Faculty Appreciation on the Field: Dr. Michelle Filling-Brown named MVP

Dr. Michelle Filling-Brown was named MVP (Most Valuable Professor) during the Women's Soccer Faculty Appreciation Day game. Dr. Filling-Brown was nominated by Avrie Nelson (#6), who is in her English 1975 course along with her teammate, Tea Gambardella (#2). Both players were excited to recognize their English professor as one of the day's MVPs. This moment was extra special for Dr. Filling-Brown, who values following her student athletes' games. Nelson and Gambardella are currently undefeated as the Women's Soccer team heads into conference play this weekend. Dr. Filling-Brown notes that they are amazing student athletes. 

With excitement building for the upcoming weekend, this year's Faculty Appreciation Day was extra special for both the student athletes and the faculty members cheering them on. 

Dr. Filling-Brown is pictured below during the MVP recognition at halftime and with Allison Venella, Senior Associate Athletic Director of Student Athlete Development:

The Featured MVPs (Most Valuable Professors)

"V's Up!"

With Allison Venella

- Juliana Catania MA '28

Spring 2027 Sneak Peek for First-Year Students

Each year we like to highlight English courses we feel would be a good fit for interested first-year students. Here is a partial list of upcoming spring courses we'd encourage first-year students to try!

SPRING 2027 UPPER-LEVEL ENGLISH COURSES

First year students welcome!

 

Note: There are no pre-requisites for any of these courses

 and course numbers don’t indicate difficulty

 

2003 Intro to Creative Writing MW 4:45-6:00, Cathy Staples

Designed for students who wish to experiment with composing several kinds of creative writing: short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. 

 

2009 Writing the Traditional Novel TR 11:30-12:45, Alan Drew

A creative writing workshop course designed for students eager to leap into the complex process of writing a novella or short novel. Students will close-read short novels to analyze elements of craft and workshop sections of their own novel in-progress.

 

2013 Writing of Memoir TR 2:30-3:45, Tsering Wangmo

Memoir is an opportunity to understand life. This writing workshop provides students with practical skills in reading and writing about the events, memories, places that inform their lives.

 

2022 Writing through Conflict TR 1:00-2:15, Alan Drew

In this creative writing workshop, you will study contemporary Irish/Northern Irish writers while working on your own creative pieces. Over semester break, you will travel to Belfast for a week of seminars and creative writing workshops at the Seamus Heaney Centre.

 

2023 Journalism MWF 12:50-1:40, Kate Szumanski

Introduces students to key techniques of news gathering and news writing. We will also explore the principles and rules that guide the writing of news pieces, editorials, and features.

 

2024 Scriptwriting MW 3:20-4:35, Michelle Filling-Brown

In this creative writing course, students will study drama and techniques that lead to developing characters, crafting stories, and writing scenes. In the collaborative scriptwriting workshop, students will work as authors, editors, and critics, ultimately each crafting a one-act play.

 

2302 Literature of the Apocalypse TR 1:00-2:15, Heather Hicks

One of the oldest forms of narrative, apocalyptic literature is more popular - and powerful - than ever. Starting with Revelation, this course traces this tradition through fascinating poems, stories, novellas, novels and films to the present day.

 

2991 English Majors in the Workplace M 1:55-3:10 for first 10 weeks of the semester, Michelle Filling-Brown

Through reflection, conversation, and practical exploration, students will gain a clearer understanding of the many professional and academic pathways open to English majors, from publishing, education, and law to nonprofit work, business, media, and graduate study. Students will build essential career skills, including crafting polished résumés, writing compelling cover letters, developing effective interviewing strategies, and networking with Villanova alumni.

 

2994 Reading and Community T 5:30-6:45 for first 10 weeks of the semester, Mary Mullen

Studying the kind of reading that takes place outside of the classroom in book groups and community reads, this course practices reading in community while studying hot new books selected by students in the course. Please note: this is a one-credit course.

 

3181 Irish Epics, Visions & Hauntings TR 8:30-9:45, Joseph Lennon

A study of Irish literature from its origins in the world of Celtic mythology, epic and saga through the development of Anglo-Irish literature. 

  

3250 Shakespeare TR 11:30-12:45, Lauren Shohet

This course studies the plays and/or poems of Shakespeare. It may be focused on a particular genre of Shakespeare's work, a period in his career, or a topic. The course seeks to develop students' appreciation of Shakespeare's artistry and relevance.

 

3507 Strange Cases: Imagining Health & Illness TR 1:00-2:15, Joseph Drury

Explore literary responses to pivotal developments in medical science and practice from the eighteenth century to the present. Study works that engage with the new ideas about illness, treatment, and disability that arose alongside changing understandings of the human body.

4000 American Literary Tradition I  TR 1:00-2:15, Kimberly Takahata

What makes literature “American?” Who gets to decide? This course examines how literary traditions developed and changed in nineteenth-century America, with a particular focus on race, citizenship, colonialism, and history-making.

 

4618 Harlem Renaissance TR 11:30-12:45, Crystal Lucky

F. Scott Fitzgerald called the years between the wars the “Jazz Age.” Folks uptown recognized that a Renaissance was happening in Harlem. Students will study major works by African Americans written during the 1920s and 1930s.

 

4646 Race and Ethnicity: American Novel MW 3:20-4:35, Yumi Lee

This course examines a fascinating range of contemporary US literary texts to explore the ways that gender and sexuality intersect with race, class and other categories of identity to form our experiences of selfhood, community, national belonging, and power.

 

4652 Letters, Texts, & Twitter MWF 10:40-11:30, Kamran Javadizadeh

How does writing bring together distant lovers, friends, family? We'll read letters, the digital forms (social media, instant messaging) that have replaced them, and their representation in novels, poems, and essays to explore how intimacy forms across distance.

 

4691 Work & Play in Contemporary Literature TR 10:00-11:15, Michael Dowdy

This class explores representations of work and play in contemporary cultural texts from the Americas. We will consider how stories, poems, films, and songs depict the struggles and joys of various jobs: “dirty” (i.e., coal mining), “unskilled” (i.e., crop picking), “professional” (i.e., sports), and more. In these innovative texts, oppositions between work and play break down and creative forms of solidarity and community emerge.

 

4702 Authors On & Off the Page TR 4:00-5:15, Adrienne Perry & Tsering Wangmo

Do you love to write? Dream of visiting with authors to discuss their work and the publishing world? This course combines creative writing workshops with literary analysis and the chance to hob-nob with prestigious authors during the Villanova Literary Festival.

You can view a complete sneak peek of spring courses on our courses page.

 

MVP (Most Valuable Professor) Goes to Cathy Velez

Cathy Velez, a beloved English adjunct faculty member, was honored at a recent Villanova Women's Soccer game for Faculty Appreciation Day. This recognition happened during halftime where she was titled one of the game's inaugural MVPs... Most Valuable Professors. Professor Velez, who has taught English 1975 for many years, was touched by the kind gesture and celebration. Attached below is a photo of Professor Velez at the game. Go Nova, Go Cats! 

- Juliana Catania MA '28

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.