Villanova English Majors and Faculty Speak Up at Climate Change Town Hall

Thanks to everyone who came out for the Climate Change Town Hall in the Connelly Cinema on Friday. The event, co-sponsored by the Student Government Association, the Faculty Congress, the Staff Council, and the Sustainability Leadership Council, featured a panel of speakers, including Villanova English professor Dr. Jean Lutes, followed by a Q&A. Speakers discussed the carbon emission reduction goals in Villanova's Strategic Plan and the steps that Villanova would need to take to develop a campus sustainability plan in line with our peer institutions.

See here for a recording of the event. You can also add your name to the petition calling on the university to make a stronger commitment to sustain.

Dr. Adrienne Perry wins Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend

Congratulations to Dr. Adrienne Perry, who has been awarded one of the two 2018 Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipends. The awards, each of $5,000, are given each year to two alumni of Warren Wilson College's MFA Creative Writing program in Asheville, NC, one in poetry and one in fiction. Dr. Perry received the fiction award for her novel in progress, See Through Girls, a reimagining of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man set in contemporary New York City. Judge Paul Lisicky said: "With hilarity, a crackling mind, and sentences of great nuance and wit, See Through Girls resists easy solutions, interrogates pieties of all types, without ever giving into cynicism. Though it uses Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a frame, this work is distinctive, utterly itself. A necessary book is coming into being."

Dr. Brooke Hunter publishes Forging Boethius in Medieval Intellectual Fantasies

Congratulations to Dr. Brooke Hunter, whose book, Forging Boethius in Medieval Intellectual Fantasies, was published by Routledge at the end of last year! Dr. Hunter's book examines the influence of the thirteenth-century Pseudo-Boethian forgery De disciplina scolarium on medieval understandings of Boethius (died 524 CE). Tracing the popularity of De disciplina’s vision of Boethius in the middle ages in relation to its current scholarly neglect, Dr. Hunters shows how medieval schoolmen saw themselves and the past, and how modern scholars imagine the medieval past. In exploring this alternate Boethian persona through a variety of different works including texts of translatio studii et imperii, common school texts, the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, and humanist writings, Dr. Hunter's book reveals a new vein of medieval Boethianism that is earthy, practical, and even humorous.

Dr. Alice Dailey Publishes Article in Shakespeare Quarterly

Congratulations to Dr. Alice Dailey, whose article, "Little, Little Graves: Shakespeare's Photographs of Richard II," was just published in the prestigious journal Shakespeare Quarterly. Dr. Dailey's essay argues that the play's many static, inset images of a dead King Richard function through a "temporal aesthetics" that cannot be summarized by the concept of the king’s two bodies, as Ernst Kantorowicz influentially argued. In place of this paradigm, Dr. Dailey invokes "the photographic phenomenology of Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag to describe how Richard generates images of his grave to proliferate himself across multiple temporal dimensions." Richard objectifies himself as a corpse while by imagining himself in the position of someone contemplating his grave after his death. By capturing himself in images of morbid stillness, Richard deploys a "photographic technology of aesthetic objectification and scopic anticipation."