The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Christoforos Sassaris, MA '22, has had a paper published in La Bibliofilía , Italy's oldest and preeminent peer-reviewed journal for bibliography and book history, in an issue dedicated to the memory of book historian Dennis E. Rhodes. You can learn more about the journal on their official site . Here is the abstract to Christoforos's article: "Yerasimos Vlachos’ Thesauros Tetraglossos —published in Venice, first in 1659 by Ducali Pinelli and again in 1723 by Antonio Vortoli—is a key text in the histories of modern Greek printing and the NeoHellenic diaspora. The book is a dictionary that contains modern Greek, ancient Greek, Latin, and Italian. Several notable differences exist between the first and second editions, and these differences shed light on the 1723 edition’s relation to the Hellenic community’s identity and its use of the text in the eighteenth century. Following the work of Vasilis Tatakis and others, I argue that the second edition served two main purpos...

Professor Tsering Wangmo Dhompa was featured in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review , in a biographical piece written by Emily DeMaioNewton. The piece marks the publication of Dr. Wangmo Dhompa's latest book of poetry, Revolute , and highlights both her trailblazing achievements (she is the first Tibetan woman to publish poetry in English) and her complex life story (she was born on a train in India to exiled Tibetan parents). Dr. Wangmo Dhompa was raised by her mother in India and Nepal and, following her mother's death, enrolled in an MFA program in San Francisco because "she thought that keeping busy and being in an unfamiliar place might help lessen the pain of loss." Since then, Dr. Wangmo Dhompa earned her PhD and has written many chapbooks and books of poetry, as well as a memoir. You can learn more about her work and her life by reading the article  from Tricycle . Illustration by Natalie Foss for Tricycle

​​​​Interview conducted by Jacqueline Ridberg Larabee VU MA '23 student Daniella began her Masters in English at Villanova knowing she wouldn’t end up in an typical “English” field. Rather her passion was always art. As an undergraduate she majored in Art History & English, and she knew that “Art history has a huge writing emphasis, but it is a flaw of most art history programs that they do not prioritize writing coursework.” Thus Daniella decided to pursue her MA in English. She talks about two divergent paths she saw herself going down after receiving her Masters: “One was to get a PhD in Art History, not English, and the other path was to pursue communications for an art museum.” Daniella decided to tangibly explore her post-grad career options by taking advantage of the English Department’s Professional Research Option (PRO), focusing on marketing & communications for Museums. The PRO course, available to second year English Masters students, consists of cre...

 Congrats to our grad students Em Friedman MA '21 and Christoforos Sassaris MA '21, who presented posters at the Villanova Graduate Research Symposium this fall. Em's topic was Feminist Abolitionism Across Time , and Christoforos's was Locating the Byzantine in Medieval English Literature: The Auchinleck Manuscript . More information about the graduate research symposium can be found here . Here is Em's abstract: The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) was an interracial women's abolitionist group active in Philadelphia from 1833-1870. This project explores the PFASS's ideological and rhetorical strategies by close reading documents in their archive, including annual reports, minutes, correspondence and personal letters to other abolitionists, speeches and financial records. The PFASS's archive is housed with the Abolitionist Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. By focusing on the three Women's Anti-Slavery Conferences —hel...

Congratulations to our own Em Friedman, MA ’22, who has had an article accepted for publication in Milton Studies . According to Em, “My paper is called ‘Unsexing Eden’ and it is about the subjective difference between Eve and Adam in John Milton’s Paradise Lost . My premise is that, while most readers and critics take Eve and Adam’s gender/sex difference for granted in prelapsarian Eden, this assumption does not necessarily derive from the metaphysical conditions of Milton’s monist materialism. After showing how physical morphology wouldn’t render ontological subjective-sexed positions in the poem, I offer a psychoanalytic reading of the first couple’s subject-formation. I draw from Lacan because of the centralized role sexuation plays in his account of subjectivation, and take up critical feminist and queer responses to Lacan including those by Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. However, my analysis departs from most psychoanalytic readings because I argue that prelapsa...

We are so happy to announce that after a reluctant hiatus, this year's Gender and Women’s Studies Conference is ON! This year's Conference Chair is Dr. Lauren Shohet, Professor of English. The event will take place on Friday, March 25, 2022. The GWS conference is an exciting opportunity to showcase student work, discuss your interests in Gender and Women’s Studies with students and faculty from Villanova, and see the broad range of intellectual disciplines represented in the field. We are including in this announcement our annual Call for Papers. We are seeking essays and creative work written either for the conference or during Spring or Fall of 2020 or 2021 that engage gender, sexuality, or feminist theories. We encourage submission of alternative forms of expression, including but not limited to original scripts, poetry, or films that engage gender analysis. We hope that Villanova students across departments and programs will submit their work; these are the following catego...

Occasionally our graduate students write reports  for our undergraduate blog  about undergrad alumni who majored in English. The following is an article written by one of our grad students! Deb Pfisterer (‘00): A Career in Consulting Interview Conducted By Jacqueline Ridberg Larabee, VU MA '23 student Deb began, like most college students, not quite sure what path she would pursue after graduation. She started her time at Villanova by majoring in Accounting. While she felt that business was always in her future (she says half-jokingly “I know I was meant to be in business because even as a kid a three-ring binder from my Dad excited me”), she also says she was unexplainably miserable as an Accounting major. Deb then decided to follow her bliss and become an English major where she “became who [she] was.” After graduating in 2000, her first job was for Boeing in military aircraft as a procedure writer. At Boeing, she was originally tasked with the mission to “get everyone into ...

 This coming Monday!  

 Second-year MA student Isobel McCreavy will be presenting her paper " Focalizing on Young Adult Literature: The Dangers of Ignoring Focalization" at the 118th Annual PAMLA Conference in Las Vegas on November 11th!  Isobel's essay "examines the use of tropes and narrative roles in young adult fiction to examine the messaging in four young adult works - John Green’s Paper Towns, J. K. Rowling’s the Harry Potter series, Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instrument series, and Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower. Each work has three narrative roles that dictate the perceptions and identity formations of its characters. The roles of narrator, focalizer and focalizee create dynamics in the works where characters exist only in relation to other characters, and their identities are tied to these roles. Embedded in tropes like the Girl Quest Tale and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, these roles confine the autonomy of its characters and hint at the dangers of focalization, i...

ENG 8560: Revolutionary Decade: The 1790s Dr. Evan Radcliffe Monday 5:20-7:20 pm   The 1790s was the decade of the French Revolution in Britain as well as France, with each new moment of turmoil in France—what an alarmed Alexander Hamilton referred to as “a rapid succession of dreadful revolutions”—generating its own vehement response across the Channel. The fall of the Bastille and the publication of The Declaration of the Rights of Man , the flight and arrest of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the royal trials and executions, the outbreak of war between Great Britain and France, the Terror—each year seemed to witness more of these “great national events,” as William Wordsworth called them. Wordsworth (who, like Mary Wollstonecraft, experienced some of the Revolution first-hand) and other British writers addressed these events and their possible implications in varied ways, often through developing their own original approaches and forms. Indeed, many of their works—William Bla...