The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Dr. Carissa Harris, an Associate Professor at Temple University, will be presenting a talk entitled "Twice Militant: Women's Intersectional Anger from the 1381 Uprising to #SayHerName." This event will be held in the Idea Accelerator in Falvey Library on Oct. 25th at 5:30 p.m. The wearing of masks will be required.  Extra thanks to grad student Theo Campbell for designing the excellent flyer, which you can see below.

Professor Megan Quigley was recently elected to the Board of Directors of the International T. S. Eliot Society. This weekend she taught a seminar to scholars from India, the Philippines, and all over the US—one of the benefits of zoom! But on Tuesday she’ll be back in her Falvey classroom looking forward to the 100th birthday of The Waste Land with her graduate class here.

An interview conducted by Alexander Matkowsky, 1st Year MA/Graduate Assistant in English This week I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Kimberly Takahata, the English Department’s new Assistant Professor of “Literature of the Americas to 1900”, who is currently teaching the undergraduate courses “American Literature Traditions 1” and “Race & Ethnicity in American Literature” in the Fall 2021 semester. Dr. Takahata pursued her undergraduate degree at Brown University and completed her graduate work and PhD at Columbia, working as a postdoctoral instructor at the West Point United States Military Academy. Her field of study, “Early American Literature”, is quite broadly defined; she works primarily with Long Eighteenth Century texts from Massachusetts down through the Caribbean. I asked her how her interest in this specific field came about. During her undergraduate experience, she found herself to be one of only a few students “jazzed by” Early American poetry and Puritan text...

Yesterday we held an orientation for our incoming graduate students. This was our first in-person orientation since COVID, and it was nice to be able to interact in person once more. Pizza and salad were enjoyed by all, and we are excited to get started next week. L to R: Julia Krieman Jamie Wojtal Alex Matkowsky Ethan Shea Hannah Kahn Caitlin Salomon Jacqueline Ridberg Theo Campbell

Villanova MA student Christoforos Sassaris has been working as a research center intern at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, and his time there has introduced him to some interesting artifacts. Much of his work has centered on a collection relating to the celebrated artist Maxfield Parrish, who was born in Philadelphia and became famous for his paintings and illustrations. While examining a scrapbook, Sassaris happened upon an image of a male figure (possibly Parrish) encountering a spectral double exposure figure—possibly a study for an unfinished painting? Sassaris was able to make connections and form hypotheses based upon the varied contents of the scrapbook: "The inserted items vary from newspaper clippings to art prints. One interesting standout was a two-page child’s report on how sugar is made on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia. This report speaks to the Parrish children’s frequent trips to that locale with their mother, artist and writer Lydia Parrish (1871-1953), who l...

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 .  

Congratulations to Christoforos Sassaris for earning the Dr. Nicholas Padis Memorial Graduate Scholarship from the Hellenic University Club of Philadelphia. The scholarship is primarily predicated on academic excellence, and "honors Philadelphia physician, first president and founding member of the Hellenic University Club of Philadelphia, Dr. Nicholas Padis."  In the poster announcing the scholarship, Christoforos (his middle name) is referred to by Panagiotis (his first name). More information about the Hellenic University Club of Philadelphia and its scholarships can be found on their website . Congratulations, Christoforos!  

Professor Tsering Wangmo Dhompa was featured in a list compiled by Good Morning America of inspirational Asian and Pacific Islander-identifying public figures. "Good Morning America and ABC News asked influential AAPI leaders, celebrities, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, athletes and more to nominate fellow members of the community for the list," according to to ABC News. Professor Wangmo Dhompa was nominated by Tenzin Mingyur Paldron, a Tibetan-American artist and scholar from UC Berkely. To quote the Good Morning America bio in full, "Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the first Tibetan-American professor of literature and creative writing, and the first Tibetan female poet to be published in English. Raised in India and Nepal, Tsering has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She is currently a professor in the English Department at Villanova University. Her first book of poems, Rule...

The eleventh annual Thesis and Field Exam Symposium was held on Monday, May 10th, over Zoom. This event was an opportunity to celebrate our spring and summer 2021 graduates, and for them to share excerpts and summaries of their work with friends, family, and colleagues. Completing theses this spring and summer were Mary Cordisco, Caitlyn Dittmeier, Alex Liska, Zac Richards, and Olivia Stowell. Completing field exams were Sarah Beth Gilbert, Catherine Bialkowski, Kathryn Corona, Josh Hsu, Anne Jones, Nick Keough, Carson Schatzman, Shea Szpila, and Lauren Wilke. During the symposium, Caitlyn Dittmeier spoke about women and gender in Irish poetry and folklore. Catherine Bialkowski spoke about manifestations of motherhood in classic children’s novels (in particular, why are there so many absent mothers in classic children’s books?). Josh Hsu spoke about science fiction and post-human concepts, beginning with Frankenstein and leading up to the present day. Lauren Wilke will be working over...

Congratulations to Anne Jones, M.A. ’21, this year's recipient of the Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award for best graduate essay. Anne earned this award for her essay, “The Vexed Position of the Black Secret-Bearer: Concealments and Revelation in Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman's Narrative .” The essay examines how Hannah Crafts’ 1850s novel theorizes secrecy both as a form necessary for enslaved peoples and as a tool of racial subjugation. While Hannah, the novel’s enslaved narrator, initially uses secrecy to facilitate intimacy within her community and resistance against slavery’s dictates, the essay demonstrates how and why Hannah becomes increasingly hesitant towards bearing the secrets of others. On the other hand, while wary of shared secrets, Hannah still uses personal secrets for her own survival. The essay argues that “Hannah longs both for the freedom attainable only through secrecy and for freedom from the chokehold of secrecy. Through the functioning of this dialec...