Catching up with Lauren Shohet

Dr. Lauren Shohet has been crisscrossing the country lately presenting on Shakespeare, Milton, AI, and more, so we thought it would be a good time to catch up with her and discuss her teaching and scholarship.

To begin with, Dr. Shohet gave a lecture at the Huntington Library on January 31st on “(In)Visibility and Mediation: Milton’s Eve,” in which she also discussed vanitas paintings (more on this later). Then, in February, she attended the Renaissance Society of America conference in San Francisco, where she gave a talk as part of the book history discussion group. In addition, while in San Francisco, Dr. Shohet also presided over Milton Society events. Finally, in early April, she attended the Shakespeare Association Conference in Denver and presented on Shakespeare and AI.

Regarding mediation and Milton’s Eve, Dr. Shohet explained that she is in the middle of a long project that examines mediation in Paradise Lost--as she put it, “What it is for angels and for the Son of God, to be mediators between God the Father and humans” Dr. Shohet explained that she is interested in communication as a form of mediation, in how any kind of communication is a kind of translation, and how to “get an idea from one mind to another mind.”

“So, my claim,” said Dr. Shohet, “is that mediation is inherent to the creaturely condition, whether you're looking before or after a fall, and that the importance of mediation makes us think differently about Eve's association throughout the epic with mediation. So we're, I think, more accustomed to seeing the ways that Adam's more direct access to God and to knowledge and to language diminishes Eve—which I think is true. But I also think that the epic shows that mediation is essential for being a creature in relationship—also of the most exalted kinds of relationship with the divine, with the world, with other people—and that Eve's expertise in mediation makes her an admirable and useful resource.”

Regarding the Renaissance vanitas paintings, Dr. Shohet explained that she is interested in a passage in Paradise Lost in which Eve examines her reflection in a pool and notes that the pool “to me seemd another Skie.” Although traditionally viewed as an instance of Eve looking for Heaven in the wrong place, Dr. Shohet is more interested in the idea that “When she says that the pool, to me, seemed another sky, she's aware of the fact that she's perceiving, and that her perception might not be the only perception, or might not be complete.”

Dr. Shohet then noticed that the image of Eve looking into the pool recalls a 17th century tradition of vanitas paintings, in which ephemeral things (like hourglasses and bubbles, but also scientific instruments and books) are contrasted with the divine and eternal (usually a skull is also present to remind us of our own mortality). “So I started thinking,” noted Dr. Shohet, “about how Eve looking in the pool reminded me of a lot of these vanitas paintings, some of which are by women artists, many of which do feature women. Because the viewer who's worried about Eve maybe being vain or narcissistic, or not understanding quite where to look for heaven, detects a little skull in that pool, detects mortality in that gaze.”

During her next trip, to the Renaissance Society of America conference in San Francisco, Dr. Shohet spoke about Paradise Lost and network theory, which she finds to be “a really intriguing way to think about medium.” As Dr. Shohet explained it, “Instead of thinking about signs and signifieds, or thing and word, I'm interested in these reciprocal, distributed ways that meanings are created by unpredictable constellations of different entities. And those entities can be matter, they can be word, they can be interpretive protocols, they can be allusion.” With regard to Paradise Lost, Dr. Shohet discussed network theory in relation to figurative language, “as something that pulls together all kinds of different frames of reference, and then, what guidance does the reader get in thinking about how to make meaning out of it?”

Finally, at the Shakespeare Association Conference in Denver, Dr. Shohet presented on Shakespeare and AI in the context of Othello. Her presentation focused on the way search algorithms and large language models depend on our input to make meaning; as Dr. Shohet put it, “What AI does is predict the statistically likeliest next word.” Meanwhile, “In the play Othello, the vice figure Iago manages to completely mess with the protagonist Othello's sense of who he is, who other people are, how he knows what's true, and what meaning is, by just repeating little bits of his speech back to him… If you ever had someone just repeat the last word of every sentence you speak back to you with a question mark, it's really unsettling… So, my paper's about ways you can ask students to use the play as a usefully unfamiliar context where they can evaluate how search algorithms and social media feeds draw on what they think should come next to manipulate them. And then, on the other hand, how they can use their own experience of, say, social media feeds, to get deeper inside the operations of the play.”

At the end of our interview, I asked Dr. Shohet for her general thoughts about AI.

“I am worried about AI,” she said, “…AND I think it's a really great opportunity to denaturalize our fantasies that we had non-iterative ways of knowing things before. You know, knowledge is always constructed, and it's constructed iteratively through feedback you get on performing a hypothesis, and then you perform it again. Just watching AI do that lets us say, ‘oh, that's how gender's constructed.’ That's how, right? You experiment with something, you reiterate it, you try it again. And that, conversely, becoming critical consumers of how that works in one arena can carry over to the other, and we can just ask more questions, both with and without AI.”

Vanitas by Antonio de Pereda

VU Faculty at the MLA in Toronto

While everyone else was being festive, English professors were busy at the Modern Languages Association Conference in Toronto in January. Professor Kamran Javadizadeh, the chair of the executive committee for the MLA’s Poetry and Poetics Forum, chaired two panels on poetry. Professor Megan Quigley delivered a paper entitled “Modernist Impersonality in the Age of AI,” and was an official mentor for other faculty at the conference! Per Dr. Quigley, "It was cold but wonderful."

Dr. Wangmo Presents at Buddhist Studies Lecture Series

On Friday, December 5th, Dr. Tsering Wangmo presented virtually on "Chigdrel and the Politics of Sorrow" as part of The Khyentse Foundation Buddhist Studies Lecture Series, sponsored by Northwestern University.

According to the summary provided by Northwestern, Dr. Wangmo examined "a lesser-known chapter in Tibetan exile history through the story of the Group of Thirteen, a collective of Khampa chieftains and religious leaders who established settlements in India in the mid-1960s with a hope to protect their diverse regional and religious traditions. This decision set them apart from the majority Tibetan refugees who joined the settlements established by the Tibetan government. They were cast as being opponents to Tibetan unity."

This presentation relates to subjects covered more extensively in Dr. Wangmo's recently published book, The Politics of Sorrow. Focusing on the early years of Tibetan exile life in India and Nepal, this book marks a significant change in the fields of nationalism studies, refugee identity and Tibetan historiography.

“My intention was to center Tibetan experiences and to write about history and exile from the perspective of ordinary Tibetans,” Professor Wangmo explains—contrary to the traditional academic approach of treating displaced peoples as research subjects and instead emphasizing their role as co-creators of knowledge.

In support of the book, Professor Wangmo has been publishing widely and traveling extensively this past spring and summer as well. In May, she read at UC Santa Cruz in California. In June, she gave a talk at a conference titled “Succession in Times of Change in the Tibetan World,” which was jointly sponsored by the École française d’Extrême-Orient and Aarhus University as part of the Leadership and Reincarnation of the Dalai Lamas (LEAD) project. And, also in June, Professor Wangmo gave a talk in English to young Tibetans and another talk in Tibetan to local elders in Bir, a village located in the Himalayas in northern India.

Dr. Wangmo presenting over Zoom on Friday, December 5th

Taught by Literature Conference Presentations

Villanova English major Ben Marcoulier '27, English MA student Julia Reagan '26, and Dr. Crystal J. Lucky presented together Friday, November 7th at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers 2025 Conference in Old City, Philadelphia. The roundtable highlighted the public humanities project Taught by Literature (https://www.taughtbyliterature.org/), which works to honor the legacy of Black author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Taught by Literature was founded by Dr. Jean Lutes, Denise Burgher, and Dr. Brigitte Fielder to make Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s work digitally available and to support educators in teaching early Black women intellectuals in their classrooms, from kindergarten to college.

Bringing together undergraduate and graduate students and professors, Taught by Literature invites Black women educators to present their work for a broader audience, engages students in the archives and the process of textual recovery, and works with public school teachers to develop curricular resources. Representing each of these elements of Taught by Literature’s collaborative process, panelists focused on the impact of reading and teaching Black women’s writing and thought from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Dr. Lucky drew on her twenty-five years of advocacy as a diversity consultant at a wide range of secondary schools to promote the power of robust collaboration between university professors and K-12 school districts. Ben Marcoulier shared his summer research at the American Antiquarian Society historicizing Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s short fiction within the social context of its time. You can see the digital exhibition he developed on the short story “The Grievances of the Books” here. Finally, Julia Reagan presented an overview of her work developing secondary school curriculum on Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s WWI-era poem “I Sit and Sew” (available here) and leading a professional development session with School District of Philadelphia teachers.

Catching up with our Faculty: Kamran Javadizadeh Edition

This past summer, many of our faculty traveled and gave talks all around the world. We’ll be featuring a few of them in the coming weeks—this time, we’ll be focusing on Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, who traveled to the UK and spoke about poetry in Oxford and Cambridge.

Professor Javadizadeh was invited to give a lecture on June 5th at the American Literature Research Seminar in Oxford, and he presented on ‘The National Poetry Crisis.’ Dr. Javadizadeh drew from the conclusion to his forthcoming book for his talk, which centered on a poetry festival which had been organized at the Library of Congress in the fall of 1962, and which happened to coincide with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“After the first day of the conference,” explained Dr. Javadizadeh, “President Kennedy came on television and announced that there were these missiles in Cuba. The Poetry Festival was happening in the Library of Congress, which is right next to the capitol building itself.” The festival’s setting, and its status as “in some ways a kind of state-sponsored event,” led the participants to ask questions: “How does the kind of poetry that was being written in that era accommodate or take the measure of a kind of sudden existential public crisis that’s happening? Does poetry feel irrelevant in a moment like that, or does it feel newly relevant in surprising ways?”

Professor Javadizadeh went on to note that one of the poets who did not attend the conference was Sylvia Plath, who was living in England at the time, and was in the midst of “a great burst of creativity, where she’s writing one or two—sometimes three—amazing poems a day, and is leading into the last months of her life.” Dr. Javadizadeh then read one of Plath’s poems from this time, “Ariel,” as “a poem about the bomb, and about her own metabolizing of anxiety about apocalypse.”

Intriguingly, according to Dr. Javadizadeh, “While the poets at the festival find themselves feeling kind of inadequate to the moment, Plath actually is the one who is carrying the form.”

Dr. Javadizadeh noted that he enjoyed giving the lecture, and that it was “a great event—the room was full of graduate students, other faculty in English, and some interested members of the public.” Afterwards, there was time to help in a ‘viva,’ a dissertation defense for a doctoral student, and “to take in Oxford itself, to visit museums, to check out these pubs that have been there for eight hundred years or whatever.”

In addition, by coincidence, Dr. Javadizadeh was able to meet up with one of his own Villanova students at Oxford, who happened to be there studying abroad. Maria Therese Barry, ’26, noted that “It was such a surreal experience to see Dr. Javadizadeh while I was abroad in Oxford! It felt like worlds colliding that two Villanovans could come across each other in a completely different part of the world. I remember him telling me at the Pre-Registration Reception in the fall of 2024 that he would be speaking there after I shared my news of going abroad, but actually going to the event and hearing him speak is something I will always remember. It was a wonderful opportunity to hear firsthand about his academic research in general, which was especially exciting for me since I usually am not able to hear about my professors' research during classtime.”

Following the Oxford visit, on the 11th of June, Dr. Javadizadeh participated in a one-day symposium, organized by the professors Jess Cotton and Christian Gelder at Cambridge, on “The Aesthetics of the Clinic.” As articulated in the symposium’s initial call for papers, “This one-day symposium draws together scholars working at the intersection of literature, aesthetics and mental health to prompt a discussion on the relationship between psychiatric institutions and the production of literature.” As Dr. Javadizadeh explained, “This was a series of talks, mostly about literary form and its relationship to psychoanalysis, (as well as) art and its relationship to psychotherapeutic practices more broadly speaking. Jess had heard that I was coming to Oxford, and she was wondering if I could give the keynote lecture to the symposium, so I was really thrilled to get to do that.”

Dr. Javadizadeh’s talk was about the poet Robert Lowell and his experience of psychiatric institutionalization, “and the way the language of psychiatry, as Lowell experienced it in the 1950s, came to inform his sense of what autobiographical poetry might look like. My argument,” explained Javadizadeh, “is that, in writing about his inner life, he’s doing so in ways that he’s absorbed rom, among other sources, a kind of psychiatric treatment that he received.”

Thanks to Dr. Javadizadeh for sharing his recollections of his trip, and we look forward to hearing from more of our faculty about their travels!

Photo courtesy of Maria Therese Barry '26

 

Attend the Spanish Tragedy for Free

Calling all theater lovers...

Current Villanova students AND alumni/ae can attend The Spanish Tragedy symposium for free!

In academic year 2023-24, Villanova University faculty Dr. Chelsea Phillips (Theater) and Dr. Alice Dailey (English) launched a year-long interdisciplinary exploration of Thomas Kyd’s seminal Renaissance revenge play, The Spanish Tragedy (1582). This extended pedagogical, scholarly, and creative endeavor began with a combined undergraduate-graduate course taught in fall 2023 titled “Legacies of Revenge.” It culminates in a production of The Spanish Tragedy co-directed by Dailey and Phillips and staged in Villanova’s new John and Joan Mullen Center for the Performing Arts in April 2024, along with a coinciding scholarly symposium on April 19-20, 2024. Through both academic study and performance, The Spanish Tragedy Project seeks to foster engagement with the play as at once an historical and contemporary artifact and to deepen our understanding of the play’s place in revenge discourses, which continue to proliferate in popular culture.

The symposium includes a performance of the play!

For more information and to register, visit the project's website.

You can read more about the project elsewhere on the Villanova English blog.

Reading Books like Browsing Costco Aisles

Reading Books like Browsing Costco Aisles    

By Trinity Rogers, VU Class of 2024 and Research Fellow for the Taught by Literature Project

Three weeks ago, I had the opportunity to fly to Pasadena, California for the C19: The Society of Nineteenth Century Americanists Conference with the Taught by Literature Project, which is supported by the Idol Family Fellows Program of the McNulty Institute. Dr. Lutes and I flew to California together and met up with TBL's Co-Founders Dr. Brigitte Fielder and Denise Burgher. Since I joined the project in my sophomore year, I've only ever gotten to be with our whole team in-person once before, in 2022, so it’s always a pleasure to be able to see everyone. We attended different conference sessions on everything from "What's Next in Florida" to Dr. Fielder's very own "Methods for Unending History from William San Pascual Still’s Underground Rail Road (1872)" in which we were lucky enough to hear her sing! The conference, interestingly titled "The End", matched my own solemn emotions as I walked through different sessions. I've been a student fellow with TBL for over two years, and my first conference presentation ever was with them, and so was my last. Dr. Lutes, Denise, and I presented on a panel titled "Gen Z & C19: A Roundtable on Affirming Student Scholars" along with faculty from Haverford College, Queens College, The University of Delaware, University of Southern Indiana, and the University of Connecticut.   

I was surprised to see that I was the only student scholar on our panel, and a bit nervous that I would be the only representative of Gen Z. As it turns out, I was the only representative of Gen Z on the panel, but not in the room. I was pleasantly surprised to see Gen Z scholars in the room who gave head nods and quiet snaps of encouragement as I shared my points and answered questions. While I wouldn't ever want to be the only voice of a generation (entirely too much pressure), I did enjoy being able to share my own thoughts and ideas on how faculty can better support their Gen Z students in research and in and out of classrooms. I was just as excited to mix and mingle with other generations as well, both within the conference and on our expedition to San Diego to film the legendary Dr. Frances Smith Foster.   

After about a three-hour long drive from Pasadena to San Diego at around six a.m., Denise, Dr. Lutes, and I arrived at the home of Dr. Frances Smith Foster. We were greeted first by a banner on her front door that read "RICKY'S HOUSE" and featured a portrait of her small, older, white dog, Ricky. When Dr. Foster opened the door, we were greeted both by her and the infamous Ricky. We were able to set up to film in under thirty minutes, and filmed Dr. Smith Foster reading an excerpt written by the (legendary) nineteenth-century writer and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, with Ricky at her feet. Afterwards, Dr. Smith Foster answered some questions we had prepared, and she offered probably the best comparison I had heard in a while: "Approach anthologies, and all books really, as if you were at Costco. Try the samples, test it out first, but if it's not for you, then keep it pushing." This, I knew, was just one of the reasons she was incredibly legendary, and I felt honored to have met and spent time with her. I think everyone should approach books and experiences like Costco – take advantage of the opportunity to test it out before you buy it in bulk and commit to something you may not even enjoy.

Image Description: (from left to right) Dr. Amari Johnson, Myself, Dr. Frances Smith Foster, Caleb Lucky, and Darius Pickett. The filming team and myself with Dr. Frances Smith Foster. 

Image Description: (from left to right) Denise Burgher, Myself, Dr. Jean Lutes out to lunch after filming in San Diego. 

Image Description: Ricky sitting in on filming 

Image Description: (from left to right): Denise Burger, myself, Dr. Brigitte Fielder, and Dr. Jean Lutes on the last day of the C19 conference.