Poetry Reading featuring Villanova English Faculty on April 3

Join us for a poetry reading this coming Wednesday, April 3. Five faculty members from Villanova's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, including English Faculty Tsering Wangmo, Jill Kress Karn, and Catherine Staples, will read poems from their own work. This ACS-approved event, is co-sponsored by Falvey Memorial Library, the Department of English, and the Augustine and Culture Seminar Program. It will take place at 4.30pm in Speakers' Corner in Falvey Library.

Dr. Tsering Wangmo speaks about Tibetan exilic life at Temple University

Dr. Tsering Wangmo gave a talk at Temple University, at an event organized by the Department of Religion, Women's Studies, and the Global Studies Program. Her talk, "Tibet: Unity in Exile and the 'Right" Vision," was about two political manifestoes produced by Tibetan refugees in India in the mid-1960s that shaped the discourse on unity and democracy within Tibetan exilic life. In her talk she outlined how unity was an exclusionary discourse that became the dominant framework for thinking about the boundaries of belonging, refugee-citizenship in exile, and the values of the Tibetan people. 

Submit your work on Joyce to the Rosenbach Museum's Bloomsday Essay Contest

Calling all emerging Joyceans! Submit your best essay on Ulysses or another Joyce text for the Rosenbach Museum's Bloomsday Essay Contest. Critical essays are welcome from undergraduate and graduate students in the Tri-State area. Winners will be announced on June 16, 2019, at the Rosenbach’s Bloomsday celebration. All participants are encouraged to attend but need not be present to win!

An extra incentive for Villanova English majors: our own Dr. Megan Quigley is one of the three judges for the contest.

Requirements:

• Essays must be original work, unpublished elsewhere.
• Essays that were submitted to the Bloomsday Essay Contest in previous years may be resubmitted.
• Essays must be written in the English language.
• Entrants must attend a college or university in, or have a permanent address in, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, or Delaware.
• Entries must be submitted from a valid academic address (.edu) by the essay’s author.
• Length should be between 2000-9000 words in length, excluding footnotes.
• Essays must be formatted in MLA style (12 pt, double-spaced, numbered pages) with MLA citation.
• Please include the essay’s title on the first page of the essay as well as in the Essay Title field below.
• To ensure blind judging, identifying information (name, institution) should ONLY be included in the submission form below, and not in the essay.

Submissions that do not meet all the above requirements are not eligible for consideration.

Judges:

• Paul Saint-Amour, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania
• Megan Quigley, Associate Professor of English, Villanova University
• Ted Howell, Lecturer, Rowan University

Two awards will be given:

• $300 for an outstanding paper written by a graduate student
• $200 for an outstanding paper written by an undergraduate student

All entries must be submitted by midnight EST on Tuesday, April 15, 2019. Please contact press@rosenbach.org if you have any questions or issues with the submission form.

Deadline for Career Center funding for Internships - April 11

Thanks to generous donor funding and departmental support, Villanova students are eligible to apply for funding to help them complete unpaid and low-paying summer internships and research experiences.

In the link below, you will find information about the various funding opportunities, in addition to policies and procedures associated with applying for and receiving funding for internships. The Center encourages students to carefully read through descriptions of each funding opportunity and the policies and procedures to understand your options.

The upcoming deadline for Career Center funding is April 11. https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/provost/careers/plan/internfunding.html

Photos from English Department's Spring Pre-Registration Reception - 3/15/19

Villanova Creating Writing students visit Belfast over spring break

Students in Pros. Alan Drew and Tsering Wangmo's "Writing Through Conflict" class travelled to Belfast in Northern Ireland over the break.the Writing Through Conflict class, where they enjoyed had a fantastic and intense week of writing workshops, symposiums, and readings at Queens University's Seamus Heaney Center. Using the Troubles and the tension surrounding the Brexit vote as a backdrop, students wrote their own fiction and prose that interrogated socio-politcal issues, both in the United States and in Belfast. They had the opportunity to workshop their own creative work in Belfast in group workshops and in one-on-ones with such respected Northern Irish writers as Glenn Patterson, Lucy Caldwell, Jimmy McAleavey, Michael Hughes, and Ian Samson. Students also participated in various other events sponsored by Queens: a film screening of The Truth Commissioner, followed by a Q&A with poet Nick Laird and novelist David Park, the author of the novel on which the film is based. They also attended a panel at the Ulster Museum with Lucy Caldwell, Lisa McGee, the creator of the hit television series Derry Girls, and singer/songwriter/producer Iain Archer, formerly of the band Snow Patrol. The whole week culminated in a student showcase/dinner at which students read from their work. 

English majors, graduate students, and faculty join protest demanding Villanova take action on climate change

Carrying signs saying, "There is No Planet B" and "What I Stand For Is What I Stand On," Villanova English majors, graduate students, and faculty joined the international climate change walk-out on Friday. After chants and speeches, including one by English major Gracie Stagliano, a group of about 150 students, faculty, and local residents marched from the Oreo to Tolentine Hall to deliver their two demands to Father Peter Donohue: that Villanova pledge to move the date for making the campus carbon neutral up to 2030, and that the university enter into a power purchase for renewable energy contract by 2020. Read the Main Line Times report of the protest here.

English major Corina Scott (holding the sign on the right) leads the climate change march

Just Published! Three New Poems by Prof. Catherine Staples

Congratulations to Prof. Cathy Staples, who has just published three new poems in the Yale Review: "After Seeing the Irish Modern Dance Theater's Lear," "Hurricane," and "In a Hurry."

Just Published! Dr. Megan Quigley on reading "The Waste Land" with the #MeToo Generation

Congratulations to Dr. Megan Quigley, whose short essay, "Reading 'The Waste Land' with the #MeToo Generation," was just published in the journal Modernism/Modernity on its digital Print Plus platform. Dr. Quigley's essay reflects on the challenges of teaching modernist literature in a new era of feminist activism.

Just Published! Dr. Jean Lutes on early advice columns

Congratulations to Dr. Jean Lutes, whose article, "Lovelorn Columns: A Genre Scorned," was just published in American Literature, one of the top journals in literary studies. Using Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) to explore a wily, underestimated genre, Dr. Lutes's essay juxtaposes his brutal, brilliant riff on the advice column with readings of the real thing. She reviews the lovelorn column’s distinctive features, situates West’s satiric novella in that context, and then examines the racial dynamics of both the novella and the genre, touching briefly on two careers: that of the well-known Dorothy Dix, who was white, and that of Princess Mysteria, a little-known columnist who was African American. In the process, Dr. Lutes shows that West tells us both more and less about this mass print genre than scholars have allowed. Although he portrays advice columns as a morally bankrupt product of consumer capitalism, they did far more than simply render irrelevant the question of genuine emotional expression. Using a complex masquerade of gender and race, columnists shifted counsel outside the bounds of interpersonal exchange, forged an anonymous, recursive imaginative field, and sometimes even generated glimmers of an ethics of intimacy.

Just published! A new book of essays on early modern British literature co-edited by Dr. Lauren Shohet

Congratulations to Dr. Lauren Shohet for her work co-editing the book, Gathering Force: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1557-1623, which has just been published by Cambridge University Press. The book is the first of three volumes, spanning 1557-1714 about the changing contexts of early-modern British literature. Dr. Shohet also co-authored the introduction and authored the chapter, "Masques, pageants, and entertainments: old rituals, new forms."

Submit your writing to Brandeis literary magazine Laurel Moon

Laurel Moon, Brandeis University's oldest literary magazine, is accepting submissions for our national issue. This issue follows a simple mission: to feature the innermost voices from a group of diverse, young writers. 

For over twenty years, Laurel Moon has published the best fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry that Brandeis students have to offer. As of last spring, Laurel Moon began accepting submissions from undergraduates enrolled at any accredited US college or university.  The submissions deadline for the upcoming national issue is March 30, 2019. For this issue, we will be accepting original, unpublished work written in English. We will consider up to five poems and three prose works from each author, as well as up to fifteen pages of content in another form. 

Additionally, Laurel Moon will be offering one-on-one feedback to writers who wish to receive guidance on any creative writing piece they they present. To see the full submission guidelines and instructions, please see here.