Join Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, in conversation with Lisa Sewell, about her new book, The Politics of Sorrow: A Story of Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile at Main Point Books on Wednesday, April 16 at 6:30 pm. For more information, see the event page at this link.
To celebrate the recent publication of Eliot Now and to discuss the field of literary modernism/s at this historical moment, there is a one day conference at CUNY on April 25th.
Among other events, the conference will start with a roundtable on Eliot Now, with several of its contributors (Sumita Chakraborty, Anthony Cuda, Julia Daniel, Frances Dickey), and Professor Megan Quigley and her co-editor, David Chinitz.
The plenary is an exciting talk by Paul Saint-Amour (U Penn) entitled, “ Joyce, Roth, Hannaham, The Mythical Method Revisited,” which Megan Quigley will moderate.
The event is organized by Ria Banerjee (CUNY) and will also have a panel called “Radical Eliot,” which will focus on her new book, Drafty Houses in Forster, Eliot, and Woolf (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) as well as Patrick Query’s Freedom is Not Enough (SUNY Press).
All NYC area 20th-century lit scholars and grad students are invited! Please come!
With Shirley Lau Wong, Professor Mary Mullen will present her research on nineteenth-century Ireland at the University of Minnesota in an event titled, "Why Ireland?" on Thursday, March 27. The event will start by showing what we learn by understanding labor, liberalism, and neoliberalism from the vantage point of Ireland in the nineteenth century and in the twenty-first century, respectively. Then, drawing upon individual research, the two speakers will provide more contextualized case studies. Mary Mullen will consider how understanding labor and liberalism in Famine Ireland illuminates the afterlives of slavery in the West Indies. Shirley Lau Wong will examine how contemporary Irish literature provides a unique site for understanding the concept of human capital and its effects on literary and cultural production. Together, the speakers will trace historical continuities and ruptures as they demonstrate how attention to Ireland can elucidate global structures.
Professor Tsering Wangmo Dhompa recently published, The Politics of Sorrow: A Story of Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile, with Columbia University Press. From the press:
For more about the book, see a recent interview with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa and Choekyi Lhamo on youtube.
The Taught by Literature team has launched “Lifting Their Voices,” a series of short videos featuring contemporary Black women educators — including the English Department's own Dr. Crystal Lucky! — reading aloud texts by Black women intellectuals of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
Villanova faculty, students (both undergraduate and graduate), and scholars from outside Villanova worked together on this public humanities project, funded in part by a grant from the College of Arts and Sciences and the McNulty Institute's Idol Family Fellows Program. In each video, a reader shares a short historical text and reflects on its personal significance and relevance today. Along with the video series, TBL has produced a set of free curricular materials for middle school and high school teachers to help them bring the rich history and literature of Black women into their classrooms. Villanova students created the curricular materials and are now leading efforts to share these resources with public school teachers, with the goal of making underrepresented voices more widely available in an array of educational spaces.
Professor Mary Mullen recently published "Public Humanities, Then and Now" in the recently launched journal, Public Humanities. The article draws on her research and builds on many discussions from her "Institutional Fictions" course. Here is the abstract:
"This essay considers how the nineteenth-century idea of the university as a refuge, constructed by thinkers like John Henry Newman, continues to shape contemporary universities and the field of public humanities. This vision of the university has lasting appeal for obvious reasons. In a culture predicated on speed, slowness is a political act. In a culture of hot takes, cold reasoning often provides necessary context, a wider view. And yet, as W. E. B. Du Bois warns, the “tenacious legend” of the Victorian university is dangerous because it separates the university from mass culture. Building on Du Bois’s thinking, the essay concludes that instead of seeking protection, enclosure, or recognition within university institutions, public humanities practitioners should seek refuge in the relationships of mutual responsibility they foster."
English major extraordinaire, Marguax Barrett, will publish a paper titled “Science on Tap: Pouring Knowledge into the Local Community.” It is joint work with Jennifer Santoro (Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment) and Chris Jeffords (Associate Teaching Professor, Economics).
This paper grew out of their collective Science on Tap effort at Root Down Brewing Co. in Phoenixville (taking place on the first Tuesday of every month). The event started in May 2022 and is so successful that it is now booked through September 2025! Margaux joined the research project through the First Year Match program and helped create and administer the survey which is the foundation of the publication. Preliminary survey results were presented at the VSB Research Day in 2023. Margaux also wrote the application to secure funding from Falvey’s Scholarly Open-Access Reserve (SOAR) Fund. As a result, the paper will be published open access.
Pictures from Professor Megan Quigley's presentation at the "Code Meets Culture"--a symposium on the future of AI and the Future of Second Language, Literature, and Culture Pedagogy.
Ann Marie Jakubowski won the Fatham Award, a prize given by the International T. S. Eliot Society at its annual meeting to the best paper presented by an early-career scholar, for her paper "Conversion as Revision: The Retrospective Poetics of Burnt Norton." She is currently a Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow at Valparaiso University, where she teaches literary and humanities courses in the undergrad honors college (Christ College). She graduated from Villanova's Masters program in English in 2017 and received a PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 2024.
Here is an abstract of the essay: Literary critics have long analyzed Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as a novel invested in issues of war and feminism. However, they have neglected the nexus point of these two matters: Rezia Warren Smith, the Italian war bride of main character Septimus Warren Smith. This essay centers this historically ignored character, arguing that she, as the embodiment of her nation, introduces the contemporary shadow of Italian fascism into the text. It considers Mrs. Dalloway as a precursor to Woolf’s famous anti-fascist, feminist work, Three Guineas, and Rezia an avatar through which Woolf explores the relationship between feminine bodies and feminized nations under violent, masculine domination. It argues that Woolf revises Shakespeare’s Cymbeline— a play about wartime nationhood quoted frequently throughout the novel— for a post-war Europe, with Rezia replacing heroine Imogen, who, too, stands in for her nation. Through an almost-exact replication of Imogen’s arc, down to a final consumption of a sleeping draught, Woolf draws a clear parallel between the two characters, only breaking away in Rezia’s final moments. Where Imogen-as-England wakes from her sedative, returning prosperity to her kingdom and reflecting England’s safety, Rezia-as-Italy merely fades into unconsciousness, seeing only the foreboding shadow of a man and visions of battlefields: a dark premonition of what Italy, freshly under Mussolini’s control, will come to face. Drawing on a unique collection of sources from Woolf’s diaries and London newspapers to Milanese history and Shakespeare criticism, the International Virginia Woolf Society has proclaimed the essay a work of “original insights… a true contribution to Woolf studies that will excite many readers.”
On September 13, 2024, Mary Mullen will present "Ireland, Public Money, and the Price of Emancipation" as part of a keynote panel on Revisiting the Irish Famine at the North American Victorian Studies Association 2024 meeting at Boston College.
Her talk considers debates over public money in the context of slavery emancipation—enslavers received 20 million pounds from the British government for their 'lost property’—and Irish famine relief. It focuses especially on how Irish nationalists like Daniel O’Connell and John Mitchel used slavery compensation to argue for Irish famine relief. In quite different ways, these nationalists argue for Irish inclusion into a British public sphere by claiming whiteness and excluding formerly enslaved people from public accounting.
Professor Kamran Javadizadeh has a new essay in The New Yorker--"When Emily Dickinson Mailed it In." Check out the full essay here.
Mark your calendars! Professor Megan Quigley will speak at the "Code Meets Culture"--a symposium on the future of AI and the Future of Second Language, Literature, and Culture Pedagogy. The symposium will take place on Thursday, September 25 and Friday, September 26 in Dougherty Hall West Lounge. More information about the symposium as well as a schedule can be found here.
This spring, students from the two English senior seminars, Professor Megan Quigley's "Virginia Woolf and her Daughters" and Professor Yumi Lee's "Literatures of U.S. Empire," presented their research. To look at the titles of their presentations, see the schedule for the respective symposium for "Virginia Woolf and her Daughters" here and "Literatures of U.S. Empire" here.
Travis Foster just published an article titled "White Supremacist Submission" in Transgender Studies Quarterly.
The article received the American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize honorable mention for the year’s best essays on American literature, tenured category.
Here's the abstract to the article:
Scholars tend to envision the sexual politics of settler colonialism and slavery through masculinist conceptions in which penetration designates mastery and receptiveness subjugation. This article asks instead how white desires for sexual submission to nonwhite men operate within white supremacy. It augments white trans and queer studies' conceptualizations of bottoming with theories of white submission found in Black thought, particularly Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin. And it argues that both sets of ideas find themselves anticipated in the mid-nineteenth-century writings of the white, gender-variant author Theodore Winthrop—particularly their most popular novel, Cecil Dreeme (1861). For Winthrop, bottoming desires occasion two modes of self-expression. First, they facilitate transfeminine embodiment, staging an experience of womanliness predicated on the racist contrast between their own white body and that of nonwhite men they see as exceptionally virile. Second, they allow Winthrop to imagine ways of being other than the self-possession and corporeal autonomy of white subjectivity. In both instances, Winthrop's fantasies rely on the plasticity of the white body under the influence of nonwhite men, even as they underscore the biopolitical unidirectionality of plasticity, tracing patterns in which Black, brown, and Indigenous men exert influence on whites while remaining fundamentally incapable of transformation. This history of racialized access to malleability provides a cautionary tale about the incorporative nature of whiteness and how contemporary politics of self-determination might unwittingly replicate white supremacist logics.
Professor Jean Lutes has co-authored an article that investigates a fascinating unpublished manuscript by turn-of-the-century African-American author Alice Dunbar-Nelson. The article appears in American Literary History, Volume 36, Issue 1, Summer 2024, and is titled"An Unpublished Tale about African American Poetry: Alice Dunbar-Nelson's 'The Grievances of the Books' (1897)."
The article acknowledges three Villanova students who helped to transcribe the unpublished manuscript that Professor Lutes and her co-writer, Professor Sandra A. Zagarell, wrote about: Current English major Jenine Hazlewood, '26; current master's student Matthew Villanueva, MA '24; and recent English major graduate Adrianna Ogando, '23.
Here's an excerpt from the article that provides a flavor of Dunbar-Nelson's original piece:
In April 1897, an ambitious young author drafted a hallucinatory narrative that was never published. Its unnamed narrator falls asleep and dreams that real-life books and newspaper clippings by African American poets come alive. They call a convention, appoint her chair of a grievance committee, and task her with “listening to our complaints and suggesting remedies for our ills” (7). Meticulously written in graceful cursive with occasional strikeouts on 37 pages of unlined note paper, “The Grievances of the Books” is a funny, demanding, self-consciously literary mash-up that veers among reciting poetry, documenting authorial infighting, gently spoofing the formal political conventions organized to resist racial oppression, and lamenting the small readership for poems by African Americans. Taking readers on a breakneck tour of Black-authored poetry in the US, the narrative quotes from 13 published poems and refers to two others. Although it includes many poems published in the 1890s, “Grievances” stretches back to Phillis Wheatley’s publishing debut in 1773 and cites several antebellum verses. It ends, abruptly, with an indignant standoff between bound books and frayed clippings. As the narrator puts it in the manuscript’s final line, “the Grievances were never finished” (26).
You can read more from the article here.
Congratulations to Professor Lutes and to these students!
On February 22, 2024 at 5:00 p.m., Professor Kimberly Takahata will give a talk titled “Not Witnessing John Gabriel Stedman's A Narrative of a Five Years Expedition.” It will take place in the grad lounge (Fisher Bennett Hall 330) at the University of Pennsylvania's English department.
Sam Covais, an alum of the Villanova English masters program, recently published "'A Guy Needs Somebody': A Study of Philia in Of Mice and Men." You can read the article here.
Please join us on November 8th, 2023 6 p.m. to 7:15 p.m. for an in-person event at Larson Kelly Auditorium in Driscoll Hall. This is a collaboration between the Lepage Center, the English Department, and Global Interdisciplinary Studies to consider what speculative fiction can tell us about real world history.
This event will be moderated by Dr. Maghan Keita, Professor of History and Global Interdisciplinary Studies and Founding Director of Global Interdisciplinary Studies and Africana Studies at VIllanova. Our panel will be comprised of Dr. Heather Hicks, Professor and Chair of English at Villanova and an expert on Post-apocalyptic fiction and Gender in Post-Modern fiction; Dr. Travis Foster, Associate Professor of English and Academic Director of Gender and Women's Studies at Villanova who expertise includes Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Genre; and Dr. Patricia Lott, Assistant Professor of American Studies, African American and Africana Studies, and English at Ursinus University, whose expertise includes Afrofuturism, Emancipation, Public Collective Memory, and more.
This event is free, open to the public, and ACS Approved.
Professor Michael Dowdy just signed a book contract with University of Nebraska Press. They will publish his collection of essays on fathering in anxious times, Tell Me About Your Bad Guys, in spring 2025. For more about this collection and his other essays, see his personal website.
