Dr. Adrienne Perry in The Villanovan

Check out the profile of Dr. Adrienne Perry by her student Caroline Harding in this week's Villanovan.

Environmentalism and Dance Performance - Oct 31

Don't miss the ecologist and modern dancer Dr. Jame McCray, who will be discussing her work in the Idea Accelerator in Falvey Library on Thursday, October 31 at 2:30pm, an event organized by Dr. Lisa Sewell.

Open Mic Night at the Wilma Theater - Nov 4

The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia is hosting an Open Mic Night on Monday, November 4 in conjunction with its production of Dance Nation by Clare Barron, a comedy about female ambition set in the world of competitive dance. At Open Mic Night, local artists will present works that respond to themes and ideas from the play. This event is hosted by Philadelphia spoken-word poet and actress Jaylene Clark Owens, and our featured artist for Dance Nation is performer and choreographer Sanchel Brown.

Casey Berner, former Villanova English major and current project coordinator at the Wilma, is urging current Villanova students to attend or even share work at the Open Mic Night.

The Wilma offers $10 tickets to Dance Nation for those who sign up for the Open Mic, as well as discounted student tickets and group rates for 10 or more, so students can see the play before sharing. Those interested in sharing work on Nov. 4 should contact wilmaopenmic@gmail.com. A sign-up sheet will also be available the day of the Open Mic.

Take Part in Marathon Reading of Moby Dick at Seaport Museum - November 9-10

To celebrate isthe 200th anniversary of Herman Melville's birth, the Rosenbach Museum is organizing a marathon reading of Moby Dick, to be held at the Independence Seaport Museum in Old City, downtown Philadelphia on November 9-10. The event will start at 2.00pm on Saturday, November 9 and will continue through the night to around 3.00pm on Sunday, November 10, the expected finish time. There will be food and fun activities for all ages.

The event is free and open to all. If you would like to be a reader, you can email Edward G. Pettit, manager of Public Programs at the Rosenbach Museum, at epettit@rosenbach.org. You should indicate in your email the times you are available and the Museum will do its best to accommodate you.

Click here for more information and to register for the event.

Submit Your Work to POLIS, Villanova's Literary Magazine

POLIS, Villanova's Literary Magazine, is now accepting written and visual submissions for its Fall 2019 edition! Submissions can take the form of poetry, prose, visual art, and photography and can be emailed to polislitmag@gmail.com. The deadline to submit is Monday, November 11.

Photos from the Majors Fair

Many thanks to the members of the Student Advisory Council who helped out staffing the English department's table at the Majors Fair on Friday. It looks like Dr. Hicks's dog Truffle also had a good time!

Joshua Greco and Reagan Wish

Villanova Wildcat, Truffle, Dr. Heather Hicks

Jane Crager

Just Published! Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh on Claudia Rankine and Robert Lowell

Congratulations to Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, whose article "The Atlantic Ocean Breaking On Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject," was just published in PMLA, the official journal of the Modern Language Association.

Dr. Javadizadeh said: "This essay began for me when I first read Rankine’s Citizen. I noticed that, tucked into the middle of her book, and in a moment that seemed to me like a reference to the Middle Passage and the history of slavery, Rankine used a phrase—“the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads”—that she was clearly (to me at least!) lifting and adapting from a poem by Robert Lowell. But I had no idea what the two moments had to do with each other—and no idea, therefore, why Rankine was turning to Lowell’s language to evoke the history of slavery. Lowell’s version of the phrase came in a poem called “Man and Wife,” part of his 1959 book Life Studies; both his poem and that book seem to be largely about crises in Lowell’s private life—and nothing to do, or at least nothing obviously to do, with anti-black racism, much less the history of slavery.

"So I started to dig around. Rankine had also said in an interview that she thought Lowell was struggling, in Life Studies, with the construction of whiteness, but that it was hard to find academic work about that. Lowell is one of the poets I work on most closely, and I knew that she was right that there wasn’t much scholarship on his whiteness. (So far as I knew, there wasn’t any!) But I didn’t know, in the first place, what Rankine was seeing when she remarked on this struggle in his work. I looked back to “Man and Wife,” and certain lines in the poem began to suggest to me a lingering anxiety about race. But it was when I went back to Lowell’s archive at Harvard and looked at drafts of the poem that my jaw dropped. Race, it turned out, was all over the early drafts of the poem. Rankine—who had never seen these drafts—had nevertheless intuited something genuinely lurking within the poem. She was right! And I could see, as Lowell revised those drafts into the published poem, how much of his poem’s explicit references to race—and all of its references to blackness—had been scrupulously cut away. I felt like I was seeing a poet whom I thought I knew very well through new eyes. And I had Rankine’s poetry to thank for that.

"That’s what got me started. What got me through the writing was a desire to figure out what Rankine’s intuition about Lowell meant for her own poetry, poetry that I also loved. Basically the challenge I saw Rankine facing was that, on the one hand, the kind of poetry that Lowell had written (introspective, autobiographical, personal) meant a great deal to her, but that, on the other, she had seen how that kind of poetry had been premised (in Lowell’s particular case but also more generally, for the kind of poetry that he represented) on a construction of whiteness that was responsible for historical violence against black people, and indeed for Rankine’s own marginalization. So: how could she write that kind of poetry without replicating its racism? Why would she even try? That’s what I tried to figure out. I learned a great deal in writing the essay: about Lowell, about Rankine, and indeed about my own relationship, as an Iranian-American who has been trained and has worked within predominately white institutions, to whiteness.

"One other thing I wanted to say: I’m deeply indebted to my colleagues in the Villanova English department for helping me do this work. In particular: Lisa Sewell invited me, once I began to talk to her about Rankine and Lowell, to contribute an essay into a volume she was coediting. And then once she saw what I was coming up with, she encouraged me to submit that essay to a journal first. I then brought a draft of the essay to a writing group made up of some other of my colleagues: Joe Drury, Travis Foster, Brooke Hunter, Mary Mullen, and Megan Quigley. They—along with Lisa, who kept editing the piece for her volume and where I’m happy to say another version of it will soon appear—gave me brilliant, crucial feedback. And they encouraged me to send it to PMLA, which was a vote of confidence I really needed at that moment."

Student in Dr. Quigley's Virginia Woolf Class Reviews "Orlando" for Villanovan

Check out Taylor Malatesta's terrific review of the current Villanova Theatre production of Orlando in this week's Villanovan. Taylor, who is staff writer for The Villanovan culture section, took Dr. Megan Quigley's seminar on Virginia Woolf last spring, and shows why reading, watching, and understanding Woolf is so crucial right now.