Middlemarch Mini-Conferences

Students will present research from their final projects for the senior seminar, "George Eliot's MIddlemarch" during the next three classes. Take a look at these excellent projects.

Wednesday, April 23

• Will Corliss - “Middlemarch Reimagined: A Written Amendment of Mr. Casaubon’s Last Will and Testament”
• Emma Cahill - “Combining Literary Worlds: Jane Austen & George Eliot, Intertwined”
• Amanda McKean - “Media Overload and Empathic Distress: Grounding Oneself in Middlemarch’s Web” 
• Riley Nelson - "Middlemarch and the Ordinary Life" 

Monday, April 28

• Catherine Piergiovanni
• Mickey Wilcox - “Middlemarch’s Unnoticed Sympathy”
• Sam Allen - “Marriage, Feminism, and Middlemarch”
• Emily Hanlon - “'Nobody thinks Mr. Ladislaw a proper husband for you': Knowledge, Gender, and Romantic Relationships in Middlemarch"

Wednesday, April 30

• Matthew Sabol - “Perception of and Responses to Female Morality in George Eliot’s Middlemarch”
• Will Harlan - “You Are Your Own Worst Enemy: The Tragedy of Introspection in George Eliot’s Middlemarch”
• Carlos Alvarez - “Definition, Value, & Appreciating the World Around You”
• Mary Bondurant - “Perspectives and Misunderstandings”
• Madeleine Brooks- “A Woven Middlemarch”

Margaux Barrett to publish “Science on Tap: Pouring Knowledge into the Local Community”

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.

Congratulations to Catherine Messier, 2024 Falvey Scholar Award Winner

Congratulations to VU English senior Catherine Messier, who is a 2024 Falvey Scholar Award Winner.

According to Falvey Library's website:

"The Falvey Scholars award is an annual program established by Falvey Library and the Center for Research and Fellowships (CRF) to recognize exceptional undergraduate research by senior-level students at Villanova.

"To be considered for the Falvey Scholars award, the process is two-fold. First, faculty mentors are invited to nominate individual or group projects of senior students who have completed exemplary (and publicly presentable) scholarship or research. Then, students who are nominated by faculty mentors will be required formally apply to be considered for the award.

"In applying for the award, students are asked to share information about their overall research process, provide a detailed abstract of their project, as well as a comprehensive bibliography. The awards traditionally have an emphasis on work that has required substantial use of library resources. Students who are applying are asked to include information about library resources and services utilized including librarian assistance, databases, journals, books, Interlibrary Loan, etc. Students may also discuss how the library building aided in their research—from late night study sessions to a welcoming place to meet with professors, co-researchers and scholars.

"A committee consisting of representatives from Falvey Library and CRF typically meets in mid-April to review nominations and applications and to select award winners. 5-7 students are annually granted Falvey Scholars awards."

Furthermore, according to Falvey Library:

"The Villanova community is cordially invited to join us on Friday, April 26, at 10 a.m. in Falvey Library’s Speakers’ Corner for the 2024 Falvey Scholars Research Presentation and Awards Ceremony.

"This program will provide the opportunity to recognize outstanding undergraduate research by the senior students who were selected as the 2024 Falvey Scholars from across Villanova’s campus. The event also serves as a recognition of the dedication of faculty in supporting undergraduate student-faculty collaborative research and scholarship. During the event, award recipients will provide a brief 10-minute presentation to highlight their overall research process and showcase a summary of their winning project.

Program Schedule

10:00-10:10 a.m. Continental Breakfast

10:10 a.m. Program Opening/Welcome: Millicent Gaskell, University Librarian

10:15 a.m. Presentation #1: Anne Eby

10:30 a.m. Presentation #2: Sydney Walsh

10:45 a.m. Presentation #3: PJ Scarperi

11:00 a.m. Presentation #4: Kathleen Jordan

11:15 a.m. Presentation #5: Matthew McMullen

11:30 a.m. Presentation #6: Catherine Messier

11:45 p.m. Closing Remarks: Millicent Gaskell"

We hope you will be able to come on Wednesday to support Catherine!

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!

Call for Papers: RhetTech--Growth, Reflection, and Change

The RhetTech Editorial Board would like to invite undergraduate students to submit their work to RhetTech, James Madison University’s undergraduate journal for students in the disciplines of writing, rhetoric, and/or technical communication. We publish all kinds of content in all types of media, including text-based essays, videos, podcasts, photo essays, reviews, websites, blogs, and more. Undergraduate students of all levels are eligible and encouraged to submit their work. You can learn more about RhetTech and view the most recent volume here: http://www.jmu.edu/wrtc/students/undergraduate/rhet-tech.shtml.

As we approach our 5th year, we are planning a special issue on the broad theme of “Growth, Reflection, and Change.” 

RhetTech is a great opportunity for students to publish their work in a peer-reviewed journal.

Call for Submissions: Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal, UC Berkeley

The Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal is now accepting submissions for our Fall 2022 edition! 

For over 10 years, the Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal at UC Berkeley has been showcasing the best undergraduate research in literature and media from universities all over the world. We invite papers from those working in, around, or critically engaging with literary topics in a comparative nature, broadly construed. Multilingual submissions and/or papers regarding world literatures are encouraged, but must be written mostly in English. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

·  Papers comparing at least two authors or texts

·  Interdisciplinary research across disciplines within the humanities

·  Research engaging with literary theory and schools of criticism

For more information and full submission guidelines, or to view past issues of CLUJ, please visit our website’s submissions page. 

 

Deadline to submit: October 15th, 11:59 PST

Link to submit: http://tinyurl.com/clujfall22

Submit Now: Gettysburg College Headquarters, an undergraduate research journal

We are glad to announce that the deadline to submit your papers to the Headquarters has been extended. Submissions will now close on September 30th at 11:59pm. The Gettysburg College Headquarters is an open access, peer-reviewed, undergraduate research journal. We aim to publish works from specific fields in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences. As stated we only accept works from specific fields, those being: 

 

Humanities: English, History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies

 

Social Sciences: Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology

 

Natural Science: Biology, Chemistry, and Physics

 

The Headquarters does accept visual art pieces for potential publication. We accept drawings, paintings, sculptures, printmaking, photography, and ceramic. We also accept works that are Interdisciplinary. We require interdisciplinary works to include one of the listed fields above in the submission. Submissions fall into three different formats: Research Articles, Book Reviews, and Visual Art Pieces. Word length for research articles are 5,000 to 10,000 words while book reviews are limited to 900 words or less. We look forward to reviewing your submissions!    

 

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact the editors:

RJ Lehal lehara01@gettysburg.edu  

Marissa Honeycutt honema01@gettysburg.edu

 

Research in the Alice Dunbar-Nelson Papers

On Friday, March 18, 2022, Professor Jean Lutes took English & Humanities major Cynthia Choo (Class of '23), and Peace and Justice major Trinity Rogers (Class of '24) to do research in the Alice Dunbar-Nelson Papers in the Special Collections Department of the University of Delaware Library.  

Cynthia and Trin -- along with  English & Criminology Major Kashae Garland (Class of '22) -- were recently named Idol Family Affiliate Fellows for 2022. They are working on the 'Steenth Street Project, a collaborative initiative that aims to develop curriculum resources for K-12 teachers on Black women writers and to produce a digital edition of a short story collection Dunbar-Nelson wrote based on her experience teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in New York City in the 1890s. 

Dunbar-Nelson, who had a long career as an author, activist, and educator, left behind one of the most extensive archives of any Black woman of her era. The archive in Delaware includes literary, professional, and personal papers: an extensive collection of correspondence, a comprehensive collection of manuscripts of her writing, including novels, stories, poetry, drama, and essays, her diary, and family papers, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, ephemera, and memorabilia.

Professor Kimberly Takahata will give the keynote at the NUCL

 Professor Kimberly Takahata will give the keynote at the Northwestern Undergraduate Conference on Literature (NUCL) on March 19th. Her talk is titled, "Indigeneity and Indigenous Life in Colonial Virginia." The conference website is here.

The 'Steenth Street Project receives funding form the McNulty Institute

The 'Steenth Street project, which includes three student affiliate fellows, receives funding from the McNulty Institute. More information on website and below.

"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.

UC-Berkeley Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal Submission opportunity

 For over 10 years, the Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal at UC Berkeley has been showcasing the best undergraduate research in literature and media from universities all over the world.

We are writing to issue a last-minute reminder for everyone to submit their papers for the Fall 2021 issue and would like to extend this call for papers to all interested undergraduates and recent graduates. We invite research papers from all those working in, around, or critically engaging with literary topics in a comparative nature. Papers in any language are welcome. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

·  Papers comparing at least two authors or texts

·  Interdisciplinary research engaging multiples disciplines within the humanities

·  Research engaging with literary theory and schools of criticism

For more information and full submission guidelines, or to view past issues of CLUJ, please visit our website’s submissions page. 

 

Submissions for the Spring 2022 issue will be accepted until February 21st 11:59 p.m., Pacific Time.

PAID STUDENT RESEARCH FELLOW POSITION for SPRING 2022

PAID STUDENT RESEARCH FELLOW POSITION for SPRING 2022 

DESCRIPTION

Undergraduate student sought to join a collaborative, public-facing humanities initiative focused on an understudied Black woman writer, racial justice education, and literary recovery.

 

EXPECTED TIME COMMITMENT

8-10 hours a week

COMPENSATION TBA, pending grant approval, expected in early January 2022

 

QUALIFICATIONS

The successful applicant will be intellectually curious, detail-oriented, self-motivated, committed to racial justice, interested in women’s literature and history, and an excellent writer, reader, and communicator. Because this is a long-term project with the possibility of extending the work beyond the Spring 2022 term, preference will be given to first-years and sophomores, although juniors and seniors will also be considered.

HOW TO APPLY

Submit a letter of interest and a resume to Dr. Jean Lutes at jean.lutes@villanova.edu by Jan. 5, 2022.

DETAILS

Dr. Jean Lutes (English department) is looking for a second student to join a team of scholars working on “The ’Steenth Street Project: Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Stories of Black Childhood.” This project aims to recover a lost short story collection written in the 1890s by Black author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson. 

In deference to Dunbar-Nelson’s long career as an educator and advocate for racial justice, the project goal is to produce an open-access digital edition of the story collection, along with curriculum resources and to make our work scalable, relevant, and adaptable to multiple K-12 school systems. 

 

Dr. Lutes and her two collaborators – Dr. Brigitte Fielder (University of Wisconsin) and Ms. Denise Burgher (University of Delaware) – have prioritized collaborating with the Black-majority school district of Philadelphia to collectively produce a text and its accompanying resources, which will bring Dunbar Nelson’s work directly to the people who inspired and shaped the Annals of Steenth street, American children. 

The ’Steenth Street stories feature children in a poor urban neighborhood and the middle-class reformers who show up to help -- and who often misunderstand and misstep. The collection is based on Dunbar-Nelson’s work teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in the 1890s in New York City. 

 

The Student Research Fellow hired in Spring 2022 will help to document the publication history of the 12 stories in the collection (several were published both independently, both during Dunbar-Nelson’s lifetime and after), to compare story versions to establish a definitive text, to conduct original archival work for the introduction to the edition, and to identify historical documents to be published as appendices to draw the reader into the world of the author and the text.

Johns Hopkins University's Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium

Villanova English majors are invited to apply for Johns Hopkins University’s second annual Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium. 

The symposium was designed to offer students across the country the chance to gather together and disseminate their humanities research on a national scale. Due to COVID, last year's symposium was a virtual event, with 359 participants and more than 10,000 visits to the conference site to date. This year’s event will be virtual as well, held live on April 24 and 25, 2021. The conference application portal is now open.

This symposium is open to undergraduate students from any two-year or four-year college or university who would like to present their original scholarship in the humanities. The organizers hope to have 400 participants this year.

In addition to the multiple panels of student papers and presentations (including original creative works), there will be e a keynote speech delivered by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr and multiple professional development panels featuring Johns Hopkins graduate students and faculty and editors from Johns Hopkins University Press.

Students studying all areas of the humanities are welcome to attend. Attendees will also have the opportunity to work with our student editors to revise their presentation into a journal-length presentation for our journal of proceedings, the Macksey Journal.

 

You can learn more about the event at the conference site.

Call for Submissions: Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal

The Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal is now accepting submissions for its Spring 2021 issue and is issuing a call for papers to all interested undergraduates and recent graduates.

The editors invite research papers from all those working in, around, or critically engaging with literary topics in a comparative nature. Papers in any language are welcome. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Papers comparing at least two authors or texts
• Interdisciplinary research engaging multiples disciplines within the humanities
• Research engaging with literary theory and schools of criticism

To review submission guidelines and submit your paper, or to view past issues of CLUJ, please visit the journal's submissions page.

 

Submissions will be accepted until March 1st 11:59 p.m., Pacific Time.

Submit Your Writing to The Foundationalist

The Foundationalist, an undergraduate literary journal based at Yale University, Bowdoin College, and the University of Iowa, is accepting submissions for its next issue. The editors are looking for fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and critical essays (no page limits, no themes). Work written for classes is also acceptable. If selected, the author’s writing will be published on academia.edu and in print format.

Submission guidelines and more information can be found at thefoundationalist.com. Submissions and queries should be sent to thefoundationalist@gmail.com

The deadline for submission is October 25.

English Faculty and Students Present at Masculinities Symposium

Last month, Dr. Jean Lutes and Dr. Travis Foster both spoke at the "Masculinities" symposium at the Inn at Villanova. Dr. Lutes presented on the African American feminist writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson, while Dr. Foster spoke about his new research on the figure of the "effeminate man" in nineteenth-century American literature. Also speaking at the event were senior English major Amanda Gerstenfeld ('20), junior Political Science major Danielle Burns, both of whom assisted Dr. Lutes with her research on Dunbar-Nelson, and Villanova English graduate student Jesse Schwartz.

Pictured above (from left to right): MaryLu Hill, Melissa Sturges, and Jesse Schwartz

Dr. Jean Lutes

Amanda Gerstenfeld and Danielle Burns

Dr. Travis Foster