Department of English
On the Books
Undergraduate Alumni Newsletter
Letter from the Chair

Welcome to the second annual newsletter for English majors, minors and alumni! It’s meant to keep you in touch with what’s happening with current students and alumni, individual faculty members, and the department as a whole.

The English Department is celebrating the 75th anniversary of the English major at Villanova throughout this academic year. This exciting watershed coincides with the department recently receiving a very generous gift from an anonymous donor. The gift will go toward enriching the undergraduate education of English majors through special programming, scholarship opportunities, career training and more.

This year’s newsletter introduces you to the exciting work Villanova English Professor Jean Lutes, PhD, is doing in collaboration with other scholars and undergraduates at Villanova to share the work of African-American author Alice Dunbar-Nelson. We’re also pleased to highlight the innovation of Professor Alice Dailey, PhD, English, and Associate Professor Chelsea Phillips, MFA, PhD, Theatre and Studio Art. They are co-teaching an Early Modern drama course this fall and then bringing that material to life this spring in a major production of The Spanish Tragedy, which I hope many of you will attend. As you’ll see below, the newsletter also includes other recent achievements by students, faculty and alumni!

I hope you enjoy this newsletter, and please stay in touch with us. Let us know what you’re up to, and of course contact me or Mike Malloy if you have any items for the next edition of this newsletter!

Best,
Heather Hicks, PhD
Professor and Chair of English
Get Involved
English Major 75th Anniversary Celebrations

Alumni are encouraged to attend all our anniversary Literary Festival readings (the full roster of writers can be found on our website), but we’d like to extend a special invitation to view former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s reading on March 12, 2024. The reading will begin at 7 p.m. Alumni are also invited to a reception preceding the reading, to be held in the President’s Lounge from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. An evite is forthcoming.

In addition, alumni are encouraged to attend a showing of The Spanish Tragedy from April 10-21!
Faculty News
Welcome to Michael Dowdy
Our newest faculty member is Professor Michael Dowdy, PhD, who teaches Latinx literature (among other things). To learn more about Dr. Dowdy and his work, check out this interview conducted by Theo Campbell ’23 MA.
Overlooked No Longer
By Megan Walsh-Boyle for Villanova Magazine

A prolific and thought-provoking author, activist and educator, Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935) influenced some of the most celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance—and yet, her works don’t appear on many K–12 school reading lists.

Jean Lutes, PhD, is working with a dedicated group of scholars to change that. “Dunbar-Nelson is part of a long tradition of Black activists and intellectuals who have been advocating for racial justice for generations,” says Dr. Lutes, the Luckow Family Endowed Chair in English Literature and professor of English.
GRASP Award for Spanish Tragedy

Professors Alice Dailey, PhD, English, and Chelsea Phillips, MFA, PhD, Theater and Studio Art, won a $15,000 grant to support a year-long exploration of The Spanish Tragedy, a rarely staged but highly influential sixteenth century drama. Dr. Dailey and Dr. Phillips will team-teach two courses, one in the fall which will study the text and prepare for a production, and one in the spring which will stage the play. The grant will enable Dr. Dailey and Dr. Phillips to support a guest artist-in-residence next year, as well as to archive the work generated by the project.

As the play that introduced revenge as a tragic motive to the Renaissance stage, The Spanish Tragedy has had an enormous influence on the representation of revenge in the Anglophone tradition, an influence that stretches from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1600) to contemporary comic books and television epics such as Game of Thrones (2011-19).
Faculty Publications, Invited Lectures and Honors
Chiji Akoma, PhD, “E Nwere Iduuazị Ụmụaka N’Igbo?” Ugegbe: Jọnalụ Ụwandịigbo, Vol. 1, 2022.

Alice Dailey, PhD, How to Do Things with Dead People, Cornell University Press, 2022.

Michael Dowdy, PhD, “From Fowler to El Salvador: Juan Felipe Herrera’s Global We.” Juan Felipe Herrera: Migrant, Activist, Poet Laureate. Ed. Francisco A. Lomelí and Osiris Aníbal Gómez. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2023.

Alan Drew, MFA, The Recruit: A Novel, Random House, 2022.

Joseph Drury, PhD, “Afterword: On the Uses of the History of Technology for Literary Studies and Vice Versa.” British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830. Ed. Kristin M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon. Bucknell University Press, 2023.

Travis Foster, PhD, “Introduction: American Literature and the Body,” The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Kamran Javadizadeh, PhD, has published regular columns in The New Yorker, including “On Diane Seuss” (June ’23) and “The Eroticism of an IKEA Bed” (Feb. ’23). He has also launched a new podcast.

Crystal Lucky, PhD, “Bible.” Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies. Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022, 4-25.

Mary Mullen, PhD, presented on “The Aesthetics of Interest in an Age of Questions: Representing Ireland” at Harvard in March 2023.

Megan Quigley, PhD, “Hugh Kenner as an Eliot Fan.” Nonsite 42. Special Issue on Hugh Kenner, 2023.

Lauren Shohet, PhD, earned the Outstanding Faculty Research Award.
Student News
English 2023 Journalism Puts Theory into Practice
By Kate Szumanski
This semester, I am teaching English 2023, Journalism. A high school and collegiate journalist who also worked as an intern and production assistant for WHYY-91 FM’s “Radio Times With Marty Moss-Coane” in Philadelphia, I began my career after college as a newspaper and magazine reporter and editor. I graduated with a master’s degree in Journalism from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 2005, and today, I humbly and proudly share my expertise and experiences with students through English 2023. My students, in turn, share with me daily their knowledge and insights related to journalism in the 21st century when smartphones and social media make accessing information nearly instantaneous.

Writing Through Conflict in Belfast

Professor Alan Drew, MFA, and students in his Writing Through Conflict course went to Belfast over fall break 2022. They traveled to the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens University for workshops, seminars and symposiums with Irish writers.
Department Awards Ceremony

The English Department hosted an award ceremony on May 5, 2023, to celebrate the members of our English Honor Society, the winners of our creative writing and essay awards, and the winner of the Medallion of Excellence.
Alumni News
J.D. Durkin '09 CLAS Discusses Journalism, Comedy and More
J.D. Durkin ’09 CLAS has worked as a journalist and news anchor, and has recently begun anchoring the morning show for TheStreet live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He kindly took the time to answer some questions from us about his career path from English major to financial journalist (with pit stops in comedy and more).

"I have little doubt that my late nights in Falvey prepared me for the pressures of the White House press briefing room (the West Wing could use a Holy Grounds, though…)," says Durkin.
Tariq Karibian '22 CLAS Wins Creative Award
English alum Tariq Karibian ’22 CLAS won the Creative Award for his thesis, "Expelled from Eden a Second Time: The Watermelon Men and the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish," written for the University of Chicago's Master of Arts program in the Humanities. The creative award is given to "Fiction, non-fiction, poetry and more that demonstrate intentionality of form, control of craft and thematic coherence."
Tariq Karibian '22 CLAS on far right at book-giving ceremony for graduating seniors
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