PAID STUDENT RESEARCH FELLOW POSITION for SPRING 2022

PAID STUDENT RESEARCH FELLOW POSITION for SPRING 2022 

DESCRIPTION

Undergraduate student sought to join a collaborative, public-facing humanities initiative focused on an understudied Black woman writer, racial justice education, and literary recovery.

 

EXPECTED TIME COMMITMENT

8-10 hours a week

COMPENSATION TBA, pending grant approval, expected in early January 2022

 

QUALIFICATIONS

The successful applicant will be intellectually curious, detail-oriented, self-motivated, committed to racial justice, interested in women’s literature and history, and an excellent writer, reader, and communicator. Because this is a long-term project with the possibility of extending the work beyond the Spring 2022 term, preference will be given to first-years and sophomores, although juniors and seniors will also be considered.

HOW TO APPLY

Submit a letter of interest and a resume to Dr. Jean Lutes at jean.lutes@villanova.edu by Jan. 5, 2022.

DETAILS

Dr. Jean Lutes (English department) is looking for a second student to join a team of scholars working on “The ’Steenth Street Project: Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Stories of Black Childhood.” This project aims to recover a lost short story collection written in the 1890s by Black author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson. 

In deference to Dunbar-Nelson’s long career as an educator and advocate for racial justice, the project goal is to produce an open-access digital edition of the story collection, along with curriculum resources and to make our work scalable, relevant, and adaptable to multiple K-12 school systems. 

 

Dr. Lutes and her two collaborators – Dr. Brigitte Fielder (University of Wisconsin) and Ms. Denise Burgher (University of Delaware) – have prioritized collaborating with the Black-majority school district of Philadelphia to collectively produce a text and its accompanying resources, which will bring Dunbar Nelson’s work directly to the people who inspired and shaped the Annals of Steenth street, American children. 

The ’Steenth Street stories feature children in a poor urban neighborhood and the middle-class reformers who show up to help -- and who often misunderstand and misstep. The collection is based on Dunbar-Nelson’s work teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in the 1890s in New York City. 

 

The Student Research Fellow hired in Spring 2022 will help to document the publication history of the 12 stories in the collection (several were published both independently, both during Dunbar-Nelson’s lifetime and after), to compare story versions to establish a definitive text, to conduct original archival work for the introduction to the edition, and to identify historical documents to be published as appendices to draw the reader into the world of the author and the text.

Just Published! Dr. Jean Lutes on Alice Dunbar-Nelson's "His Heart's Desire"

Congratulations to Dr. Jean Lutes, whose article, "A Queer Tale of Two Endings: Alice Dunbar-Nelson and 'His Heart's Desire,'" was just published in J19, a scholarly journal for nineteenth-century Americanists.

Combining archival research with childhood and Queer studies, Dr. Lutes's essay analyzes multiple versions of "His Heart's Desire," an extraordinary but little-known short story by Alice Dunbar-Nelson about a racially unmarked boy who wants a blonde, blue-eyed doll. While the story was originally meant to be part of a never-finished story collection, it has seen print separately in two different versions, one published during Dunbar-Nelson's lifetime and one posthumously. In this essay, Dr. Lutes argue that the story's two published versions, when read together, make a devastating case for the damage wrought by global imperialism and its fetishizing of white femininity. Dr. Lutes's comparative textual study also indicates Dunbar-Nelson may have engaged in savvy self-censorship that ultimately contributed to her relative obscurity in the current day, even among scholars of African American studies and Queer studies.

Be sure to check out Dr. Lutes's acknowledgments, which names the team of six students, undergraduate and graduate, who helped her with this project: Gia Beaton, Michael DeAngelo, John Flynn, Lucy Mileto, Elena Patton, and Jackie Solomon.

English Faculty and Students Present at Masculinities Symposium

Last month, Dr. Jean Lutes and Dr. Travis Foster both spoke at the "Masculinities" symposium at the Inn at Villanova. Dr. Lutes presented on the African American feminist writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson, while Dr. Foster spoke about his new research on the figure of the "effeminate man" in nineteenth-century American literature. Also speaking at the event were senior English major Amanda Gerstenfeld ('20), junior Political Science major Danielle Burns, both of whom assisted Dr. Lutes with her research on Dunbar-Nelson, and Villanova English graduate student Jesse Schwartz.

Pictured above (from left to right): MaryLu Hill, Melissa Sturges, and Jesse Schwartz

Dr. Jean Lutes

Amanda Gerstenfeld and Danielle Burns

Dr. Travis Foster

Villanova Match Research Program with Dr. Megan Quigley

The new Villanova Match Program for Freshmen includes a project with English faculty member, Dr. Megan Quigley.  The Villanova Match Research program provides opportunities for motivated freshmen to pursue undergraduate research in the Spring 2014 semester.  Freshmen applicants do not need substantial experience as they will serve as research assistants to faculty mentors. If selected for the Match program, freshmen students will conduct research for 10 hours per week for 10 weeks for which they will receive a $1000 stipend for the Spring 2014 semester.  Current English majors might want to encourage Freshmen they know to apply for the program.

Dr. Quigley's project description:  Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Language, and Form
Having worked in book publishing before my academic career, I believe this research project, which combines scholarly research with learning the tricks of the trade of book publishing, could provide a unique opportunity for a liberal arts student.

Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Language, and Form is a book manuscript that investigates the intertwined history of philosophy and literature in the modern British novel.  The final book manuscript is due to the editor at Cambridge University Press on April 15, 2014, though substantial publishing work will continue after that date.  The project argues that we would better understand modernist fiction if we appreciated its connections to early twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy.  Building on recent interest in the connections among analytic philosophy, pragmatism, and modernist literature, I offer new readings of novels by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce that link aesthetic and philosophical vagueness. Overall, I maintain that debates about vagueness instigated the transition in the form and language of the modernist novel. The question of vagueness—how precise language can possibly be and how it can match up with our experience of the world—is still a thriving topic in philosophy, computer science, and linguistics.  I argue that we should read vagueness—whether it be indefinability, fuzziness, or the reconceptualization of literary realism—not as an aesthetic deficiency but as a defining attribute of much modernist fiction.

This research position would help a freshman student to learn the skills necessary for researching, editing, proofreading and, finally, publishing an interdisciplinary liberal arts book.  Specifically the tasks would include:
Scholarly:
--Tracking down literary and philosophical texts for citations, including complex primary source treasure hunting.
--Helping with work on permissions (contacting researching libraries, etc.).
--Proofreading and learning to use the Chicago Manual of Style.
Professional:
--Learning about the publishing business: author bios, blurbs, industry standards.
--Researching competitive works on philosophy and literature.
--Drafting book jacket copy.

Dr. Megan Quigley in her office

To apply for the Villanova Match program, submit a resume and cover letter directly to Dr. Quigley (megan.m.quigley@villanova.edu).  Please include in your one-page resume your first semester GPA, high school GPA, and SAT/ACT scores in addition to your academic, professional, and relevant experiences and skills.  Please also include in your one-page cover letter your motivations and qualifications for this research assistantship.  Dr. Quigley will review your application materials (resume and cover letter) and will contact you to interview for the position in early February.