Gain Work Experience While Helping Local Small Businesses

Villanova's Career Center is looking for English majors to take part in a new initiative aimed at helping local small businesses navigate the disruption caused by Covid-19. Students seeking remote or virtual work opportunities can assist these businesses by promoting them and advertising their services. This work will not only help local businesses, but also provide learning and work opportunities for students.

The kinds of work available include: social media and online marketing, website building and payment processing, writing a business plan, and research assistance for loans. The first five positions received were all in areas that might be of interest to English majors: social media, marketing, digital video producer, website producer, and education.

You can check out the postings in Handshake using this quick link: https://bit.ly/smallbusinessops. Or you can search jobs in Handshake using the label "small business." Postings are coming in daily, so keep checking back for new opportunities. Note that students need to follow the application instructions in the job posting rather than applying directly via Handshake.

Internship Opportunity: Students Journalists Wanted for Sports Media Company

Best Version Media, an international media company with headquarters in Brookfield, Wisconsin, is launching a new internship program for its national website, BVMsports.com. BVM Sports provides professional reporting on sports at every level from the international to the local. It publishes over 850 monthly magazines with locally oriented news stories and distributes over 30 million copies across North America, serving residents, homeowners' associations, villages, and local businesses.

BVM Sports is seeking students for the 2020-2021 academic school year to become Sports Writing Interns. The ideal candidates will be talented student journalists interested in expanding their portfolio with real-world media experience while being provided professional-level training, one-on-one mentorship with professional writers, and story critique from professional editors. Each week interns will be given the opportunity to pursue different types of sports stories and offered advising and oversight to help them become the best version of themselves as sports writers. Interns may also have the chance to cover large sporting events as credentialed media members as well as enter to win Best Version Media’s student sports writing awards. 

Visit here for more information and to apply for an internship.

Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh Reflects on Reading during the Pandemic

Check out Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh's brilliant new column, "Lunar Phase", in The Point magazine, in which he answers the question, "What would you most like to read at this moment?"

Dr. Mary Mullen wins Irish Studies Book Award

Congratulations to Dr. Mary Mullen, who has won the 2019 Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature from the American Conference for Irish Studies for her book Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism.

Here's what the judges wrote:
"Mary Mullen's Novel Institutions is a fascinating study that reassesses both literary histories and current scholarship about the realist novel. In clear, persuasive prose, it reads Irish realist novels to offer a transnational understanding of realism as a genre. By identifying the temporal anachronisms in Irish realism, the book draws provocative conclusions about how the unruly features of all realist novels disrupt their texts' dominant institutional politics, and about how we ourselves might disturb the demands of the institutions we inhabit by being likewise 'untimely.' Mullen's work is rigorous and original, and her ideas about how to push back against the strictures of academic institutions are a welcome tonic for our times."

Visit here to see the announcement

Dr. Heather Hicks on Contemporary "Disaster Studies"

Some folks may be wondering what Villanova's English faculty has been up to in between Zoom meetings, doomsurfing the internet, and homeschooling their kids. As it happens, department chair Dr. Heather Hicks, whose second book was on contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction, has been busy working on an essay that turned out to be more topical than she had anticipated.

Dr. Hicks said: "I just wrote a whole article on "Disaster Response in Post-2000 American Apocalyptic Literature" for a Cambridge University Press volume on Apocalyptic Literature in American Literature and Culture. Now of course I wish I could write a post-script. But the point of the article is that Disaster Studies as a field indicates that most people are highly cooperative and compassionate during disasters, rather than taking up cudgels as per many post-apocalyptic visions. I think most of what has happened reflects this tendency for people to be mutually supportive, though the vigilantism toward wealthy people trying to hide out in their vacation homes is an interesting and complicated exception. And the way nations and states are turning on each other is also a wrinkle in the theory... But there certainly hasn't been a lot of crime or looting thus far."