Wednesday, November 9 at 7:30 pm: Alice Dailey's How to Do Things with Dead People, A Conversation and Celebration

 Join us either in person in Falvey Library Room 205 or online via zoom on Wednesday, November 9 at 7:30 pm to celebrate Alice Dailey's recently published book, How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol. Professor Peter Holland (University of Notre Dame) and Professor Melissa Sanchez (University of Pennsylvania) will join Professor Alice Dailey to discuss the importance of this book. More information, including the link to register for the online event, is here.

Friday, Nov. 4 at 2:00 pm, Alan Drew's The Recruit: A Conversation and Celebration

 On Friday, November 4 at 2:00 pm in Room 205 of Falvey Library, Professor Jean Lutes and Professor Alan Drew will discuss Professor Drew's latest novel, The Recruit. There will books for sale and a few lucky attendees will win a copy of the book in a raffle. More information here.

English 2023 -- Journalism -- Puts Theory Into Practice

 By Kate Szumanski 

The long corridor on Dougherty Hall’s second floor seemingly extends without end. Tucked into a small space along the hallway are the studios of WXVU 89.1 FM The Roar. If you’re lucky, the florescent sign above the doorway will glow, signaling that the station is ON AIR.

 

On Wednesday, August 24, 2022, Villanova took a big step to ensure that the ON AIR signal remains strong. The University purchased Cabrini College’s shared license, beginning exclusive full-time FM operations for the first time in its history. Read more about WXVU’s history and mission here. 

 

This semester, I am teaching English 2023, Journalism. A high school and collegiate journalist who also worked as an intern and production assistant for WHYY-91 FM’s “Radio Times With Marty Moss-Coane” in Philadelphia, I began my career after college as a newspaper and magazine reporter and editor. I graduated with a master’s degree in Journalism from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 2005, and today, humbly and proudly share my expertise and experiences with students through English 2023. My students, in turn, share with me daily their knowledge and insights related to journalism in the 21^st century when smartphones and social media make accessing information nearly instantaneous.

 

My goal in this course is not only to explore theory with my students, but also to put those concepts into practice through the creation of audio journalism. As a class, we have discussed what it means for something to be newsworthy and are exploring the topic, “Dining On and Around the Main Line,” through diverse perspectives and multiple angles. We’re conducting research, identifying sources, and crafting interview questions: How are restaurants able to thrive in a post-COVID-19 world? How will restaurants continue to innovate to survive? From labor shortages to the high cost of rent and ingredients, what are among the greatest challenges facing small-business restauranteurs? How does the restaurant service economy, based so strongly on tips, affect a restaurant’s survival and staff longevity at the restaurant? Now, we switch gears. As a Villanova student, what do you look for in casual, healthy dining off campus? How does price point influence your dining decisions? When you want to splurge with friends on an evening out, what types of restaurants do you enjoy?

 

These are just a few of the multiple directions my students are exploring individually and in small groups. As we’ve discussed, reporting is a messy business. But through our reporting processes, the stories we seek to tell will reveal themselves more clearly.   

 

I extend my heartfelt thanks to my Villanova colleagues, Deena Leh and Nick Langan, who welcomed my Journalism students into WXVU The Roar studios on Friday, October21, and shared with us the station's long-standing commitment to radio in the public interest. We look forward to more and more collaboration.

Stations like WXVU produce diverse content designed to educate, enlighten, inform, and entertain. At Villanova, all students from all academic majors are encouraged to get involved.

The opportunity to put theory, knowledge, and classroom lessons into practice will allow my curious and hardworking students to strengthen a variety of skills, such as reporting, interviewing, writing, research, and editing. In addition, experiential learning like this supports students' academic, professional, and social development.

 

Pre-Registration Recap

The Pre-Registration Reception was a smashing success! A big thank you to Grace Kully for talking about her internship experience and encouraging students to follow their interests. Take a look at photos from the event.

Amanda Eliandes and Mike Malloy: the people who make the magic happen!

Professor Jean Lutes's dog is excited about spring courses

students!

Professor Wangmo with students

Creating poetry (thank you to Professor Perry for making this possible!)

More poetry!

Food!

Julianna Perri and Catherine Wood

Poetry in motion

Pre-Registration Reception Friday, October 21 from 12:30-2:00 pm

Join us in the SAC East Courtyard from 12:30-2:00 this Friday, Oct. 21^st for great food, information about Spring 2023 courses and internships, and news about the English department in general! This is a great chance to socialize with English professors and majors. The reception will feature free lunch and a raffle with a chance to win literary prizes and English Department swag.  Please RSVP to Michael Malloy at Michael.malloy@villanova.edu by this Wednesday at noon! (You can also drop by at the last minute! We’re just trying to get an estimate on how much food to order!)

A poetry busker at the English department Pre-registration reception.

There will be swag!

J.D. Durkin, VU English '09, in Conversation about Journalism, Comedy, and More

"I have little doubt that my late nights in Falvey prepared me for the pressures of the White House press briefing room (the West Wing could use a Holy Grounds, though)..."

-Thoughts from VU English Alum and current financial journalist J.D. Durkin

J.D. Durkin, VU English '09, has worked as a journalist and news anchor, and has recently begun anchoring the morning show for TheStreet live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He kindly took the time to answer some questions from us about his career path from English major to financial journalist (with pit stops in comedy and more).

Please describe your current job and what a typical day might look like.

I host a morning business show from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, so my prep starts the night before -- getting a jump on stories, gathering elements, and writing questions for my guests. I (try to) wake up in the 5am hour and read up on premarket data, and see if any big stories overseas may impact US news/markets later on. I'm at the NYSE by 8:30am and coordinating elements with my amazing producers (who are remote!), ready to go live for Opening Bell at 9:30am -- "The bell waits for no one," as they say. I usually write and shoot some packages in the afternoon, and spend a lot of my day researching and writing.

Before this, I was a White House and Capitol Hill correspondent where my days consisted of regular live shots, wrapping breaking news, attending press conferences/briefings, and talking to sources for my own reporting. I then pivoted to anchoring a nightly show, where I spent all day writing with an awesome team, followed by rehearsals, quick hair & makeup, then popping into the anchor chair. 

What got you interested in journalism?

I sort of fell into it -- I always knew I wanted to work in TV, but the start of my career was on the comedy development side. I was hosting news-driven/late night shows on stage in New York, which meant learning a lot about politics/the media... in order to poke fun at it. In 2015 I was offered an actual newsroom position by Mediaite; with polish along the way from great mentors, I realized that although my path to get there was unique, my skills were well-suited for TV journalism. I quickly fell in love with the thrill of a good scoop, or a well-delivered news-making interview with a member of Congress. I've also been drawn to news jobs where I don't have to take myself too seriously, so I can still have a little comedic point-of-view. It's fun, but it's a huge privilege you can't ever take for granted. The viewers/readers/voters are the most important part of the work.

How did you develop your journalistic and anchoring skills?

I started performing at a pretty young age, silly stuff like school musicals (not to brag, but I was a mean Nathan Detroit in 8th grade). Most of my early performing was high school forensics, or speech and debate (my mother made me do it -- and man, she was right; mom's always are). I competed nationally for four years, and my event -- Original Oratory, or OO -- is how I started writing for myself. Being a TV news correspondent is adult forensics.

As an adult, my jump back into performing was improv/sketch comedy for years, often bombing on stage. It builds character, or so they say. I just kept going, and adding crafty little skills to my toolbelt along the way. Years later I started really studying the great anchors and TV personalities I admired -- their cadence, pacing, non-verbals. Properly studying the greats in the arena is a fun and important part of the process. 

Do you draw on your English major skills or perspectives in your current role? If so, how so?

Sure, being an English major taught me that no matter how tight of a deadline I was facing, I could pretty reliably crank out a 10+ page paper in a pretty short amount of time. In broadcast, sometimes the deadlines are as tight as minutes, and you have to turn out accurate, solidly-sourced, smooth-sounding scripts/packages on the fly. I have little doubt that my late nights in Falvey prepared me for the pressures of the White House press briefing room (the West Wing could use a Holy Grounds, though).

What was your journey like from undergrad through to career?

Aeneid-sized twists and turns. But more or less:

The morning after graduation I moved to LA to make it "big" in TV, Entourage-style, because of course I did; there were big ups, and big downs; I slept in my car, performed basement improv shows to an audience of 3 people, and handed out my resume to every street vendor on Hollywood Boulevard to find work... but also somehow booked a movie and got into SAG. I moved to NYC, became a bartender to pay the bills while my main hustle was writing/performing live shows and could be closer to my family in Jersey. In my mid-20s, I focused a good bit of time teaching myself the parts of the industry I never learned, like how to shoot with a decent DSLR and edit my own videos. I was a writer's room PA for a few TV comedy shows, and joined Mediaite as Senior Editor, where I covered the historic 2016 election. Cheddar News launched as a TV network, and it was a well-timed fit; I started at the NYSE, but quickly moved to DC as a correspondent, anchor, reporter, you-name-it for 5.5 years. I covered two impeachments, Supreme Court nominations, countless White House briefings and Hill gaggles with grumpy Senators, and traveled to cover the President in Helsinki, Belgium, and Normandy. Now I'm back in New York at the NYSE for TheStreet, an incredible Wall St. institution, at a crucial time for the economy and our future, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Though I may have used the word "I" often in the last paragraph, the journey was only made possible by an astounding list of supportive family members, producers, stage managers, editors -- and friends from Villanova who came to my shows to support my career. I'm wildly grateful for them all.

Has there been culture shock involved in going from studying English at Villanova to reporting from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange?

Not so much -- this is right for the moment I'm in. If I had gotten dropped onto the floor of the NYSE after graduation and asked to anchor a live TV show… I'd be clueless. But I've been out of school now for 13 years (what?!) so that's a lot of time to fail, learn, and hustle. As an English major, I had to learn the daily discipline of getting the icky stuff done, because the reading/writing load demanded it. I do the same thing now: the daily discipline of doing my best work. 

What kind of advice would you give to current undergrads thinking about studying English? Or, if you’d prefer, what kind of advice do you wish you could go back in time to give to yourself as an undergrad?

You don’t have to have it all figured out right now! Don’t put too much stock in how your major “determines” your career path – things change. Just be open-minded, work your tail off, be a kind person, and don’t forget to put the work down to go to a ball game or an amazing concert. A beautiful part of the journey is responding to things as they pop up, and saying yes to challenges and opportunities as they arise in your life and career. I went from sleeping in my car to questioning the President in the same lifetime – neither of which I thought I would ever do when I was at Nova. I don’t know that my map is the best blueprint for others, but if it helps even one student, then it’s worth it to share.

And by the way… the correct answer to the endless question, “But what are you going to do with an ENGLISH degree?" is: literally anything I want. 

An Interview with Michael Dowdy

By Theo Campbell

I had the opportunity to sit down this week with Michael Dowdy, the newest full-time faculty member in the English department, and chat with him about his work and why he’s excited to be at Villanova. In addition to being a scholar of Latinx literature and poetry of the Americas, Professor Dowdy is also a poet and essayist, whose recent works include Urbilly, a poetry collections he describes on his website as “the anti-Hillbilly Elegy, as an autoethnography of the hipster-hillbilly,” and Broken Souths, the first book-length study of Latinx poetry.

 

TC: So, to start, what are you teaching this fall, and what are you excited to teach at Villanova in the future?

MD: This fall, I’m teaching two courses in  Latinx literature, one is  the required writing seminar for non-majors and one is an  upper level course. Both of these course look at how Latinx writers have written about work and play in American culture. So they’re focused on Latinx representations of lives of work, but also of play in its many instantiations, from the most obvious one—which is sports— to less obvious ones, which might involve art making art, such a graffiti, or the play that we might think is central to experiments with aesthetics and  language, like the play that comes from the collision of multiple languages and their many registers, say between Spanish and English, as in Spanglish, for examples. So really what I think I’m going to be doing here is teaching Latinx literature. And I’m excited to do that in part because it hasn’t been offered in the English department here before, and the undergraduate student body at Villanova now is over 10%  Latinx, which I think is a good milestone, we’re catching up—the state of Pennsylvania is about 15% Latinx.

 

TC: How did you become interested in Latinx poetry as a field of study?

MD: When I was studying in graduate school, one of my mentors was a scholar and artist named María DeGuzmán, and she was working with me on my reading lists in poetry. She started  suggesting many terrific Latinx poets, many of whom were in anthology called Aloud, which is an anthology that emerged from the  Nuyorican Poet’s café in NYC. So many of those iconic poets from the 60s and 70s and then into the 80s and 90s are the ones I started studying initially, and I was hooked—in part because I was interested really in the intersections  between poetics and politics. In the United States,  the relationship  between literature, particularly poetry, and politics in disavowed, I think—we want our poets to be apolitical. And the traditions that I was interested in were coming from Latin America, where poets are some of the foremost public intellectuals in their countries. So it’s a very different understanding of the role of the poet. And I was interested in tapping into and learning more about those traditions, many of which have been inherited and transformed by Latinx poets in the United States.

 

TC: What are you working on right now?

MD:  In the last 40 years or so, migration patterns in the United States have changed quite dramatically, and many Latinos have settled in Southern Appalachia  to work in timber, in animal processing, carpet factories and so on and so forth. So one thing that I’ve studied in the past is how Latinos in Appalachia have written about what it means to be Latino in Appalachia,  a historically marginalized, stereotyped  region in the United States. My new project is looking at white novelists’ representations of Latinos in Appalachia. So its turning the lens the other way, to think about how white writers in Appalachia have been thinking about migration to Appalachia of Latinxes and the changes they’re created, the challenges they face, and how they are reshaping the stories that Appalachians tell about themselves. So that’s a small project I’ve been working on and am sort of excited to do in part because I usually work on poetry and poetics and this a project that’s looking at prose, fiction in particular.  

 

TC: So I know you’re a poet, as well as a scholar, and I was wondering: how do your creative scholarly work feed into and influence each other?

MD: This is a question that’s always hard to answer. Because I could give you the  answer that I wish were true, which is that creative writing and critical writing are mutually beneficial and they influence each other positively, they provide energy to each other, but really the truth is that in some ways it’s a zero sum game. You don’t have time to do both. So what I really strive to do is to bring the scholar’s critical  eye to my creative writing,  and I want to bring the creative writer’s creativity—attention to language, to sound, to sense making— to my scholarly work. In part because I really do believe that scholarly writing can be sonorous and beautiful and invested in having lovely sentences and paragraphs. So in terms of the writing itself I see them being intimately connected. At the end of the day, I’m a writer, and it’s all writing.

 

TC: Is there anything else you’d like to say to the students of Villanova?

MD: Just that I’m excited to be here. It’s an exciting time to be a student, and a really stressful time to be a student, so I’m happy to be here to play my part in helping students to embrace the challenge of being a young person  in this really fraught moment in world history and in US history, and I think Latinx literature is a good place to do some of that thinking.

Trinity Rogers: Reflections on The 'Steenth Street trip to ASALH

By Trinity Rogers

The 'Steenth Street Project Team at the Legacy Museum

On Sunday during the “Mothers of Gynecology” tour, Cynthia, Adrianna, and I were grabbing cupcakes when we struck up a conversation with a woman sitting on the windowsill near the treat table. This woman explained that she worked in archives and culture preservation in Washington, D.C. She asked us what we were studying, about the ‘Steenth Street Project, and what our plans and aspirations were post-grad. After we explained to her, she told us that she loved hearing what other people are working on because we are all working together – in a way she compared it to quiltmaking. She explained that each person, working towards their own personal projects and goals, helps to create a larger quilt. Each person, with their own goals and projects, is one thread in this massive quilt, she explained. It is each person’s job to protect and maintain their thread, and if everyone does this, then we can create a collective quilt with each bit of research, inquiry, and culture preservation effort. Her words summed up the trip perfectly for me: when we come together for a conference like ASALH we are seeing the quilt being made, watching each threat intertwine to create something beautiful.

Bryan Stevenson talking 

With each presentation and event we attended this past week, I could see the threads coming together. First, in Bryan Stevenson’s speech on Thursday, he laid out the ways in which our threads can be destroyed, misconstrued, or removed. He spoke about the ways in which Black people in America have been disenfranchised, murdered, and targeted, but above all this, he spoke about how we can still hold on to hope. His story about the woman who was digging at a lynching site on the side of a road in rural Alabama when she was approached by a white man was the perfect example of how rewarding and surprising hope can be. The woman was at first afraid that the man would cause her harm and considered lying to the man when he asked her what she was doing. She found in herself the courage and need to tell him that she was digging dirt because a man was lynched there, to which the man replied, “Can I help you?” The man’s response not only shocked the woman but also prompted her to accept his help. Following this interaction, the two shared a moment on the side of the road in which both of them were crying, and then the man followed the woman back to Montgomery to learn more about the Equal Justice Initiative and the remembrance movement. Stevenson’s story started with an edge of fear – that history may repeat itself and another Black person would see violence on the same soil – but it ended with the hope that these threads of history can be restored and put together to create something beautiful. This something beautiful was shown through the ending of our time at EJI’s Legacy Museum, which concluded with a bright, cheerful room of smiling Black faces of history – those who have started these threads and who are passing them to us now to continue and care for.

Dedication at the Memorial for Peace and Justice

In our own effort to continue, this trip was a way to move our thread. Going beyond just our own research, ASALH gave me the opportunity to see the bigger picture – a shared sense that our work is in line with so many others, with the aim of recentering history. We all recognize how easily parts of history are marginalized and erased, and we all share a sense that we have to recenter history, to give a voice back to the erased and silenced.

This trip was enlightening and sobering in so many different ways, but the most impactful was the way in which it showed me a larger context for the work that we do. From the Legacy Museum to the “Mothers of Gynecology” tour, each experience provided an opportunity to better understand the context in which we live and do this work, and why we must continue our thread.

Cynthia, myself, and Adrianna with our sweet teas (a new phenomenon that I introduced to Cynthia and Adrianna--a drink that they ordered at every restaurant during the trip).

The 'Steenth Street Research Team attends Association for the Study of African American Life and History

The 'Steenth Street Project at ASALH (missing Brigitte Fielder)

 Professor Jean Lutes recently traveled with her three-student research team to the 107^th annual conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in Montgomery, Alabama, where they participated in a roundtable on The 'Steenth Street Project, a collaborative Black digital humanities project that honors the legacy of Black author, educator, and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

Funded by the Idol Family Fellows Program of Villanova's McNulty Institute, the project was co-founded in 2021 by Denise Burgher (PhD student, University of Delaware, and Colored Conventions Project Fellow), Brigitte Fielder (associate professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Professor Lutes. The project is bringing texts by early Black women writers to classrooms in the Philadelphia school district, producing a widely accessible digital edition of a short story collection by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and working with Hezekiah Lewis and Caleb Lucky from the Communication Department to create a series of short videos featuring contemporary Black scholars reading texts by early Black women writers.

The 'Steenth Street Project (SSP) is named after “The Annals of ‘Steenth Street,” a short-story collection Dunbar-Nelson wrote based on her work teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in New York City in the 1897 and 1898. The project prioritizes bringing Dunbar Nelson’s work to the people who inspired and shaped her stories, American children. The stories – which have never seen print together, as Dunbar-Nelson intended – feature the youngest residents of ‘Steenth Street, an urban neighborhood targeted for uplift by Progressive-era reformers. The stories chronicle a vibrant, working poor community where poverty, neglect, domestic violence, limited access to education, and untreated illnesses make it difficult for people to thrive.

 

During the SPP team's trip, they attended conference panels, conducted project planning sessions, and toured the Alabama state archives, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which is the nation's first memorial dedicated to African Americans terrorized by lynching, humiliated by racial segregation, and burdened with presumptions of guilt and police violence. 

 

Other highlights of the SSP team's visit to Montgomery, a historic city that was the site of the first large-scale demonstration against segregation in the 1950s"

-- a rousing keynote address by Bryan Stevenson, the acclaimed lawyer, activist, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, selected as Villanova's One Book for 2018-19.

 

-- a panel featuring Fred Gray, the civil rights attorney who represented Rosa Parks and served as a key organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called him "the chief counsel of the protest movement." Gray was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in July 2022.

-- an evening art tour and ceremony organized by Montgomery artist and community activist Michelle Browder, who has developed an arts and education campaign and erected a monument to honor the three enslaved women who were experimented on by Marion Sims, a white doctor who launched his  career in Montgomery by practicing surgical techniques on enslaved women without anesthesia and without their consent. Browder's three scrap-metal statues, built and welded from recycled parts of cars, bikes, applicances, and other objects, loom over observers, standing from 9 to 15 feet tall. In a direct counter Sims' longstanding reputation as "the father of gynecology," Browder memorializes the women -- Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey -- as "the mothers of gynecology." 

Stay tuned for more pictures and reflections from the students!