The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Matthew Ryan, a second-year graduate student here at Villanova, recently published his reflections on completing his thesis during a pandemic over at the Irish Women's Writing Network. Check out his thoughts, along with those of other scholars, here .

Grad Student Guest Post By Anne Jones I remember being in Dr. Lutes’ class at Driscoll Hall the day we got the email. Suddenly, the gray tablet arm chair I usually sat on for class didn’t seem too bad. The fact that my laptop, books, and notes were in constant danger of falling off for want of space became, at that moment, an inconsequential matter. In fact, on the first day of class, my laptop had actually spectacularly tumbled off. Astonishingly enough, it had survived this near-death experience. Distance approximation was never my forte but that traumatic moment had made me an expert, at least when it came to the boundaries of a tablet arm. That evening, as I settled in, I realized I had formed a bit of history with that chair. It was tied to my engagement with the world of immigrant narratives and histories. With characters, ideas, and nations across time. With my professor and my classmates. Earlier that day, my inbox revealed what everyone knew was coming: classes we...

Check out Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh's brilliant new column, "Lunar Phase," in The Point magazine, in which he answers the question, "What would you most like to read at this moment?"  

Congratulations to Dr. Mary Mullen, who has won the 2019 Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature from the American Conference for Irish Studies for her book Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism . Here's what the judges wrote: "Mary Mullen's Novel Institutions is a fascinating study that reassesses both literary histories and current scholarship about the realist novel. In clear, persuasive prose, it reads Irish realist novels to offer a transnational understanding of realism as a genre. By identifying the temporal anachronisms in Irish realism, the book draws provocative conclusions about how the unruly features of all realist novels disrupt their texts' dominant institutional politics, and about how we ourselves might disturb the demands of the institutions we inhabit by being likewise 'untimely.' Mullen's work is rigorous and original, and her ideas about how to push back against the strictures of academic in...

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...

The Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award, which comes with a prize of $250, is given to the most distinguished scholarly or critical essay written by a graduate student at Villanova. The prize-winning essays (undergraduate and graduate) are published in a booklet. For previous winners, as well as information about Margaret Powell Esmonde, see our awards page . To be eligible , essays must have been written within a year preceding the deadline; written either for any Villanova English course that was taught by a member of the Villanova English faculty. It is permissible to revise or expand papers beyond what was submitted for the course. Submissions may be excerpted from an M.A. Thesis. Format In addition to their essay, students should include a cover page including the course and professor for which the paper was written, as well as their local address, email, and telephone number. Students should also submit the essay assignment or an approximation of the assig...

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 ...