Members of the student advisory committee will soon visit core writing and ACS courses to talk to students about the English major. They'll discuss their experience as an English major, answer questions, and share information. Here are some of the relevant handouts that they will provide:
How Creative Writers Can Benefit from the English Major
How Does the Villanova English Department prepare its majors for Careers?
English Courses and the Workplace
Join the English department for the spring pre-registration reception on Friday, March 11 between 12:30 and 2:00 pm in the Driscoll tent. Get swag! Talk to students and faculty! Learn about upcoming courses! Hear about exciting internships! And, for the first time ever, a book swap!
Book Swap Alert! Looking for your next binge read? Have a book you’re dying to recommend to a fellow reader who will dish about that plot twist, character arc, or surprise ending? Come to the English Pre-Registration event on Friday, March 11 in the Driscoll Tent from 12:30-2:00 pm with a favorite book of yours and swap it for one of your peers’. Whether it’s a hard-hitting drama, a fantastical page-turner, a gut-wrenching tear-jerker, a moving collection of poems, an inspirational memoir, or a guilty pleasure from BookTok, share something that you love. Books can be new, used, tabbed at your favorite parts, or creased in every direction. Don’t worry, though, you’ll get it back at the end of the semester when you meet up again with your partner and spill the tea about the books you both will have read. If you’re interested, sign up here by March 10 and we will connect you with a partner. Hope to see you there with a book in hand! Questions? Email Juliana Perri (jperri2@villanova.edu) or Katie Reed (kreed11@villanova.edu).
“I tell my students to find anything they can that will help us to understand Joyce’s master novel — literature or music mentioned, historical references, later novelists influenced by Joyce (like Sally Rooney), maps, charts, previous minds who have tussled and argued and written about Joyce in everything from scholarly articles to blogs and fanfic,” she said in an email. “Joyce’s universe is one for the obsessive reader who will find any clues to chart their way through the novel.”
She added: “I’m happy to throw my hat in to support an edition of ‘Ulysses’ with images.” Full article here.
"The fellows in the Idol Family Fellowship Program are: Denise Burgher, ABD, English, University of Delaware; African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow, Brigitte Fielder, associate professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison; author, Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke University Press, 2020), Jean Lutes, Luckow Family Endowed Chair of English Literature, Villanova University; with Student Affiliate Fellows: Kashae Garland, English and Criminology major, Villanova Class of 2022, Cynthia Choo, English and Humanities double major and Education minor Class of 2023 and Trinity Rogers, Peace & Justice Major, Class of 2024.
Their project: The ’Steenth Street Project: Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Stories of Black Childhood. This public-facing humanities project aims to recover a lost short story collection written in the 1890s by Black author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson, based on her experience teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in New York City. “The Annals of ‘Steenth Street,” as Dunbar-Nelson titled the planned collection, features the youngest residents of a city neighborhood targeted for uplift by Progressive-era reformers. It chronicles a vibrant community where poverty, neglect, domestic violence, limited access to education, and untreated illnesses make it difficult for people to thrive.
We are collaborating with the Black-majority School District of Philadelphia to bring Dunbar-Nelson’s work directly to the people who inspired and shaped “The Annals of ‘Steenth Street,” American children.
In deference to Dunbar-Nelson’s long career as an educator and advocate for racial justice, our goal is to produce a widely accessible digital edition along with curriculum resources and to make our work scalable, relevant, and adaptable to multiple K-12 school systems as well as college classrooms."
They have completed the first of three professional development sessions on teaching Black women writers to Philadelphia School District teachers and have an upcoming event at the Paul Robeson House in Philly in late February.
Join the English department for the spring 2022 Esmonde Colloquium series event on Tuesday, February 15 at 5:30 pm in Falvey Room 205.
If you have a piece of work that you're especially proud of, please consider submitting it for consideration for one of these awards.
The Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award, which comes with a prize of $250, is given to the most distinguished scholarly or critical essay written by a graduate student in a Villanova English course within the last 12 months.
The Jerome J. Fischer Memorial Awards, which come with a prize of $250, are given to the most distinguished scholarly or critical essays written by undergraduate students at Villanova within the last 12 months.
Submissions for the Fischer Award must have been written either for a Villanova English course (all except ENG 1975) or for a Villanova Honors course (2000 level or higher) taught by a member of the Villanova English faculty. It is permissible to revise or expand papers beyond what was submitted for the course. Submissions may be excerpted from a senior Honors thesis.
The Core Literature and Writing Seminar Essay Award, which also comes with a prize of $250, is given to the most distinguished critical essay written for a Villanova Core Literature and Writing Seminar (ENG 1975) in the previous calendar year (i.e. in Spring or Fall 2021).
Format
In addition to their essay, students should include a cover page including the course and professor for which the paper was written, as well as their email and a local mailing address
Students should also submit the essay assignment or an approximation of the assignment.
Essays should be formatted in Times New Roman 12 (or equivalent font) and double-spaced.
For the Fischer Award, papers up to 6 pages will be considered separately from papers that are 6-15 pages. Longer papers are expected to engage scholarly sources.
Essays should be formatted in MLA or Chicago Style.
Only one submission per award is allowed.
Judges are looking for argumentative originality and rigor, elegance of writing,
and interpretive incisiveness. Submissions should be carefully proofread.
The deadline for submissions is Friday, April 8, 2022. Submissions should be emailed as an attachment to joseph.drury@villanova.edu.
For previous winners, as well as information about Jerome J. Fischer, see our department Awards page.
See the wide-ranging English courses we’ll be offering in the fall, along with information about course time and instructor! We’ll be providing fuller descriptions and information on course attributes closer to Registration time. Since this is a preliminary schedule, keep in mind there may be still be a few modifications. For now, if you have any questions, please contact your English advisor or drop Dr. Hicks an email.
By Theo Campbell
Amanda Gerstenfeld (class of 2020) always imagined herself in publishing: “Even in high school, I really loved books and I saw myself in that world, but I had no idea how to get there until I was at Villanova and I took a class with Professor Adrienne Perry—she’s amazing.”
While the course—Editing and Literary Publishing—was primarily about publishing journals, rather than books, it introduced Amanda to the world of publishing and gave her hands on experiences that jump-started her professional development. She landed a summer internship at Sterling Publishing, and after graduating from Villanova in Spring 2020, she was accepted into the intensive six-week publishing course at Columbia University.
Now, Amanda works at Yale University Press as an editorial assistant in the acquisitions department. Being in acquisitions means that she gets communicate with authors at every stage of their books’ development, from getting the proposals to formatting the book for production to the excitement of distributing copies to bookstores. Her favorite part? “Getting to reach out to lots of interesting people to send them pre-print copies so they can write the blurbs for the back of the books.”
Amanda credits the small size and intimate feel of her classes at Villanova for giving her the
interpersonal communication skills that allow her to thrive in the workplace: “Even in my largest English
classes, with 20 or 25 people, there were just great conversations about books and writing which really
prepared me for the workplace. Beyond, obviously, the writing skills that I learned that are a core part
of what I do now."
Her advice for current English majors who are interested in publishing? “Do your research.
There’s so many different facets of the industry—children’s, adult, academic, trade—but there’s also a lot
of different kinds of jobs that I didn’t really even know about before I took the course at Columbia.
Editorial assistant is what most people think of, getting to be hands on with the manuscripts, but there’s
also marketing, sales, production…Don’t be afraid to reach out to people in the industry for informational
interviews. Putting yourself out there to get as much information as possible is what’s going to guide
you towards where you want to be.”
