New Podcasts Coming Soon

A new season of the Villanova English podcast is coming soon! In the meantime, why not catch up with our most recent episode, an interview about early American and Indigenous literatures with Professor Kimberly Takahata? You can listen to the podcast using the links above, or subscribe on Apple, Amazon, Spotify, or other major podcatchers so you never miss an episode!

Why Don't You Just Call Up the Poetry Phone?

 By Alexis Stakem MA '28

Some people see the liberal arts and STEM fields as being in constant conflict. However, Bryan Serinese ‘91 BA is a Villanova University alum who embodies the melding of these two broad fields.

Last spring, Serinese reached out to Villanova’s English department to gift us a poetry phone. The poetry phone is an old rotary phone that has been rewired to play the dialer/listener/caller one of 333 poems upon dialing any three-digit number – a clear physical representation of intermingling between technology, poetry, and performance art. 

Serinese with the Poetry Phone in Villanova's English Department office

Serinese’s father worked for Bell Labs, now AT&T, and they built their first computer together in 1976. While at Villanova, Serinese also minored in computer science, which at the time was a relatively small department, housed in the basement of Mendel Hall. Self-effacingly, he says to have chosen, or “downgraded,” to computer science he “couldn’t hack [it in] electrical engineering.”

Now a Project Manager at Agilent Technologies, a company responsible for developing biology research supplies, Serinese helps individuals communicate their ideas to a broad array of audiences, all with various levels of technical and background knowledge. 

As he explains, “Someone [will have] an idea, and they don’t know how to express it because they’re so focused on the idea and they have such a specific background… I can help them explain it and document it for someone who has zero background in that.”

Being able to articulate another person’s feelings, ideas, or worldviews are what Serinese consider to be the greatest benefit of studying literature. 

“[Poetry] is about what’s not being said and the intentional interpretation you have to bring to it… It’s always about the words. My interpretation or the connotation I bring to a word may be different from the poet or may be different from you. So, I think that’s the beauty of it. Everyone brings something different.”

Beyond the poetry phone itself, Serinese has continued to interact with art throughout different periods of his life, whether that be in an experiential role or as the creator. He has written a zombie musical for his children titled, Carl’s School for the Apocalypse. Carl’s School lives on through the poetry phone, in fact – dial 888 to hear “Zombie Love” and 666 to hear “I Found My Purpose in the Apocalypse,” both of which are songs written and produced for the musical. Serinese has also attended Burning Man several times over,  and in one instance was led out of a whiteout by means of a hardcore rock and roll band’s continued playing. 

“This guy’s playing rock and roll in the whiteout and just not stopping. They were our beacon. He's jamming out on heavy metal guitar, and… we come up and [now] we’re like 5 feet in front of them. [When] we finally saw them, we were like ‘Thank you, thank you.’”

The cover for Carl's School for Zombie Self-Defense 

Serinese’s creative, communicative, and technological life has given him a great perspective on a liberal arts education, and he advises current students that, “You certainly didn’t waste your time because you will continue using these skills in your personal life... Keep that faith in [a liberal arts degree], just keep telling yourself that. Other people will tell you too, and those are the ones you want to listen to.”

Saints, Sinners, and Selfless: Jason Kim visits English 1975

Professor Lora Novak met Jason Kim, the writer and director of Selfless, at a Hollywood screening this past summer. This screening presented films from the 2026 Emerging Cinematographers awards. Professor Novak attended as her nephew, Jordan Oglesby, won an award for his short film, The Interview. This experience became more than just a celebration, as the film Selfless ended up inspiring Mr. Kim's class visit for "Saints and Sinners," Professor Novak's English 1975 course.  

 

Professor Novak went to dinner with Jason Kim and a group of other screening attendees, where she learned that Mr. Kim lives in New York. After speaking to her nephew, Professor Novak decided to invite Mr. Kim to Villanova for a screening of his film and a Q&A with her students. Not only did Mr. Kim accept her invitation, he inspired a new sense of enthusiasm from Professor Novak's students.  

Selfless is both poignant and thought-provoking, two descriptors only supported by the responding interest from Professor Novak's class. Mr. Kim's film and presence encouraged students to engage deeply with the class discussion during the Q&A. Professor Novak states that even "students who haven't spoken up too much in class before were suddenly chatting away." The guest appearance of Mr. Kim created the space for students to appreciate intellectual dialogue and film critique as a community. It is uncommon to be in the presence of both a piece of art and its creator simultaneously. Students in "Saints and Sinners" got to experience the dynamic conversation surrounding both Selfless as a film and Jason Kim's perspective as the film's writer and director. When asked about their experience, one student says: 

"I noticed that...Jason Kim didn't speak right away when asked a question. He collected his thoughts for a minute and then spoke. He's really intelligent." - Hannah Farrell 

Below are pictures of Jason Kim with Professor Novak's classes: 

 

 

~ by Juliana Catania MA '28

Urayoán Noel visits Villanova for Graduate Colloquium

Grad students, undergrads, faculty, and staff came to SAC 300 on Thursday, September 24, at 3:30pm, for a hybrid critical-creative talk by the award-winning Puerto Rican scholar, poet, translator, and performer Urayoán Noel, who is an associate professor at NYU. Sponsored by the Department of English’s Graduate Colloquium Speaker series, “Bodymind Poetics” drew from Noel's forthcoming monograph Virtually Latinx: Identities in the Age of Social Media, and his in-progress experimental memoir of living with epilepsy, Neural Sea.

Professor Noel presented students with a talk that drew from his diverse interests in academic writing, literary translation, and poetry. He began by discussing the work of poet Pedro Pietri, whom he described as modeling a "radical bodymind freedom." He then read from his upcoming work Virtually Latinx, where he described the presentation of diverse aspects of identity over contemporary social media platforms like tiktok. He went on to read sections from the poet Nicole Cecilia Delgado's work "bioluminiscencia" in Spanish along with his own translation in English. He then read from some of his own poetry, including a piece that drew from fora online such as reddit. Finally, Professor Noel performed an improvisational, multimedia poem, and took questions from the room.

We are grateful to Professor Michael Dowdy for his help in coordinating this visit and to Professor Noel for visiting Villanova. Keep an eye out for additional visitors in the spring!

I, too, sing America: The English Department celebrates 100 years of Langston Hughes's "The Weary Blues"

This past Wednesday, the English Department celebrated 100 years of Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues with the event “I, too Sing America.” A huge crowd of undergraduate students stopped by the 2nd floor lounge of

Good Counsel Hall for an evening of poetry and pizza.

In his opening remarks, Professor Javadizadeh said he hoped the event would give students a taste of what they could

expect from English classes at Villanova. Professor Javadizadeh originated the event over 10 years ago as a way to

introduce 1st year students to the English major and minor, at the time focusing on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The event has since centered other works including J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and, this year, Langston Hughes’ poetry collection The Weary Blues.

Professor Javadizadeh and Professor Skillings welcome students to the event.

2nd Year English MA Christopher Supplee then took center stage, providing historical context to Langston Hughes’ life

and his publication of The Weary Blues in 1926. Christopher concluded with a reading of Hughes’s poem “Dream Variations.”

2nd Year English MA Student Christopher Supplee reads Hughes' "Dream Variations"

Professor Javadizadeh then asked students to consider the many meanings of “dream” in the poem, as well as the

jazz-related idea of variations. The room split into small groups, led by graduate and undergraduate seniors, to discuss these two elements.

Undergraduate senior John Snyder leads a discussion group

Students reconvened to listen to Professor Emily Skillings, who broke down the poem’s literary devices and how the

use of form doesn’t limit a poem’s creative possibilities, but instead expands them.

Professor Emily Skillings discusses the poem's literary elements

Before the night let out, Professor Skillings invited students to write their own poems inspired by Hughes’ idea of variation.

Students talked, ate, and wrote together in the shared, creative space the event had cultivated. Several students approached the professors afterward to say the event had made them want to pursue the English major.

Thank you to the graduate and undergraduate students who helped with setting up and leading the discussion groups. Congratulations to Professors Javadizadeh and Professor Skillings for a successful event!

Professor Adrienne Perry Highlights Under-Appreciated Poets in Forthcoming Co-edited Poetry Anthology "Other Legacies"

 

I recently had the chance to speak with Professor Adrienne Perry about her forthcoming co-edited poetry anthology, Other Legacies: Great Unsung American Poets. The book, co-edited by Kevin Prufer and Martin Rock, features contributions from 35 contemporary poets, each introducing a poet of their choice whom they feel has been neglected in literary conversations.

The book arose out of Professor Perry and her co-editors' work on the Unsung Masters Series, an annual publication highlighting the work of an under-appreciated poet. The publication has an associated reading series, for which Professor Perry served as co-host, in which several scholars and writers are invited to come together to read the work of one such neglected poet. Recognizing the value these readings brought to discussions of American poetry, Professor Perry and her co-editors sought to build upon this unique experience in the form of a poetry anthology–one that would notably differ from traditional poetry anthologies in its choice of poets. “While we really respect and revere many poetry anthologies, particularly in terms of contemporary American poetry, we often felt like there were these gaps in terms of who was represented and why,” Professor Perry explains.

To this end, Professor Perry and her co-editors sought out 35 poets whom they felt were specifically excluded from the literary canon on the basis of factors such as race, gender, class, and disability. When curating the list of poets, Professor Perry and her co-editors kept several questions in mind. “We’re always thinking of ‘who have we not heard from? Who is here or not here?’” Professor Perry says. “‘Do we feel that we’re getting enough different aesthetics and viewpoints to try to create this other narrative?’” For Professor Perry, a notable through-line that emerged from the selected poets is that many of them suffered from mental illness: “A number of poets who died prematurely didn’t have the care or understanding they needed to live longer lives in general but also to continue to write poetry and be part of a literary conversation,” she says.

Other Legacies also departs from typical anthologies by nature of its multimedia format. Readers can scan a QR code in the book’s opening pages which will take them to a digital timeline with several threads. One thread lists the publication dates for the featured poets’ works alongside the poets' biographies, while others track the publication of canonical American literary works and, more broadly, the span of literary movements across the 20th and 21st Century. This digital timeline allows readers to view the unsung poets’ work against the backdrop of the dominant narratives of contemporary American poetry. It’s a visual articulation of the book’s argument, Professor Perry says. “It can help to sometimes disrupt our sense of where these periods begin or end and who fits into them.”

With a forthcoming release on December 8th, Other Legacies promises readers a chance to discover their new favorite, unsung poet.

- Nikola Stojcic MA '28

Who’s Afraid of Woolfbot? Professor Megan Quigley and MA Student Tate Gibbons Explore the Use of A.I. Chatbots in the Classroom

Who’s Afraid of Woolfbot? Professor Megan Quigley and MA Student Tate Gibbons Explore the Use of A.I. Chatbots in the Classroom

By Nikola Stojcic MA ‘28

For many of us in the humanities, the encroachment of artificial intelligence usage into our academic lives has provoked feelings of wariness, to say the least. Indeed, what role is there, if any, for artificial intelligence in the field of English literature? For Professor Megan Quigley and 2nd year English MA student Tate Gibbons, the answer might look something like their custom chatbot, “The Lighthouse”--or, as it has come to be known, Woolfbot.

In her forthcoming article “Refined Out of Existence”: Modernist Impersonality Revisited,” Professor Megan Quigley describes how in the summer of 2024 she began studying the recently unarchived eight volumes of T.S. Eliot’s Complete Prose. To help her sift through nearly 7000 pages of prose and to better understand and evaluate the usage of A.I. for herself, Professor Quigley created a custom Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) she called Scofield 1.0, named after Eliot’s childhood friend and publisher of The Waste Land. Trained on the work of T.S. Eliot scholars, gender and race theorists, as well as literary theorists more broadly, Scofield would scan Eliot’s volumes to identify writings relevant to Professor Quigley’s research interests and offer its interpretations for the selected text. Importantly, Scofield was a closed bot, meaning it couldn’t share any of the data that Professor Quigley had inputted to outside sources. The project yielded insights regarding the limitations of A.I. collaboration, as both Scofield 1.0 and its successor, Scofield 2.0, analyzed Eliot’s work with the racial and gendered biases of the scholarly works it was trained on. For Professor Quigley, the next question became how these findings might prove useful in investigating the use of A.I. in the classroom.

In a zoom call, English M.A. student Tate Gibbons told me how Professor Quigley approached him in 2025 to help develop a custom chatbot for pedagogical purposes. “She pitched it as getting our hands dirty with A.I.” Tate says. “It became a way we could deal with it and not put our heads in the sand.”

The two received funding via a VITAL (Villanova Institute for Teaching and Learning) grant to participate in a ChatGPT pilot program in 2025, which, per a report written by VITAL graduate assistant Wittney Hammeke, aimed to “explore innovative, pedagogically grounded ways to engage students through the intentional integration of ChatGPT tools into their courses.” To this end, Professor Quigley and Tate designed The Lighthouse, aka Woolfbot, for use in two of Professor Quigley’s Fall 2025 classes–one undergraduate and one graduate–both focused on Virginia Woolf’s work. Professor Quigley and Tate introduced the bot as a homework assignment for the undergraduate students and as an in-class exercise for the graduate students. The Woolfbot project was set up to be optional for both classes and included a bibliography of “Critical A.I.,” with articles explaining the potential threat of A.I. to the humanities. Students could engage with Woolfbot or write a short piece explaining their critique of engaging with A.I. in the literature classroom. The aim for both groups, according to Professor Quigley’s reflections in the VITAL report, was to see “whether students’ engagement with the bot would elicit the kind of extratextual reflections—on language, self, consciousness, etc.—that might deepen their understanding of Woolf’s fiction.” 

So what does interacting with Woolfbot look like, exactly? Its role, Tate says, is that of a theoretical “close reading partner” that will prompt you to question the meaning of a passage and to consider deeper meanings of the text. And while the bot was not in any way designed to encapsulate Virginia Woolf’s personality, that doesn’t mean it’s without a personality of its own. Indeed, the bot has an “ostensibly scholarly” persona, which is “supposed to sound like if you asked someone a question in a seminar and they gave you a three paragraph response that they had written in advance.” Additionally, although Tate and Professor Quigley made attempts to tone down the trademark “back-patting” behavior of ChatGPT, it is still prone to commend you on your expert analysis. It might also get passive-aggressive if you happen to question its authority (after testing and purposely needling the bot myself, I can confirm this).

Initial reactions from students using the bot apparently ranged from “true appreciation for extended ‘personalized’ debate to horror about talking to a bot about life and death.” But setting existential questions aside for the moment, did Woolfbot achieve its purpose on a pedagogical level? The answer depends on who you ask: “In general, for both [undergraduate and graduate] classes, there were some people who thought it was useful as a critical A.I. exercise and then fewer people who thought it was useful as a literature exercise,” Tate says. In particular, the graduate class felt the bot’s grasp of Woolf’s work was not yet solid enough to provide any literary benefits; however, many of the grad students nevertheless found the exercise to be enjoyable and a helpful illustration of the critiques and questions facing use of A.I. in literary studies.

For Tate, the opportunity to train the bot using the most advanced model of ChatGPT available at the time provided a learning experience of a different sort. “It is able to make some of these kind of fine argumentative moves that really feel like something you would see in a graduate paper, which is kind of unnerving and as a grad student, it’s not something you want to see an A.I. is capable of,” he says. “I wouldn’t have thought A.I. was capable of that if I weren’t working with these advanced models.” 

So what is the future of The Lighthouse? When I followed up with Professor Quigley over e-mail, she notes future classroom uses of the bot would continue to be optional, with those opting out required to write a critical article about their decision to do so. She says this “has proven a very useful exercise as people give voice to fears about data centers, unemployment, plagiarism, etc.” Additionally, she and Tate would revise the bot to ensure its responses are framed in terms of questions, rather than answers, to better elicit students’ own analysis.

Asked about what she hoped students took away from the assignment, Professor Quigley says, “I hope that they thought long and hard about large language models, data sets, and how their approach to reading as students might differ from the way A.I. analyzes a text.”

Professor Quigley and Tate presented their work on The Lighthouse at the VITAL 2026 Teaching and Learning Strategies (TLS) Program, as well as at a faculty retreat. Professor Quigley’s forthcoming work includes an article on speculative fiction and AI for the Cambridge Companion to Literature and A.I, and a book project “on fan cultures and reading modernism which connects to the work of Impersonality and A.I.” She is currently on sabbatical.