Professor Megan Quigley in The Villanovan

English major, Lauren Kourey, wrote an article for The Villanovan on Professor Quigley's recent talk, "A Feminist Waste Land." Check it out here.

Professor Travis Foster presents his research at UW-Madison

Travis Foster will present a lecture titled, "White Supremacist Submission: Interracial Desire, Transfemininity, and the Biopolitics of Penetration" online at University of Wisconsin-Madison, on April 18 at 5:00 pm EST (changed from the poster above). You can join via zoom by using this link.

Here's the abstract for the lecture:

Scholars tend to envision the sexual politics of settler colonialism and slavery through masculinist conceptions equating penetration with mastery and receptiveness with subjugation. This talk tracks instead how white desires for sexual submission to Black and brown men operate as white supremacy. It augments white trans and queer conceptualizations of bottoming with theories of white submission found in Black thought, particularly those of Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin—all of which find themselves anticipated in the mid-nineteenth century writings of Theodore Winthrop and the turn-of-the-century photography of F. Holland Day. For Winthrop and Day, bottoming fantasies facilitate transfeminine embodiment, staging an experience of womanhood predicated upon the racist contrast between their own penetrable white bodies and the bodies of nonwhite men they see as impenetrable and virile. Taken together, both figures offer a cautionary tale about how contemporary politics of white trans and queer self-actualization all too often replicate white supremacist logics—then as well as now.

Professor Mary Mullen presents her research at Mahindra Humanities Center

Mary Mullen will give a lecture titled, "The Aesthetics of Interest in an Age of Question: Representing Ireland" at Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University on Thursday, March 23. The talk pairs Edward Said’s reflection on the series of “interests” that underlie Orientalism with Sianne Ngai’s account of interesting as an aesthetic category, in order to consider the difficulty in sustaining British interest in colonial locations. The talk focuses on the novel as a form of “sustained interest”—drawing on work by William Carleton and Anthony Trollope—and the rhetorical form of the question—especially “The Irish Question”—to suggest that the very act of encouraging readers to take an interest in a foreign place can also direct their attention away from the people who inhabit this place.

Professor Megan Quigley presents her research on T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland

 Professor Megan Quigley will present her research on T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland at a Gender and Women's Study Faculty Spotlight lecture on Wednesday, March 22 at noon in Falvey 205.

Race and Social Justice Courses: Fall 2023

 

For full course descriptions, see the English department course booklet for fall classes here.

Routledge Online Resources: The Renaissance World

Dr. Lauren Shohet is the Subject Editor for Literature and Drama in English for the new Routledge Online Resources: The Renaissance World. 

This project seeks to provide resources for students and scholars of the early modern period, while also questioning ideas of "the Renaissance" and "Renaissance Studies." 

The current "freemium" version shows you a small fraction of what eventually will be available! Check out topics like "Shipwreck, Wet Globalization, and the Blue Humanities"; "French Sexual Cultures"; "Buddhism and Globalization"; "Infanticide in Italy 1500-1800"; "Renaissance Poetry in Colonial Peru: The Antarctic Academy (1586-1617)"; and "Elizabethan Courtly Fashion."

Professors Jean Lutes and Hezekiah Lewis win a GRASP award: Black Women Writers Video Project

 Jean Lutes and Hezekiah Lewis, associate professor in Communication, received a two-year $24,000 grant from the new GRASP program in CLAS to continue work on a series of short videos designed to make early Black women writers more accessible to K-12 teachers.  

The video project involves selecting under-studied texts by 18th-, 19th, and early 20th-century African American women; recruiting contemporary Black women educators to read those texts and talk briefly what those texts mean to them personally; producing short videos – no more than 10 minutes each – designed for K-12 classroom use; and making the videos available and freely accessible online, along with accompanying explanatory materials. 

The videos will be made available on the Just Teach One-Early African American Print initiative on the American Antiquarian Association website.  

This video series is part of Taught by Literature: Recentering Black Women Intellectuals, a collaborative, public-facing humanities project co-founded in 2021 by Jean Lutes and two scholars from outside Villanova: Denise Burgher (senior team leader, Center for Black Digital Research, Penn State) and Brigitte Fielder (associate professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison). They work with a student team of one graduate student (Matt Villanueva) and three undergraduate students (Cynthia Choo, Jenine Hazlewood, and Adrianna Ogando). 

Three videos have already been filmed: Crystal Lucky, associate dean and professor of English, reading Sojourner Truth's 1851 "Aren't I a Woman" speech in the Connelly Center; Shaquita Smith, social studies curriculum specialist with the School District of Philadelphia, reading Alice Dunbar-Nelson's 1922 article "Negro Literature for Negro Pupils" in a classroom at Constitution High in Philadelphia; and 2022 MacArthur Fellow Gabrielle Foreman – Founding Co-Director, Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk; Founding Director, The Colored Conventions Project; Professor of English, African American Studies, and History; The Paterno Family Chair of Liberal Arts, Penn State University –  reading the preface to Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) in Mendel Hall. 

Photos below from filmings (last October, November, and December)

Professors Alice Dailey and Chelsea Phillips win GRASP award: “The Spanish Tragedy: Artist Residency and Archive”

Professors Alice Dailey and Chelsea Phillips (Department of Theater) won a $15,000 Grant for Researchers for Arts and Sciences Professors from the College of Arts and Sciences to support a year-long exploration of The Spanish Tragedy.  Specifically, the grant will enable them to have a guest artist in residence next year and to archive the work generated by the project.  Students can participate in this project by taking the fall course, English 3260-H01 Legacies of Revenge in Drama, Fiction, Comics, and Film, and the corresponding spring course which will stage the play. Students are not required to take both fall and spring courses, but it is encouraged.

From the successful grant application:

As the play that introduced revenge as a tragic motive to the Renaissance stage, The Spanish Tragedy has had an enormous influence on the representation of revenge in the anglophile tradition, an influence that stretches from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1600) to contemporary comic books and television epics such as Game of Thrones (2011-19).  It is often studied, but for both stylistic and technical reasons, it is infrequently staged.  This means that opportunities to examine The Spanish Tragedy as a fully-fledged piece of theater—as a play being played, embodied by actors and spoken aloud in Kyd’s iambic pentameter, the verse form that would go on to become the indelible rhythm of Shakespearean drama—are exceedingly rare.  On the one hand, this makes our staging of particular interest to a large community both on campus and off.  Villanova community members who are familiar with the play—from Father Peter to Theater faculty and students to our undergraduate theater groups—have responded with overwhelming enthusiasm about our producing it here at Villanova, and colleagues in English and Theater from area universities and beyond are excited for the opportunity that our production will create to study this play “on its feet.”  On the other hand, it means we are entering relatively uncharted territory.  One can find any number of book-length studies on how to perform Shakespeare’s works; there are only a handful of essays on performing those of Thomas Kyd.

The Spanish Tragedy, like other plays of its era, is written in iambic pentameter, a metrical structure that demands greater breath support and control than everyday speech and that requires time in rehearsal to understand and execute.  The play also employs oratorical strategies that were taught in 16^th-century English grammar schools and universities, such as formal rhetorical figures, Latin quotation, and classical allusions, all of which contribute to the generation of character and meaning.  Understanding and using these features of the language will be key to performing the play successfully.  The fall undergraduate and graduate courses, which will form the conventional academic foundation for the project, will explore the play’s literary background—its roots in Senecan tragedy and its direct descendants in English Renaissance drama—as well as its cognates in contemporary culture, including literature, art, television, and film. Students will use this background to edit the text of The Spanish Tragedy for performance and to propose production designs for various components of the play. 

            In short, the fall will prepare enrolled students to understand the play intellectually. As we move into the rehearsal process, however, it will be necessary to translate that understanding into embodied mastery of the language and story.  To do this, we propose the same model theater workers have used for centuries, including during the English Renaissance: apprenticeship with a senior artist.  We propose an artistic residency for an experienced performer who has not only acted in every play in the Shakespearean canon but also, crucially, in the plays of many of his contemporaries.  The residency will take place in spring 2024, offering invaluable embodied, performance-based knowledge of English Renaissance plays to our students during rehearsal.

Photos from the Pre-Registration Reception

 

Erin Neilsen describes her internship experience

A successful book (and English swag!) raffle!

Erasure poetry, thanks to Dr. Adrienne Perry 

Some fantastic advisory council members!

The people who make it all possible: Mike Malloy, Amanda Eliandes, Dr. Heather Hicks

Check out those festive table cloths (and fab English majors).

Dr. Megan Quigley meets a new advisee, Mary Bondurant

Dr. Kimberly Takahata explains her new fall course on Indigenous literature (!!)

Professor Javadizadeh, "On Diane Seuss" in the London Review of Books

 Check out Kamran Javadizadeh's recent essay, "On Diane Seuss" in the London Review of Books.

Pre-registration Reception: This Friday!!

 

Come to the pre-registration reception this Friday, March 17 from 12:30-2:00 pm in the Driscoll tent. You can learn about fall classes, talk to professors, meet other English students, eat free food, participate in a book raffle, make some poetry. This event is ACS approved. If you plan on attending RSVP to Amanda Eliades at amanda.eliades@villanova.edu by Wednesday so we can order enough food (you can still attend if you don’t RSVP though).