VU English Major Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

Marie-Helene Bertino, who graduated as a Villanova English major in 1999, was just granted a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. According to Yale News, fellows are "selected from a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants to be part of the 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows." They are selected based upon "prior career achievement and exceptional promise," and they are awarded a monetary stipend to pursue their work.

Marie-Helene also happens to be part of the 100th cohort of Guggenheim fellows, as the program was established one hundred years ago. Per the Fellowship's website, "For a century, Guggenheim Fellowships have helped artists, writers, scholars, and scientists at the highest levels of achievement pursue the work they were meant to do. Since our founding, we have supported over 19,000 Fellows."

Marie-Helene, currently the Ritvo-Slifka Writer in Residence and a lecturer in English at Yale, is the author of numerous books, including the short story collections Safe as Houses (2012) and Exit Zero (just released last month!), as well as the novels 2AM at the Cat's Pajamas (2014), Parakeet (2020), and Beautyland (2024). One of the stories from her debut collection Safe as Houses, "Great, Wondrous," was inspired by her time as a student at Villanova.

You can read more about Marie-Helene and her work at her website.

Photo retrieved from us.macmillan.com

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, The Politics of Sorrow, Wednesday, April 16

Join Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, in conversation with Lisa Sewell, about her new book, The Politics of Sorrow: A Story of Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile at Main Point Books on Wednesday, April 16 at 6:30 pm. For more information, see the event page at this link. 

 

Professor Tsering Wangmo Dhompa publishes The Politics of Sorrow

 Professor Tsering Wangmo Dhompa recently published, The Politics of Sorrow: A Story of Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile, with Columbia University Press. From the press:

The Politics of Sorrow tells the story of the Group of Thirteen, a collective of chieftains and lamas from the regions of Kham and Amdo, who sought to preserve Tibet’s cultural diversity in exile. They established settlements in India in the mid-1960s with the goal of protecting their regional and religious traditions, setting them apart from the majority of Tibetan refugees, who saw a common tradition as the basis for unifying the Tibetan people. Tsering Wangmo Dhompa traces these different visions for Tibetan governance and identity, juxtaposing the Tibetan government in exile’s external struggle for international recognition with its lesser-known internal struggle to command loyalty within the diaspora. She argues that although unity was necessary for democracy and independence, it also drew painful boundaries between those who belonged and those who didn’t. Drawing on insightful interviews with Tibetan elders and an exceptional archive of Tibetan exile texts, The Politics of Sorrow is a compelling narrative of a tumultuous time that reveals the complexities of Tibetan identities then and now.

For more about the book, see a recent interview with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa and Choekyi Lhamo on youtube.  

Taught by Literature, "Lifting Their Voices" Video Series

The Taught by Literature team has launched “Lifting Their Voices,” a series of short videos featuring contemporary Black women educators — including the English Department's own Dr. Crystal Lucky!  — reading aloud texts by Black women intellectuals of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. 

Villanova faculty, students (both undergraduate and graduate), and scholars from outside Villanova worked together on this public humanities project, funded in part by a grant from the College of Arts and Sciences and the McNulty Institute's Idol Family Fellows Program. In each video, a reader shares a short historical text and reflects on its personal significance and relevance today. Along with the video series, TBL has produced a set of free curricular materials for middle school and high school teachers to help them bring the rich history and literature of Black women into their classrooms. Villanova students created the curricular materials and are now leading efforts to share these resources with public school teachers, with the goal of making underrepresented voices more widely available in an array of educational spaces.

Bailey Quinn ('24) Named Poet Laureate of Middlebury, Connecticut

Bailey Quinn, who graduated from Villanova in 2024 with a B.A. in English and minors in Creative Writing, Irish Studies, and Gender & Women's Studies, recently became the first-ever Poet Laureate of Middlebury, Connecticut. You can read some of her published work here, here, and here. Congratulations, Bailey!!

VU English Major and MA Alumna Publishes Debut Novel

Olivia Martel '00, English, and MA '03, English, has just published her debut novel, How to Fly. 

From Olivia's website: 

"Twenty-nine-year-old Chelsea Pearl is thrown for a loop when her therapist asks her that one simple question. Always a helper, Chelsea isn’t one for self-reflection. She’s fooled herself into believing that planning social events for graduate students at elite Swank University and hanging with friends is enough. But is it? Even her two best friends—Raquel, a globe-trotting stunt woman, and Matteo, a former love interest—are worried about her lately...

"Chelsea’s most challenging student, Ivana Volkov, has issues of her own and isn’t into Chelsea’s so-called help. When Chelsea finally meets a great guy, her ability to keep playing by the rules is threatened. He’s off limits, and she runs the risk of losing her job. But if she doesn’t take a chance, she fears she’ll stay stuck and miss out on growing into who she is really meant to be.

"If things are ever going to take off for her, Chelsea needs to get honest, get over herself, and admit that life is way more fun when she’s not being so good. 

"How to Fly is a love letter to late-bloomers and anyone who feels like they are somehow bad at life-ing. It’s proof that it’s never too late to come of age and be more than just good."

You can learn more about the book and about Olivia at her website. Congratulations, Olivia! 

Professor Mary Mullen Publishes "Public Humanities, Then and Now"

 Professor Mary Mullen recently published "Public Humanities, Then and Now" in the recently launched journal, Public Humanities. The article draws on her research and builds on many discussions from her "Institutional Fictions" course. Here is the abstract:

"This essay considers how the nineteenth-century idea of the university as a refuge, constructed by thinkers like John Henry Newman, continues to shape contemporary universities and the field of public humanities. This vision of the university has lasting appeal for obvious reasons. In a culture predicated on speed, slowness is a political act. In a culture of hot takes, cold reasoning often provides necessary context, a wider view. And yet, as W. E. B. Du Bois warns, the “tenacious legend” of the Victorian university is dangerous because it separates the university from mass culture. Building on Du Bois’s thinking, the essay concludes that instead of seeking protection, enclosure, or recognition within university institutions, public humanities practitioners should seek refuge in the relationships of mutual responsibility they foster."

Just Published: Lauren Shohet on the Shield of Achilles

Dr. Lauren Shohet has just published an article in the journal Anglia titled "Touching the Shield of Achilles: Ekphrasis and/as Re-Mediation." Here is the abstract:

Homer’s treatment of the Matter of Troy illuminates the foundational impossibility of representation in ways that sponsor examination of the semiotic choices, the costs and benefits and tradeoffs, of different practices. Homer’s ekphrastic description of the shield of Achilles highlights a variety of available semiotic systems focused on different media of representation. This article explores Homeric ekphrasis in relation to later theories of media intersection, interaction, and transformation. Not only word, image, music, and dance, but also human perception as such, are subject to mediation.

You can view more information on the article here.

The shield's design as interpreted by Angelo Monticelli, ca. 1820, image courtesy of Wikipedia

Just Published: Professor Kamran Javadizadeh on Emily Dickinson's letters

Professor Kamran Javadizadeh has a new essay in The New Yorker--"When Emily Dickinson Mailed it In." Check out the full essay here.

Just published: Megan Quigley on Eliot

 Dr. Megan Quigley has just released a new co-edited volume, Eliot Now, available from Bloomsbury. 

VERT: Catherine Staples's Upcoming Reading and Book Launch

Villanova English Professor Catherine Staples will be launching her newest collection of poetry, Vert, at a special event taking place at Main Point Books on Tuesday, May 7th, at 7 p.m. She will be joined by fellow VU English professor and poet Tsering Wangmo Dhompa.

Per Main Point Books's website: "This event is free; registrations are requested via Eventbrite. Walk-ins are welcome as space permits. The event will be in the store's lower-level event space."

Here is some further information about the book and Professor Staples, borrowed from Main Point Book's event page:

About the Book

Catherine Staples grew up in Massachusetts and it’s there—in New England woods, meadows, and Cape Cod coasts—that the loss of her brother plays out as a quest across space and time: from a weathervane in Madison Square Park to a rusty pump in the Catskills, from words etched on nineteenth-century glass to the track of skates on the Charles River. Place is at the heart of the transformation of loss. So, too, are myth and the lives of New England’s early naturalists and Transcendentalists. Henry David Thoreau’s narrative echoes and enlarges hers. He, too, lost a brother and found his way by tuning ear, eye, and stride to “the living earth,” a new way of seeing things.

Vert is an old word in danger of being lost or misunderstood “In English forest law,” it’s “everything that grows and forms a green leaf, serving as cover for deer.” It’s suggestive of habitat, our imperiled earth, the small spinney of a brother’s memory.

About the Author

Catherine Staples is the author of The Rattling Window and Never a Note Forfeit. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Academy of American Poets, Kenyon Review, POETRY, The Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review and others. Awards include the Guy Owen, a McGovern Poetry Prize, and a Walter Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She teaches in the Honors and English programs at Villanova University.

You can register ahead of time, for free, for this reading at eventbrite.

Just Published: Joe Drury on Humans, Machines, and Automatons

Professor Joe Drury has a chapter coming out next week in the new Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English, edited by Nicole Aljoe, Sarah Eron, and Suvir Kaul. The title of Professor Drury's essay is “Humans, Machines, and Automatons.”

Here is the abstract of Professor Drury's chapter:

Lord Macartney’s assumptions about the Chinese taste for spectacular ornamental machinery during his unsuccessful 1793–1794 embassy reflected changing attitudes toward technology within Britain’s Industrial Enlightenment. Where machines had previously been valued for their aesthetic qualities, the labor required to produce them, and the luxurious consumption they excited, late eighteenth-century commentators such as Adam Smith increasingly emphasized their utility, the productive labor they saved, and the frugality required of the capitalists who introduced them. Responding to this shift, Frances Burney’s Evelina and William Beckford’s Vathek reimagined the longstanding British enthusiasm for ornamental mechanical exhibitions and toys as a barbarous form of “Oriental” fetishism.

To learn more and to read the chapter, you can visit the book's website.

Submit to Villanova’s Ellipsis Magazine

Villanova’s Ellipsis Literary Magazine is seeking submissions! Everyone is encouraged to submit: undergraduates and graduates as well as professors and staff within the Villanova community. We accept a wide host of traditional and non-traditional media from writing, poetry, and art to embroidery, text messages, memes, and anything else with aesthetic value, humor, personal meaning, or, perhaps, a touch of the bizarre. 

Simply submit your work to ellipsis@villlanova.edu, and we’ll consider it for this year’s edition. Our deadline for submissions is March 20th. 

Jean Lutes's New Co-Written Article (and the Nova Students Who Helped Make it Happen)

Professor Jean Lutes has co-authored an article that investigates a fascinating unpublished manuscript by turn-of-the-century African-American author Alice Dunbar-Nelson. The article appears in American Literary History, Volume 36, Issue 1, Summer 2024, and is titled"An Unpublished Tale about African American Poetry: Alice Dunbar-Nelson's 'The Grievances of the Books' (1897)."

The article acknowledges three Villanova students who helped to transcribe the unpublished manuscript that Professor Lutes and her co-writer, Professor Sandra A. Zagarell, wrote about: Current English major Jenine Hazlewood, '26; current master's student Matthew Villanueva, MA '24; and recent English major graduate Adrianna Ogando, '23. 

Here's an excerpt from the article that provides a flavor of Dunbar-Nelson's original piece:

In April 1897, an ambitious young author drafted a hallucinatory narrative that was never published. Its unnamed narrator falls asleep and dreams that real-life books and newspaper clippings by African American poets come alive. They call a convention, appoint her chair of a grievance committee, and task her with “listening to our complaints and suggesting remedies for our ills” (7). Meticulously written in graceful cursive with occasional strikeouts on 37 pages of unlined note paper, “The Grievances of the Books” is a funny, demanding, self-consciously literary mash-up that veers among reciting poetry, documenting authorial infighting, gently spoofing the formal political conventions organized to resist racial oppression, and lamenting the small readership for poems by African Americans. Taking readers on a breakneck tour of Black-authored poetry in the US, the narrative quotes from 13 published poems and refers to two others. Although it includes many poems published in the 1890s, “Grievances” stretches back to Phillis Wheatley’s publishing debut in 1773 and cites several antebellum verses. It ends, abruptly, with an indignant standoff between bound books and frayed clippings. As the narrator puts it in the manuscript’s final line, “the Grievances were never finished” (26).

You can read more from the article here.

Congratulations to Professor Lutes and to these students!

Professor Michael Dowdy's Tell Me About Your Bad Guys forthcoming spring 2025

Professor Michael Dowdy just signed a book contract with University of Nebraska Press. They will publish his collection of essays on fathering in anxious times, Tell Me About Your Bad Guys, in spring 2025. For more about this collection and his other essays, see his personal website.

Professor Jean Lutes Publishes "Feminisms"

Jean Lutes just published "Feminisms" in The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics.  A brief summary of the chapter:

"Twentieth-century feminist activism and thought spread with an urgency and ambition unseen before, as advocates for women achieved mass recognition, unsettled long-held convictions, and upset the status quo in ways unimaginable in previous centuries. No novel genre escaped these changes or failed to register them. Feminist politics reshaped the content, and sometimes the form, of the novel. Yet, dramatic as the expansion of US women’s opportunities was, progress was never unchallenged or universal. Feminist political gains inspired significant backlash: Patriarchy supporters fought back. Meanwhile, feminist organizing fractured from within. Before the twentieth century even began, women of color were explaining why they couldn’t be expected to identify only as women, as if all women belonged in a single category. Their message often went unheeded, particularly in the most widely circulated versions of feminist thought, which elevated white middle-class experiences over those of working-class, Indigenous, Black, Latina, and Asian women. Throughout the century, narratives by women of color pushed back against the white supremacist version of feminism. The American novel narrated multiple feminisms, triumphant and defeated, jubilant and anguished, razor-focused and utterly lost."