very forces of race, class, and gender that a college degree purports to correct. TAHR ​ seeks to help unravel the relationship of race and place, which together overwhelmingly shape American life, in higher education at our bi-annual conference. We invite panel, poster, roun...

The following event might be up the alleys of some of our grad students... Please join us on Wednesday, Feb. 19, from 12-1 p.m., in Falvey Memorial Library’s Speakers’ Corner for a panel presentation demonstrating the vitality of literary translation; that a living mind behind the process is essential to translation as an art and academic endeavor. The "vitality" of literary translation rests in the root meaning of "vital"--in Latin, vitalis: "of life, likely to live.” Anyone who has attempted to put idiomatic language into Google Translate has almost certainly discovered how remarkably skewed--sometimes even comical--the result can be. A sensitive translator can produce a text that is as lyrical as the original without critically compromising the source text or its author's intentions. Hear from three such translators and their experiences communicating the richness of Arabic and Asian language to non-native readers. Panelists include Barbara Romaine , Ara...

What can you do with a Master's in English? Taking for granted that the people who ask this usually mean "in a professional context," how can we answer this question? One way would be to take a look back at the (roughly) last ten years of data on what alumni from the Villanova Master's program have gotten up to in their work lives. It's no secret that full-time college-level teaching jobs in English are hard to come by, although some of our graduates have gone down that road. Others have gone into (or, often, continued with) K-12 teaching. Higher education administration is a popular field for our graduates, as is adjunct and tutoring work, which may or may not coincide with PhD program work. Meanwhile, just over a third of our graduates are part of the 'other' category; but what does that mean? Villanova English MA graduates have titles like producer, specialist, director, editor, analyst, and writer. They work in diverse fields that rely on...

Interested in the state of critical theory? You might want to attend a lecture coming up this Friday that is being offered by the Philosophy department. Dr. Kieran Durkin from the Department of Sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara will be presenting "Critical Theory at the Crossroads: Negativity, Humanism, and the Dialectics of Social Transformation." The lecture will be given this Friday, February 7th, from 3-4 p.m. in Driscoll Hall, Room 240.