Dr. Wangmo Presents at Buddhist Studies Lecture Series

On Friday, December 5th, Dr. Tsering Wangmo presented virtually on "Chigdrel and the Politics of Sorrow" as part of The Khyentse Foundation Buddhist Studies Lecture Series, sponsored by Northwestern University.

According to the summary provided by Northwestern, Dr. Wangmo examined "a lesser-known chapter in Tibetan exile history through the story of the Group of Thirteen, a collective of Khampa chieftains and religious leaders who established settlements in India in the mid-1960s with a hope to protect their diverse regional and religious traditions. This decision set them apart from the majority Tibetan refugees who joined the settlements established by the Tibetan government. They were cast as being opponents to Tibetan unity."

This presentation relates to subjects covered more extensively in Dr. Wangmo's recently published book, The Politics of Sorrow. Focusing on the early years of Tibetan exile life in India and Nepal, this book marks a significant change in the fields of nationalism studies, refugee identity and Tibetan historiography.

“My intention was to center Tibetan experiences and to write about history and exile from the perspective of ordinary Tibetans,” Professor Wangmo explains—contrary to the traditional academic approach of treating displaced peoples as research subjects and instead emphasizing their role as co-creators of knowledge.

In support of the book, Professor Wangmo has been publishing widely and traveling extensively this past spring and summer as well. In May, she read at UC Santa Cruz in California. In June, she gave a talk at a conference titled “Succession in Times of Change in the Tibetan World,” which was jointly sponsored by the École française d’Extrême-Orient and Aarhus University as part of the Leadership and Reincarnation of the Dalai Lamas (LEAD) project. And, also in June, Professor Wangmo gave a talk in English to young Tibetans and another talk in Tibetan to local elders in Bir, a village located in the Himalayas in northern India.

Dr. Wangmo presenting over Zoom on Friday, December 5th

Alexis Atwood on Summer Research and "Poetry of Witness"

    Last week, I sat down for a chat with Alexis Atwood ‘26 to discuss how one class from her first semester of courses in the Graduate English program inspired her to pursue a fascinating research topic. Alexis arrived at Villanova last fall and, as a first-year student, took the required ENG8000: Literary Theory with Dr. Heather Hicks, a survey course designed to introduce first-years to a wide variety of theoretical fields and frameworks. She told me how two particular classes in ENG8000—on Vulnerability Studies and Border Studies—helped her build upon her pre-existing scholarly interests and develop them further in a new context. 

    “I’ve always been interested in discourse in particular and the ways that discourse exposes systems of dominance, so I think that's kind of what brought me to Vulnerability Studies," said Alex.  "And then I found that poetry was a potent source to pull from when it came to understanding discourse and the way it exposes hierarchies and hegemony. I've also always been interested in the poetry of Pablo Neruda. He's someone I really enjoy reading…because of the Border Studies class, I was really drawn to this relationship between North and South America, and I felt like there was something to kind of dig into there when it came to vulnerability and how our vulnerability as North Americans might impact the way that we engage with that sort of poetry.”

    Synthesizing these interests together led Alexis to “Poetry of Witness,” or poetry “that comes from people who have experienced extremity, whether it be extreme poverty, exile, or if they’re experiencing severe human rights violations.” Linking her affinity for Latin American poetry with the new methodological approach of vulnerability studies allowed Alexis to “make a connection between the field and the practice of actually reading poetry.”

    Once she realized the potential for her academic intervention, Alexis then had to familiarize herself with the canons of Latin American poetry, Vulnerability Studies, and Poetry of Witness, which she achieved by participating in the Summer Research program. Alexis began by identifying key texts that would be most beneficial to her interests. She told me how an anthology of Poetry of Witness called Against Forgetting, edited by Carolyn Forché, served as an excellent entry into the field. “I started there by reading the introduction and getting an overview of what poetry of witness looks like,” Alexis told me. “After that, my day-to-day looked like reading poetry collections from Latin America, and then reading articles that were supplementary to my topic. I was reading articles about vulnerability studies, but I also started veering off into care ethics, and then I was also thinking about pedagogy…asking questions about how we implement these things into a classroom, so that if a student reads poetry through the lens of vulnerability studies, how do we make them a subject who is aware of human rights violations in a way that would hopefully urge them to be active.” 

    After a long summer filled with lots of reading, Alexis presented her findings in the Summer Research Symposium, where students are invited to share the findings they made over the break. Alexis, who was new to a symposium as large as this, had to manage some initial nerves, noting to me how she was surprised by the size of both the audience and the room itself. In the end, however, everything turned out great. “It was fun, and it was a tiny bit scary. But it was really nice to see everyone else there, and everyone was really supportive. They asked really great questions during my Q&A period, which was really nice.”

    Now, as Alexis’s second year in the program begins to near its end, she’s looking ahead to the field exam. When asked about her decision to opt for the exam instead of writing a thesis, she explained how the former would allow her more time to immerse herself in the various fields she was entering. “There is still so much to read,” said Alexis. “There’s still so much foundational reading to get through. I realized that there were a few different things I would really need to dig into, so I decided to do a field exam to expand my research to focus on poets as public figures and to gain a stronger understanding of vulnerability studies as a whole.”

    Moving forward, Alexis looks to continue developing her research as she pursues a second Master’s degree in Human Rights. “I do kind of look at this as a stepping stone to a larger project,” Alexis told me when asked about her plans for the future beyond Villanova. “I would like to maybe write a book that’s a collection focused on vulnerability and poetry of witness, that's maybe similar to Against Forgetting, but is more focused on care ethics and border studies, and still focused on Latin American poetry. I'm kind of looking at the field exam as something that is helping me to build that foundation to write this longer project that I'll probably be researching for a few years.”

    To close out our interview, I asked Alexis if she had any words of wisdom she'd like to pass on to current first-year students. "I think it's two things. The first is that if you have something you're really interested in, don't deviate from it. I knew what I was interested in, and that thread has led me here. When I look back at my graduate bio, it still reflects what I'm interested in and what I'm doing right now, which is great. But the other part is that you don't need to just focus on your one thing. Every semester, I usually write one paper that is focused on my main topic and another paper that's focused on a more creative topic. That not only keeps me grounded, but it also helps me to explore different things, so I don't get pigeonholed or bored. I would say know what you want or find out what you want to really research and maybe contribute, but also find a fun thing to study as well." —Aria Gray

 

Robots in the University: Can They Help?

 

English Department Roundtable: "Robots in the University: Can They Help?"

The English Department AI Committee brought Villanova faculty and students together for the third AI roundtable, “Robots in the University: Can They Help?” 

Dr. Megan Quigley from the English department, Dr. Adriano Duque from the Spanish Department, and Jonathan Graziola, Manager of CLAS IT discussed their ongoing projects and how emerging technologies are shaping academic spaces.

Taught by Literature Conference Presentations

Villanova English major Ben Marcoulier '27, English MA student Julia Reagan '26, and Dr. Crystal J. Lucky presented together Friday, November 7th at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers 2025 Conference in Old City, Philadelphia. The roundtable highlighted the public humanities project Taught by Literature (https://www.taughtbyliterature.org/), which works to honor the legacy of Black author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Taught by Literature was founded by Dr. Jean Lutes, Denise Burgher, and Dr. Brigitte Fielder to make Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s work digitally available and to support educators in teaching early Black women intellectuals in their classrooms, from kindergarten to college.

Bringing together undergraduate and graduate students and professors, Taught by Literature invites Black women educators to present their work for a broader audience, engages students in the archives and the process of textual recovery, and works with public school teachers to develop curricular resources. Representing each of these elements of Taught by Literature’s collaborative process, panelists focused on the impact of reading and teaching Black women’s writing and thought from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Dr. Lucky drew on her twenty-five years of advocacy as a diversity consultant at a wide range of secondary schools to promote the power of robust collaboration between university professors and K-12 school districts. Ben Marcoulier shared his summer research at the American Antiquarian Society historicizing Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s short fiction within the social context of its time. You can see the digital exhibition he developed on the short story “The Grievances of the Books” here. Finally, Julia Reagan presented an overview of her work developing secondary school curriculum on Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s WWI-era poem “I Sit and Sew” (available here) and leading a professional development session with School District of Philadelphia teachers.

Photos from the Fall Reception

Thanks to everyone who attended and who helped to make our Fall Reception such a resounding success!

Catching up with our Faculty: Kamran Javadizadeh Edition

This past summer, many of our faculty traveled and gave talks all around the world. We’ll be featuring a few of them in the coming weeks—this time, we’ll be focusing on Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, who traveled to the UK and spoke about poetry in Oxford and Cambridge.

Professor Javadizadeh was invited to give a lecture on June 5th at the American Literature Research Seminar in Oxford, and he presented on ‘The National Poetry Crisis.’ Dr. Javadizadeh drew from the conclusion to his forthcoming book for his talk, which centered on a poetry festival which had been organized at the Library of Congress in the fall of 1962, and which happened to coincide with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“After the first day of the conference,” explained Dr. Javadizadeh, “President Kennedy came on television and announced that there were these missiles in Cuba. The Poetry Festival was happening in the Library of Congress, which is right next to the capitol building itself.” The festival’s setting, and its status as “in some ways a kind of state-sponsored event,” led the participants to ask questions: “How does the kind of poetry that was being written in that era accommodate or take the measure of a kind of sudden existential public crisis that’s happening? Does poetry feel irrelevant in a moment like that, or does it feel newly relevant in surprising ways?”

Professor Javadizadeh went on to note that one of the poets who did not attend the conference was Sylvia Plath, who was living in England at the time, and was in the midst of “a great burst of creativity, where she’s writing one or two—sometimes three—amazing poems a day, and is leading into the last months of her life.” Dr. Javadizadeh then read one of Plath’s poems from this time, “Ariel,” as “a poem about the bomb, and about her own metabolizing of anxiety about apocalypse.”

Intriguingly, according to Dr. Javadizadeh, “While the poets at the festival find themselves feeling kind of inadequate to the moment, Plath actually is the one who is carrying the form.”

Dr. Javadizadeh noted that he enjoyed giving the lecture, and that it was “a great event—the room was full of graduate students, other faculty in English, and some interested members of the public.” Afterwards, there was time to help in a ‘viva,’ a dissertation defense for a doctoral student, and “to take in Oxford itself, to visit museums, to check out these pubs that have been there for eight hundred years or whatever.”

In addition, by coincidence, Dr. Javadizadeh was able to meet up with one of his own Villanova students at Oxford, who happened to be there studying abroad. Maria Therese Barry, ’26, noted that “It was such a surreal experience to see Dr. Javadizadeh while I was abroad in Oxford! It felt like worlds colliding that two Villanovans could come across each other in a completely different part of the world. I remember him telling me at the Pre-Registration Reception in the fall of 2024 that he would be speaking there after I shared my news of going abroad, but actually going to the event and hearing him speak is something I will always remember. It was a wonderful opportunity to hear firsthand about his academic research in general, which was especially exciting for me since I usually am not able to hear about my professors' research during classtime.”

Following the Oxford visit, on the 11th of June, Dr. Javadizadeh participated in a one-day symposium, organized by the professors Jess Cotton and Christian Gelder at Cambridge, on “The Aesthetics of the Clinic.” As articulated in the symposium’s initial call for papers, “This one-day symposium draws together scholars working at the intersection of literature, aesthetics and mental health to prompt a discussion on the relationship between psychiatric institutions and the production of literature.” As Dr. Javadizadeh explained, “This was a series of talks, mostly about literary form and its relationship to psychoanalysis, (as well as) art and its relationship to psychotherapeutic practices more broadly speaking. Jess had heard that I was coming to Oxford, and she was wondering if I could give the keynote lecture to the symposium, so I was really thrilled to get to do that.”

Dr. Javadizadeh’s talk was about the poet Robert Lowell and his experience of psychiatric institutionalization, “and the way the language of psychiatry, as Lowell experienced it in the 1950s, came to inform his sense of what autobiographical poetry might look like. My argument,” explained Javadizadeh, “is that, in writing about his inner life, he’s doing so in ways that he’s absorbed rom, among other sources, a kind of psychiatric treatment that he received.”

Thanks to Dr. Javadizadeh for sharing his recollections of his trip, and we look forward to hearing from more of our faculty about their travels!

Photo courtesy of Maria Therese Barry '26

 

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with Jason Rekulak

 Novelist and editor Jason Rekulak captivated his audience with stories about his journey from English graduate to editor and writer in Philadelphia. In conversation with Dr. Joe Drury and Dr. Adrienne Perry at Villanova, Rekulak discussed the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its film adaptation, the creative process behind writing books, literary fandom, and the realities of life as a writer and editor.