English Department Film Trip: October 3!

Join professor Megan Quigley, Tuesday Oct. 3 at 7:00 pm, at our local independent theater, BMFI, for an advanced screening of “Cat Person,” an adaptation of the ’story that broke the internet’ when it was first published in The New Yorker in 2017.

The story is linked here. The wild follow up (read the story first) is linked here: Cat Person & Me.

Shoot Professor Quigley (megan.quigley@villanova.edu) an email if you plan to join—or just show up! Tickets are $11.00. Buy tickets here: https://brynmawrfilm.org/event/advance-screening-cat-person/

Not the Cruelest Month

This weekend, professors Kamran Javadizadeh and Megan Quigley put their poetry skills to work at the T. S. Eliot conference in Cambridge, MA. They co-taught a seminar on "T. S. Eliot and Close Reading” to a group of professors and graduate students at the Houghton Library at Harvard University on Friday. Megan later delivered a lecture, “Perfectly good, normal and right: Eliot, Attraction, and Intimacy,” in Emerson Hall, the same philosophy building where T. S. Eliot took his philosophy courses at Harvard a century ago. What is “close reading”?  Take a class with Megan or Kamran or listen to Kamran’s podcast (linked here Apple & Spotify) to find out!

Celebrating 75 Years of the English Major

 Check out this article from The Villanovan, written by the one and only Caitlyn Foley, on celebrating 75 years of the English major at Villanova.

This Week in the English Department

 

Reading Sci-Fi with AI

On Friday Sept. 15th, Dr. Megan Quigley presented a paper in Switzerland (really on zoom!) on reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun with ChatGPT and the Logic and Modern Literature Conference at the University of Lausanne.

She thanks Erica Hayes, in Falvey Library’s Digital Scholarship Lab, and Jamie Wojtal, her RA, for assistance with AI side of the project.

What do you think ChatGPT wrote when prompted to answer if the border between human and artificial intelligence was vague? And what does that mean for humanity’s “evolution” with AI?

Professor Kamran Javadizadeh in The New Yorker

 Professor Kamran Javadizadeh reviews Ben Lerner's The Lights in The New Yorker. Check out his essay here.

Fall 2023 BIPOC Creative Writing Hangouts

BIPOC creative writing hangouts with Professors Adrienne Perry, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Yumi Lee and Kimberly Takahata begin next week, at 6pm on Tuesday, September 19th. This is the fourth year! The hangouts are open to staff, faculty, students, and alumni who self-identify as folks of color. They take place in person, with pizza! No creative writing experience is necessary.