On Thursday, May 2 the English department gathered to celebrate 75 years of the English major as well as our graduating seniors. Below are some pictures from the party as well as a list of the books faculty gave graduating seniors and their reasoning. We are so proud of you all!
Faculty Member: Megan Quigley
Emily Attisano
Book: Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These
Reasoning:
Emily, I chose to give you Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These because it is quiet and fierce – just like you. I have been blessed to have you as a student more than once, and in every class you have taught me something new. Given your keen interest in social justice and the law and your appreciation for emotional complexity, I think you will enjoy this enchanting, deeply feminist novella, which invites readers into the heart of a community that is failing to protect its most vulnerable members. I hope it will inspire you to keep asking hard questions, to keep resisting too-easy answers, and most of all, to keep writing.
Faculty Member: Jean Lutes
Monroe Byer
Book: Preti Taneja, We That Are Young
Reasoning: Monroe, I’ve chosen Taneja’s We That Are Young because it’s brilliant, devastating, complex, intense, magical, and Shakespearean, much like you. The novel is a recent adaptation of King Lear set in contemporary India, and in it you will encounter the kind of rich characterological and moral ambiguity that attracts you to early modern drama. It has been my great fortune to collaborate with you on outstanding writing, thinking, and acting in this period we are both invested in. I hope you will read this novel in the spirit of ongoing collaboration with the ideas I’ve had the privilege to share with you during your time at Villanova. You make early modern drama seem really cool.
Faculty Member: Alice Dailey
Grant Carey
Book: Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars
Reasoning: Grant, in a brilliant presentation in class, you helped our senior seminar gain a new understanding of the spectacular, devastating ending of Tommy Orange’s first novel, There There – you argued that the ending of the novel shouldn’t overshadow what we take away from the different characters’ longer journeys. Wandering Stars is a continuation – not exactly a sequel or a prequel – of the story that There There told. As a work that marks both the persistence of memory and the beauty of new beginnings, it seems like a fitting book to give you to celebrate your graduation.
Faculty Member: Yumi Lee
Hannah de Melo
Book: bell hooks, All About Love
Reasoning: Hannah, witnessing your smart intersectional feminist thought in action is inspiring. For this reason I’m giving you bell hooks, All About Love–a book that I frequently turn to when I need inspiration. hooks’ definition of love articulates the challenges we face and offers a rigorous ethics of love to address these challenges. I hope it will move both your powerful mind and your generous heart.
Faculty Member: Mary Mullen
Meaghan Falconer
Book: M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me
Reasoning: Meg, one of the highlights of this year has been having you as a student and getting to know your work as a writer and editor. When I learned, through your writing and our conversations, how much food matters to you, and when I became accustomed to reading the artful, beautifully fashioned sentences in your prose, I immediately thought of M.F.K. Fisher as your kindred spirit. Though Fisher wrote and published The Gastronomical Me over seventy years ago, her writing continues to read as fresh and contemporary. It’s not simply that she has one of finest prose styles readers may encounter, it’s that she writes about those things we humans would die without: food, love, community and togetherness, and a sense of the way eating tethers us to life and the material world. The fact that she wrote about such things in the midst of war and, at times, great personal loss, is equally instructive. I hope you will relish this essay collection as much as I have. And I hope that in Fisher you will find that elegant, generous, and brilliant fellow traveler many readers have come to count as both muse and friend.
Faculty Member: Adrienne Perry
Caitlyn Foley
Book: The Flight of Gemma Hardy
Reasoning: Even though I have never had you in class, I was encouraged by my colleague, Adrienne Perry, to give you this book! She said you had the same courage, determination and intellect as Gemma in this engaging novel, and you would be charmed by this character. Enjoy!
Faculty Member: Karyn Hollis
Riley Marie Hawkins
Book: The Power by Naomi Alderman
Reasoning: Riley, I know some of your favorite books include The Little Prince, The Book Thief, and perhaps most importantly, The Hunger Games. All three books are tough acts to follow, but I’ve chosen for you a book that I think combines elements of all three. Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power includes magic, political commentary, and, as the title suggests, a number of very powerful female protagonists. You spoke eloquently in our class this semester about why the powerful protagonist of The Hunger Games has meant so much to female readers of your generation, and your first paper offered a fascinating analysis of what happens when women’s powerful influence is removed from a future world. For those reasons, I’m hoping Alderman’s book might join your pantheon of favorites.
Faculty Member: Heather Hicks
Allison Hilliard
Book: Toni Morrison, Paradise
Reasoning: Allison, I picked Paradise for you, not only because it is an intriguing exploration of language, race, and intergenerational connections. I chose it also because you are moving from the study of literature to that of theology. At the heart of the novel is the question of interpretation–key to the theological project. Two of the characters, Rev. Pulliam and Rev. Misner, have very different perspectives on scripture and the role of God in the lives of individuals and communities. Morrison offers models of different ways of thinking, believing, and being in community with one another but very few answers. And isn’t that the work of both literature and theology, to offer ways of thinking, believing, and being without prescription? I hope you enjoy this complicated novel of families, histories, and ever-developing communities. And I hope it helps you think more deeply about the people you will encounter along the way.
Faculty Member: Crystal J. Lucky
Kylie Horan
Book: Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
Reasoning: Although I selected this novel for you, Kylie, I have a strong suspicion you may have already read it–because it’s another King Lear adaptation but also because you have the depth and wisdom of someone who has read everything. You may notice a strategy emerging here: I’ve given both you and Monroe Lear adaptations. Quite possibly I am hoping you’ll read them, then swap, and then have a discussion seminar together, twins separated at birth reunited again over Shakespearean tragedy. Quite possibly I am cooking up my fantasy book group, in which I assemble my most astute students of early modern drama, assign gorgeous material for them to read, and set them in conversation with each other while I eavesdrop to learn new things about material I’ve taught many times over. Quite possibly I am just wishing you could keep being my student so that I could keep being yours.
Faculty Member: Alice Dailey
Rachel Jordan
Book: Pat Barker, Regeneration
Reasoning: As soon as I read your insightful and sensitive analysis of war-related trauma in Walt Whitman’s “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Grey and Dim,” Rachel, I thought of recommending this novel to you. Like you, Pat Barker cares a great deal about what war does to the bodies it maims and kills as well as to the less visible traumas it leaves in psyches and minds. And, like you, Barker, in her novel, turns to poets and poetry as she thinks through these questions.
Faculty Member: Travis Foster
Erin Kruh
Book: Brit Bennett, The Mothers
Reasoning: Erin, your final project for our American Literature class was a thoughtful and powerful lesson focusing on the role of multi-voiced authorship, community, and American history. This book–while not authored by multiple people–shifts between multiple voices and perspectives, including the communal collective voice of “the Mothers” from the title. It follows three characters as they grow up together, exploring how we shape and navigate our own personal histories. I can’t say too much without giving it away, but I hope that you enjoy!
Faculty Member: Kimberly Takahata
Steve Makino
Book: Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Reasoning: Steve, I was struck when I read your first paper for my apocalyptic literature course that you are a gifted writer of clear, direct prose. I also know you are a fan of apocalyptic literature broadly. For these reasons, I’ve chosen for you Philip K. Dick’s classic post-apocalyptic novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Philip K. Dick was writing at the height of his literary powers in this novel, which takes on eerily contemporary questions about species extinction and what it means to be human. Given your talents as a stylish writer, I’m hopeful you will enjoy immersing yourself in the future world he conjures.
Faculty Member: Heather Hicks
Alex Marino
Book: Anne Carson / Sappho, If Not, Winter
Reasoning: Alex, you impressed me from the day we met (in ACS! Over Zoom! In a pandemic!) as a uniquely thoughtful student, someone who took very seriously the intellectual journey college could offer. In the classes we’ve had together since then, I’ve been privileged to see where that journey has led you: you’re an incredibly attentive reader of poetry, a creative thinker, and a serious reader. For all of these reasons—and because I know how thoughtful you are about questions of gender and sexuality—I’ve chosen the poet and scholar Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho, If Not, Winter. This is a book I hope you’ll keep close and work through and puzzle over for many years to come. It’s a beautiful record of a sustained engagement with an archive that contains many gaps—just as life inevitably does—and that makes beauty out of what remains.
Faculty Member: Kamran Javadizadeh
Andrew Moerschel
Book: Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Reasoning: Andrew, I cherished the earnest curiosity, searching questions, and joy in reading that you brought to my classroom. I chose to give you Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay mostly because I think you will have such a grand time reading it. An astonishing novel about the adventures of two boy geniuses set in New York City during the Golden Age of comic books, Kavalier and Clay is bold, funny, and amazingly inventive in its use of language. I trust that this book will be a fine companion to you as you embark on your own next set of adventures, and I know that like the heroes of this novel, you will bring your own great heart with you everywhere you go.
Faculty Member: Jean Lutes
Jo Mastrodomenico
Book: George Eliot, Middlemarch
Reasoning: Jo, I so enjoyed your smart thinking on both Victorian literature and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, not to mention your incredible organization and planning in preparation for advising appointments. I give you George Eliot’s Middlemarch—one of my favorite works of Victorian literature. It features an interlude in Italy and a failed attempt to organize information into a key to all mythologies. My hunch is that you could offer some pointers and succeed where Casaubon fails.
Faculty Member: Mary Mullen
Catherine Messier
Book: Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
Reasoning: This gift is a bit perverse for you, Catherine, as a Falvey Scholar who has just successfully waged a war against masculinist criticism in your thesis examining the appropriation of women’s words in the works of T. S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I know you are headed off to the UK this summer and could use a bit of a laugh, and this classic campus novel will either make you laugh or throw it across the room in feminist fury. Enjoy!
Faculty Member: Megan Quigley
Megan Moore
Book: Madeline Miller, Circe
Reasoning: As I listened to you share thoughtful feminist interpretations of Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley Peters, and Emily Dickinson during class, and as I read your incisive analysis of how Dickinson exposes and undercuts patriarchy in “She rose to his Requirement,” Megan, I found myself wondering if you’d read this feminist minor character adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Like you, Madeline Miller wants to reorient our attention to women’s imagination, creativity, and writing as an invaluable resource for better understanding why things are the way they are – and what pathways we might take to change them for the better.
Faculty Member: Travis Foster
Skylar Musick
Book: Ali Smith, Autumn
Reasoning: Skylar: this novel intertwines points of view to create a vivid, nuanced, immersive picture of what it is to live in the world. I thought of it for you because you show equal care for precision and reflectiveness. There’s an elegiac uplift to this text that also made me think of you–connection and beauty carrying people along and keeping them above the surface, however dangerous the tumult below. If you like it, it’s part of a seasonal quartet.
Faculty Member: Lauren Shohet
Julia O'Keefe
Book: Percival Everett, Erasure
Reasoning: Julia, Because you are a gifted writer – and because I know you have read and enjoyed Toni Morrison’s Beloved – I chose to give you Erasure by Percival Everett. This brilliant satire explores the relationship between race and writing, assumptions about authorship, and especially the difficulty of being a Black American writer. Last year, Erasure was made into an Academy Award winning film, American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright. I know this is not a crowd that opts to watch movies instead of reading books, but in this case, you might consider doing both – as long as you read the book first.
Faculty Member: Jean Lutes
Bailey Quinn
Book: Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through
Reasoning: Bailey, what a pleasure it has always been to have you in class! You bring vitality and vigor to any intellectual community—you help to make learning and conversation a joyful enterprise, even when the topics at hand are weighty. I’ll always remember how you galvanized our ACS seminar with the comments that you would stitch together out of our discussion. The book I’ve chosen for you, Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through, is a beautiful and moving novel about friendship and conversation. It narrates a difficult passage of life and illness with humor and without sentimentality—and it holds its attention all the while. You’re one of the most inventive and independent thinkers I’ve ever had the pleasure to teach, and I hope this novel will be a good companion to you in whatever comes next.
Faculty Member: Kamran Javadizadeh
Charlotte Ralston
Book: Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
Reasoning: Charlotte, it was your thoughtful analysis in our Classics course of how Penelope manages to successfully navigate the world of the Odyssey that made me think that Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad would speak to you. In this short novel, Penelope rather than Odysseus gets to be the main storyteller, and from her demystifying point of view, characters like Odysseus and Telemachus aren’t the heroic figures they are in Homer. Neither are other men and women, including Penelope—she doesn’t exempt herself from her truth-telling, and she acknowledges her role in the unjust hanging of her 12 maids at the end of the poem. In this book, those maids receive the attention that they lack in Homer, and Atwood enables them to have their own voices as well. They haunt the book, as they’ve haunted Atwood, and I hope the story will stay with you as well.
Faculty Member: Evan
Rachel Rhee
Book: E.J.Koh, The Magical Language of Others
Reasoning: Rachel, in the very first piece you wrote for the memoir class you described the collection of snowglobes on your bedroom shelf and how you were not certain why or how you began collecting them. You mentioned you didn’t love the way they looked in your room but felt they were linked to your love for literature, to your experience of having family members scattered across multiple countries, and to the act of translating between languages. I was struck by how often you asked the questions: who is speaking for whom, whose voices are accounted for in your own creative and critical writings. I also recall you saying that languages have their histories. I hope you will find pleasure in E.J. Koh’s memoir, The Magical Language of Others. A poet and a prose writer, like you, Koh examines family separation, inter-generational history, and the ways people attempt to bridge the many distances between them. The memoir is also about her relationship with language: translating her mother’s letters to her from Korean to English, learning Japanese, and writing poetry.
Faculty Member: Tsering Wangmo
Megan Rigione
Book: Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
Reasoning: Megan, I’ve changed my mind many times about what book would be most appropriate to give you and then realized that a book about change and about the possibilities of transformations and transitions seemed perfect as you move on to a totally new career path. The way that Maggie Nelson uses theory to write this memoir (a genre called autotheory) seemed to echo the way you’ve come to think of Foucault’s biopower in order to understand gender and the power of the state. The fact that you came to need Foucault in the face of examining the origins of toxic masculinity and that theory helped you to make sense of your experience nicely mirrors Nelson’s musings on the reading that shapes her intellectual and personal journey. I know you’ll keep reading as you move on to NYC and I can’t wait to hear what you learn.
Faculty Member: Megan Quigley
Abby Thompson
Book: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Abby, in our senior seminar, every week, you made insightful observations and asked important questions about the cultural and political topics our books explored, from the Hawks Nest mining disaster in West Virginia documented in Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead, to the endless war in Korea, the focus of Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony. But it seemed to me that you were especially concerned – and dismayed – about the human and environmental costs of human-caused climate disaster explored in Rebecca Dunham’s Cold Pastoral, which you wrote about with passion and great insight. I thought you might really enjoy Robin Wall Kimmerer’s celebrated book of essays, Braiding Sweetgrass. A botanist and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer generously shares both a scientific and indigenous perspective on the relationship between the human and the more than human world, embracing the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. I hope this book will give you hope and contribute to the already serious thought you have given to this subject.
Faculty Member: Lisa Sewell
Elizabeth Weiss
Book: Lauren Groff, Matrix
Reasoning: Elizabeth, this speculative historical novel postulates a backstory for the medieval writer Marie de France. Its energetic, imaginative dive into the unknowable made me think of your questions in the Foundations of Literature in English class we did together a few years ago. Groff thinks through vectors of gender and class privilege in ways that draw out both conflict and beauty, with characters who alternately challenge tradition and find beauty in it. I hope it draws you in as it did me.
Faculty Member: Lauren Shohet
