Celebrating Dr. Alice Dailey's Recent Publication: "Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations"

Dr. Alice Dailey developed a photography-writing project, titled “Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations,” in collaboration with her son, Adam Dailey. This past August, Tupelo Quarterly published this project in a folio on collaboration. 

Page 8 of "Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations"

Led by a fascination with creating analog spiritualistic photographs, Dr. Dailey found herself experimenting with several mediums outside of the process of photography itself. What started as a project to recreate Victorian spiritualist photographs transformed into her recently published photography-writing project, “Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations.” Dr. Dailey describes this project as originating from a desire to understand the creation of analog spiritualist photographs alongside the theory of embodied practice as a form of historical knowledge. 

“The project thus began with no writing or narration planned. I simply wanted to make pictures,” explains Dr. Dailey when asked about the creative process. 

As Dr. Dailey embarked on the journey of learning analog photography and darkroom printing, her son, Adam, was simultaneously discovering his passion for music. While initially unplanned, this parallel led Dr. Dailey to invite Adam to create alongside her. Serving as a model and contributing a piece of his own composition, Adam’s efforts in this partnership unveiled hidden insights about collaboration itself. Dr. Dailey describes this project as “not only a collaboration but a piece about collaboration and transmission.” Relating back to her interest in the field of performance studies, this piece as commentary on both collaboration and transmission explores Dr. Dailey’s initial interest in the theoretical argument that bodies transmit knowledge across history through repertoires of repeated action. 

When asked about the final project, Dr. Dailey states, “although the written components are mine, they were composed in conversation and process with Adam, an artist I admire and with whom I feel privileged to collaborate”. At its core, collaboration is the inspiration, process, and product of “Love Poem with Ectoplasmic Materializations.” 

Watch the video form, or read the written piece, here: https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/editors-selections/love-poem-with-ectoplasmic-materializations-by-alice-dailey-adam-dailey/

- by Juliana Catania MA '28

Employers are Looking for English Majors at the Fall Career Fair

A lot of employers will be attending next week's career fair who are interested in hiring English majors for jobs and internships. A partial list of such employers can be found below. 

The Fall Career Fair will take place next Wednesday, September 9, from 2:00 – 6:00 pm in the Finneran Pavilion. You can learn more about the fair on Handshake, and peruse a list of resources and events to help you prepare for the fair as well. Please do attend!

Kamran Javadizadeh on Phatic Language, ‘the master’s tools,’ and More

image retrieved from 
events.stanford.edu

Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh traveled to California this past spring to give talks on the poets Jack Spicer and Solmaz Sharif. We sat down with Dr. Javadizadeh recently to hear more about these talks, which covered subjects as diverse as poets as radios, the notion of AI poetry, assimilation and language, and Iranian immigrant experience in the US.

We first discussed Dr. Javadizadeh’s lecture at the Stanford Center for Poetics, which describes itself as “a home for research in poetics across periods, languages, and methods.” His talk, which took place on April 23^rd, was titled "Making Contact: Jack Spicer and Phatic Poetics." Dr. Javadizadeh borrows the concept of “phatic language” from the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, a concept which Dr. Javadizadeh describes as a variety of language in which “you’re not communicating, so much as you’re calling attention to the channel along which you are about to be communicating.” Some examples might include small talk (“When you see someone, you say, ‘hey, how you doing?’ You're not really asking them how they're doing”), or stepping up to a microphone and saying ‘Is this thing on?’”

Although phatic communication was not an idea that Jakobson associated with poetry, Dr. Javadizadeh stated that he has a “kind of perverse, but counterintuitive, maybe, idea” that the phatic function of language is an important facet of poetry, and he has tried to “give different versions of it using different poets as examples.” Dr. Javadizadeh felt it would be interesting to use the poet Jack Spicer at Stanford in part because he was a Bay Area poet, but also because he was himself “quite interested in linguistics” and had some “bizarre ideas about poetry” (although Dr. Javadizadeh noted that it’s hard to know quite how seriously to take everything Spicer wrote about poetry).

“Spicer came to think,” said Dr. Javadizadeh, “that, poetry was, not something that came from inside of him, but that it was something that came from the outside, sort of through him, that poetry was dictated to him. Sometimes he described it as Martians using him to create poetry… Sometimes he compared poets to radios that receive transmissions.”

Dr. Javadizadeh went on to state that another reason he felt Spicer and the phatic function of language would be interesting to talk about in the Bay Area was that it provides “a kind of answer to what it is that we might object to--without knowing why we're objecting to it--when the topic of AI-generated poetry comes up.”

“I'm willing to stipulate,” said Dr. Javadizadeh, “that an AI could produce a better poem than what I've seen so far, but I think I still wouldn't care very much about it,” because the phatic function would be missing—in other words, the sense that “somebody’s on the other end of the line.”

Therefore, Dr. Javadizadeh chose “Making Contact” as a title for this talk: “The idea that what poetry might be making is not the artifact that is the poem, but the contact itself--that is, the connection between the poet and the reader as the real thing that's being made by poetry--is an interesting idea to me.”

In addition to his talk on Jack Spicer, Dr. Javadizadeh also participated in a so-called “sushi salon” (a lunchtime talk) with Stanford students taking part in that university’s Structured Liberal Education program. Dr. Javadizadeh was in conversation with Dr. Elias Kleinbock, who, inspired in part by Dr. Javadizadeh’s podcast, Close Readings, chose to center their talk around one poem—in this case, Solmaz Sharif’s “The Master’s House.”

Dr. Javadizadeh noted that he had wanted to choose something contemporary, and that Sharif is one of his favorite contemporary poets (you can read his review of Sharif’s collection Customs in The New York Review of Books). In addition, with the talk taking place in the early days of the American and Israeli bombing of Iran, Dr. Javadizadeh felt the poem would provide a way to “bring some attention to Iran in ways that are not what people were typically hearing or reading about in the early stages of this war, at the time.”

The poem’s title quotes a famous line from Audre Lorde (“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”).

“So what,” said Dr. Javadizadeh, “does Sharif mean by ‘the master’s house’ here? Maybe the United States, or maybe it’s English—as a language, an academic discipline, a poetic tradition… There’s this very touching moment at the end of the poem where, she seems to be sharing a memory about her father, who had a shotgun held to his chest by a Texan.”

Sharif writes:

To recall the Texan that held the shotgun to your father’s chest, sending him falling backward, pleading, and the words came to him in Farsi

To be jealous of this, his most desperate language

To lament the fact of your lamentations in English, English being your first defeat

Dr. Javadizadeh discussed those lines in length at Stanford, analyzing how, “for people who are in any measure bilingual or polylingual, there might come the question, alright, if you’re suddenly in a desperate situation… what language comes to your lips? And for Sharif’s father, it’s Farsi, or Persian. But for Sharif, clearly it’s English.”

According to Dr. Javadizadeh, “In a sort of typical kind of immigrant narrative,” Sharif’s default use of English might feel like assimilation or achievement, but in her poem she describes it as a defeat, as if “English has mastered her,” or she has, “in some sense, been colonized by it. And she can’t help but speak it.”

Dr. Javadizadeh described this as “a position that I identify pretty strongly with, as somebody whose first language was Persian, but I’ve made my whole life out of English.”

Overall, Dr. Javadizadeh noted that he had a wonderful time and received a warm reception at Stanford. Interested readers of this blog can read Solmaz Sharif’s “The Master’s House” in full on the Poetry Foundation’s website, and you can hear more reflections on poems from Dr. Javadizadeh on his podcast.

Emily Skillings Awarded Howard Foundation Fellowship

Emily Skillings

Our newest faculty member, Emily Skillings, who will begin teaching with us this fall, was just awarded a Howard Foundation Fellowship by the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation.

The Foundation awarded 14 fellowships totaling $560,000 to support early mid-career individuals. Each recipient received an unrestricted $40,000 fellowship. The funds provide time to advance independent creative and scholarly work on a major project.

Per the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, "Since 1954, over 500 Howard Fellows have used the fellowship to transition from promising early-career status to recognized leaders in their fields. Howard Fellows have authored bestsellers, directed Oscar nominated feature-length films, and earned some of the world’s most prestigious honors including Pulitzer Prizes, the Rome Prize, and the Whiting Award. They have gone on to MacArthur, Guggenheim, and Carnegie Fellowships.

"The Howard Foundation carefully selects its Fellows through a rigorous and competitive multi-round process. This year’s Fellows stood out among a competitive candidate pool of 258 applicants, across 41 states and the District of Columbia."

Emily Skillings was awarded her fellowship in the field of poetry, for a project titled Of Pearl.

Per Skillings's biography for the fellowship, "Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collections Fort Not (2017) and Tantrums in Air (2025), both published by The Song Cave. Tantrums in Air was named one of the best poetry books of 2025 by The New York Times. Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts."

We look forward to welcoming Emily to Villanova this fall!

For more information about Emily Skillings and the Howard Foundation Fellowship, visit the Foundation's website.

Congratulations to the Class of 2026!

 Congratulations to the Class of 2026 who were celebrated on May 19, 2026. We will miss you! Here are a few photographs from the Bachelor's Degree Commencement ceremony with English faculty and graduates.

Summer Reading Recs 2026: Faculty & Staff Recs

Summer Reading Recommendations

Welcome to the English Department's 13th annual summer reading recommendations. Once you've explored this list, you can click on “summer reading” to see recommendations from previous years. Stay tuned for recommendations from members of the Student Advisory Council.


Michelle Filling-Brown

The Emperor of Gladness will have you contemplating what it means to truly live and find joy. The characters ask us to consider family, memory, choice, addiction, pain, empathy, and second chances. Although the novel has moments of deep sadness, the comedic scenes with the crew at HomeMarket, a fictionalized Boston Market-type restaurant featuring cornbread with a secret ingredient, bring warmth and absurdity that beautifully balance the profound darkness.

It’s this mix of heartbreaking generational trauma and ridiculous humor that drew me into this novel. Ocean Vuong’s prose is lyrical and immersive. He writes with such vivid detail that I’m convinced I know what the secret basement library with yellow, brittled books smells like and what it feels like to stomp on dinner rolls in the rain. The novel is haunting and stayed with me long after I finished my time with Hai, Grazina, Sonny, and the crew, reminding me that through human connection we can find happiness even in our lowest moments.

Adrienne Perry

A dear friend sent me Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès, 1944-1959 for my birthday. Translated from the French by Sandra Smith and Cory Stockwell, the hundreds of letters contained in this massive volume chronicle the life, love, carriers, and milieus of two absolute stars--Camus in the literary and political realm and Cazares as a renowned actor of radio, stage, and screen. I have only begun to read this marvelous book, but can already say it is a stunning, humbling example of the power of letters and correspondence. The letters' honesty and beauty remind me that seeking, reading, correspondence, connection, passion, and introspection can be part of everyday life and that we can wring more out of life through curiosity and feeling. I have long been an admirer of Camus, especially given his writings gathered into Neither Victims Nor Executioners, so I am eager to learn more about him, as well as Casares.

 

Tsering Wangmo

I’ve been carrying sentences from Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me in my body months after reading it. The memoir tackles the author’s complicated and painful relationship with her mother, but like Roy’s last novel (The Ministry of Utmost Happiness) this text is also a critique of India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. I so admire how Roy shows the scars from her childhood while achieving at the same time the reader’s understanding, even admiration, of Mother Mary as an educator and activist in addition to being a formidable mother. It’s Roy’s stunning tribute to her mother.

Last summer a friend from Argentina gave me Tender is The Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, (translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses) saying the plot builds around a society where animal meat is no longer edible after a virus outbreak. In an article in the The Irish Times on February 21, 2020, the author writes she wanted to tell a story about a time in the future when cannibalism could be legalised. Incredible plot, right? The novel made my friend think about capitalism, the normalization of cruelty, and language: what is done with words as well as the inadequacy of language in crucial moments. I was intrigued by the book’s effect on my friend and am eager to read the novel.

  

 

Mary Mullen

One book that I read and am stilling thinking about is Yasmin Zaher, The Coin. It’s zany and surreal. This story of a Palestinian woman who teaches middle school for underprivileged students and gets involved in a Birkin Bag swindling operation stuck with me both because of what it says about our world and because of the unexpected unfolding of its plot. There are stunning sentences throughout.

I look forward to reading a book I bought on the bookstore expedition: Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel. I enjoy Taylor’s subtle, sharp writing. I picked up this book because I think it is a story of what Jenny Offill calls an "art monster": a writer who prioritizes creativity over mundane responsibilities. What could be better?

 

Travis Foster

If you’re looking for something slim and mind-expanding, I highly recommend Emma Heaney’s 2025 This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation. Too often, we bury conception, gestation, birth, and infant care under falsifying spectacles. Heaney cuts through all of that by focusing on the knowledge of experience, grounding brilliant insights about reproductive freedom, cisness, and state violence in bodies and their lived reality.

For something completely different, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901) is one of the most enjoyable novels I’ve picked up in a long time. It's a 700-page German family saga tracking four generations of a merchant family, and it moves with surprising speed. Mann published this when he was only 26, and it remains easy to see why it then became central to his Nobel Prize. If you pick it up, I recommend the John E. Woods translation, which, I think, beautifully captures the humor and natural dialogue.

 

 

Yumi Lee

Kaori Ekuni – Twinkle Twinkle, or 반짝반짝 빛나는

One of my goals this summer is to improve my Korean language reading and writing, and a friend recommended, and lent me, a Korean translation of the Japanese novelist Kaori Ekuni’s Twinkle Twinkle. It’s about a gay man and his female friend who enter into a fake marriage to appease their parents; shenanigans ensue. My friend loved it and thought the translation was also very readable for my level, so I’m excited to give it a try.

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

Even as a scholar of 20th and 21st century American literature, and one who’s read, taught, and written about other Morrison novels, I’ve somehow never sat down and read Song of Solomon in its entirety. I started rectifying this shameful error on a recent short trip, and truly, what a treat to get to read a Morrison novel for the first time and luxuriate in the sentences, the imagery, the sensory details (her mind!!). Summer is also a perfect time to start a long book, I think, so I’m excited to get immersed.

Jean Lutes

I'm diving immediately into Tana French's The Keeper (Penguin Random House, 2026), the final book in her crime-novel trilogy featuring a retired Chicago detective in rural Ireland. French's atmospheric, subtle narratives always remind me of my mother, a devoutly Catholic daughter of Irish immigrants who was a devoted fan of the television police procedural. Then I'll reread Charles Dickens' Bleak House, a doorstopper of a Victorian novel that I've been wanting to revisit, partly because of its irresistible depiction of a legal system that perverts justice. After that, two books by colleagues (one about-to-be, the other longstanding) are at the top of my list.

First, I'll return to a book of poetry I encountered and appreciated, but lacked time to savor, during the bustle of the school year: Emily Skillings' Tantrums in Air (The Song Cave, 2025). Emily will join our department this coming fall, and before she arrives in person in August, I'm looking forward to spending more time with her poetry, which I find riveting: joyful, deep, funny, and pomposity-free. Then I'll reread Alice Dailey's Mother of Stories: An Elegy (Fordham University Press, 2024), a lyrical, challenging memoir about motherhood and stories. In recent years, it has been a thrill — and a reminder of the varied, always-emerging talents of our English department faculty — to watch Alice, a highly accomplished literary critic who taught in our department for many years, begin publishing creative nonfiction. This particular bit of summer reading is really cheating, however, since I'm teaching a course in Fall 2026 on Fictions of Motherhood, and I'll cite some of Alice's work in my class.

  

Megan Quigley

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf

This summer I am beginning by reading Woolf’s most overtly political essay, she maintains that war, patriarchy, and political institutions are intrinsically linked. In my two Woolf classes we read her fictional novels and memoirs (wonderful!) but I think perhaps we need to take off the gloves and read the polemics next time! So I want to re-read this work and look at why she decided to include photographs. I also will read Flush, her biography of a dog, for a bit more light-hearted fun.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Booker prize-winning lyrical novel about the experience of memory, time, and love when in orbit. I’ve been eager to read.

    

 

Joe Drury

I just tore through Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, London Falling. It’s a masterful, gripping exploration of the financial-criminal complex that has transformed London over the last three decades and explains much of the world we now live in, though it starts out as an investigation into the mysterious death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who fell from the balcony of a luxury apartment building overlooking the Thames in 2019. After his death, his parents learned that he had been living a secret life pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch. It’s a remarkable story with an astonishing cast of Trumpian grifters, mobsters, and confidence men, told with a Dickensian eye for the corruption and cruelty hiding beneath the city’s glittering surfaces. If you like this book, you will also enjoy Reefe's astonishing Say Nothing, another utterly enthralling investigation of a mysterious death, this time in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the 1970s, that turns into a complex, exhilarating exploration of the history of the IRA, the Troubles, and the legacy of British imperialism in Ireland. Warning: Keefe’s books will make you put off all the other things you have to do until you've finished reading them!

 

Lora Novak

I have three selections that our ladies' book club enjoyed:
1. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett
2. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
3. Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

Kimberly Takahata

With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming up in July, I've been thinking a lot about what the "early Americas" can teach us about our present moment, especially as the subject of contemporary reimaginings. I'll be diving into Laila Lalami's novel The Moor's Account this summer, which tells the story of Mustafa al-Zamori, an enslaved man called Esteban in Spanish agent Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's 1542 account of an expedition through what is now the US south. They were two of only four men who survived. This book promises to help us reflect on the kinds of stories that survive across centuries and all the stories we still might discover.




Cathy Staples

I am always on the search for new books exploring our relationship with nature so one new book I am hoping to read is Michael Symmons Roberts' Dog Star. The publisher’s description is enticing: “Dog Star is a book of linked poems rooted in encounters with real, imagined or mythical birds, trees, fish, flowers, bacteria, chimeras – ancient connections reshaped by technological and political change and critically endangered by species and habitat loss.” I love the work of his I've seen online. Here's an excerpt from a poem from the Poetry Foundation website. If "Mapping the Genome: is not in his new book, I'll be ordering another one of his books!  

Somewhere out there are remnants

of our evolution, genes for how



to fly south, sense a storm,

hunt at night, how to harden

your flesh into hide or scales.



These are the miles of dead code.

Every desert has them......



Mike Malloy

I thought I’d recommend two very different books for summer reading: one long and cosmic, the other short and parochial.

 The long one even has a long title: The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, by Chingiz Aitmatov. Aitmatov was a Kyrgyz-Soviet writer who published this book in Russian in the 1980s, but it’s available in a very readable English translation by F.J. French. The story takes place over a single day and follows two narrative threads, one about a Kazakh man trying to bury his friend in a traditional manner, the other about a joint US-Soviet encounter with an extraterrestrial intelligence in outer space. The way these two narratives intersect, echo, and rhyme is deeply interesting, and the poetic evocation of the Kazakh steppe (and outer space!) is powerful.

The short one is also a translation into English, this one from Irish, and it’s Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha’s Jimeen (translated by Íde ní Laoghaire and Peter Fallon). This is a slice-of-life coming-of-age tale about a boy in the Munster Gaeltacht who gets into various silly scrapes and relates his adventures with a distinctive Huck Finn-esque narrative voice. It’s mostly light fun, but it builds to a surprisingly emotional conclusion as you realize the narrator has been growing up, almost imperceptibly, the whole time.

 

 

Amanda Eliades

So far, 2026 has been a great year of new releases for me and I am having the best time reading a lot of brand-new books! I have two recommendations and two hopefuls for this summer. Everyone has been talking about The Correspondent by Virginia Evans for such good reason. This is a wonderful epistolary novel about a retired lawyer who communicates with people in her life (and Joan Didion!) via beautiful (and funny) letters. This one made me laugh and cry, my favorite type of novel! I also loved Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser, a sort of Cinderella retelling from the stepmother’s perspective. I love fairytale retellings and this one does not disappoint. Female rage abounds!

I’m looking forward to reading Yesteryear by Caro Clarire Burke this summer. You can’t go into any bookstore or talk to a bookseller nowadays without hearing about this one. The main character is a “tradwife” influencer who wakes up in the 1800s and is forced to live the life she’s been sort of selling online. I am so intrigued by this one and can’t wait to see if I love it as much as everyone else has been lately. I’d also like to get to Thistlemarsh by Moorea Corrigan which takes place in a rundown cottage in the English countryside. The cottage may or may not be haunted, I think? I can’t wait to find out!

 

 

Alan Drew

We just had Alvaro Enrigue and his translator, Natasha Wimmer, here at Villanova for the 2026 Literary Festival. I loved his last book, You Dreamed of Empires, which is set in 1519 Tenochtitlan on the eve of the Spanish destruction of the Aztec and the larger Mexica civilization. It's a mind trip of a book which seeks to reimagine the fateful encounter between Cortez and Moctezuma amid a haze of magic mushrooms. (As I said, it's a trip.) This book, Now I Surrender, is also historical fiction, set in the 19th Century borderlands of Mexico and the United States as both countries' armies try to battle Geronimo and his band of Apache into surrender. Magic mushrooms or not, I'm sure this book will be a wild trip, too, that makes us rethink the histories we think we know.

Kamran Javadizadeh

Over the last year or so, I have become kind of obsessed with Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. It’s a Danish novel that is being published in seven installments—the English translation of the Book IV came out this April, and Book V is due in October—and I think of it as a cross between Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. The novel takes the form of the diary of a woman named Tara Selter, a rare book dealer, who has become “stuck” in a single day, November 18. It’s hard to describe. Because on the one hand very little happens, or rather very little can happen, since anything that does happen seems to get reset to nothing by the next day, the next November 18. But on the other hand, because Tara’s understanding of what is (or isn’t!) happening to her, and to the world she inhabits, grows and deepens, as the day keeps repeating, and as she learns what the “rules” of the repetition seem to be, the most minor variations begin to acquire this magical and sometimes even shocking quality. I’m currently reading Book IV, and, without giving anything away, I can say that things do happen in this world, and that Balle has written a high-concept, literary novel that also manages to be a page turner, one that makes its reader aware, again and again, of the strange temporal experience of reading itself.

Lara Rutherford-Morrison

I just finished reading Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer and highly recommend it if you enjoy unreliable narrators, sentient fungus, and worldbuilding that is both beautiful and extremely creepy. I’m also recommending the podcast LeVar Burton Reads, in which LeVar Burton reads short stories, mostly (but not exclusively) science fiction and fantasy, from a diverse range of authors. The back catalogue includes works by well-known authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Louise Erdrich, and N.K. Jemisin, as well as new stories by up-and-coming writers. I’ve discovered several authors I really enjoy while walking my neighborhood and listening to Burton’s wonderful voice.

    

Dr. Joe Drury's Presentation for the American Society for 18th Century Studies Conference

Dr. Joe Drury recently presented at the American Society for 18th Century Studies conference in Philadelphia, which took place April 9-11. At the event, Dr. Drury presented his paper, “‘A Singular Man’: James Boswell’s Oddness,” which posits Boswell’s “oddness” as whimsy, a trait characterized by his almost compulsive tendency to overshare. 

I was given the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Drury to discuss his paper in further detail. He cites Sianne Ngai’s book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, and Interesting, as sparking his interest in whimsy. Ngai’s book, Dr. Drury explains, is a “cultural analysis of our everyday aesthetic vocabulary,” especially that vocabulary which extends beyond the popular yet constraining conception of aesthetics as beauty. While Ngai’s novel explores the “zany, cute, and interesting,” Dr. Drury is more interested in whimsy. Dr. Drury explains that whimsy “has its origins in the period that I study, the Enlightenment, the long 18th century…I begin with this idea: why did this word emerge? What is it?...What are people using it to do and say?”

To answer these questions, Dr. Drury turns to James Boswell, Scottish biographer and prolific diarist. Although best known for his biography of Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s journals, which were published posthumously, also sparked significant intrigue. Dr. Drury draws particular attention to The London Journal, the first of more than a dozen volumes of Boswell’s diaries. Dr. Drury explains of The London Journal, “it sold more than a million copies, in large part because Boswell describes his sexual escapades in some detail. But it’s also incredibly frank and open about himself.” Even before his journals were published, however, Boswell was often described by his peers as an “odd” individual because of his tendency to overshare. Dr. Drury notes that perhaps our contemporary age of social media is more comfortable with oversharing, “but in the 18th century, it was not common to do that, and particularly for men…Men were expected to be stoic, constrained and disciplined.” Boswell’s journals express his shame about his own character, but they also express moments of pride: Dr. Drury says, “I give all these examples of all the different moments where he acts on a whim or does something whimsical and appears to be quite proud of doing it.” 

Dr. Drury’s project thus posits Boswell’s “oddness” as a sort of self-aware whimsicality. Many of Boswell’s contemporaries, Dr. Drury explains, saw him as entirely unconscious of his character, as somewhat of a babbling fool. In contrast, Dr. Drury says that Boswell “knows what he’s doing and he thinks there’s value to it. He’s modern in the way that he thinks being open and vulnerable with each other is actually a way to form intimacy and is also a way to reveal the essential identity of an individual.” In this way, Boswell was not only conscious of his own whimsical nature, but also pushing the boundaries of masculinity in the 18th century. Dr. Drury notes, “this is about how Boswell’s candor and openness breached all these kinds of norms about what it meant to be a gentleman that were very shocking at the time.” 

Dr. Drury concludes by telling me that not only did The London Journal make him want to be a scholar of the 18th century, but that he will also be teaching the book in his upcoming fall 2026 course entitled “Serious Whimsy.” In his course, he’ll connect Boswell’s writing to an aesthetic of whimsy that Dr. Drury cites as “absolutely central to the 18th century.” If Boswell doesn’t intrigue you, Dr. Drury tells me that he’ll also be teaching Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, the ending of which Dr. Drury describes as “rapturous.” Regardless of what brings you to Dr. Drury’s course, it promises to be a fascinating exploration of whimsy as a serious aesthetic and social force of the 18th century.