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On the Books
Graduate Alumni Newsletter
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Letter from the Director
Welcome to the latest electronic edition of the newsletter of the Villanova Graduate English Program! As always, it’s meant to keep you in touch with what’s happening in the program (which, I’m happy to report, will be directed by Mary Mullen, PhD, beginning in 2026).
In this newsletter, you can read about publications and presentations by our faculty, including books by Tsering Wangmo, PhD, and Michael Dowdy, PhD; recognition for Villanova’s production of The Spanish Tragedy (on which Alice Dailey, PhD, and several of our graduate students worked); recognition from the Modern Language Association for a book by alumna Alexandra Edwards '12 MA; other publications and presentations by current grad students and alumni; and, as always, more news about program events, grad students, alumni and faculty.
Please stay in touch with us—let us know what you’re up to, and contact me or Mike Malloy if you have any items for this newsletter or our blog, the YAWP. The YAWP, of course, is how you can always keep up with what’s going on. Subscribe, and you won’t miss a thing!
Best,
Evan Radcliffe, PhD
Director, English Graduate Program
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Support the Department
Generous alumni allow us to broaden the scope of our programming as well as our support for our students. Please consider donating!
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VU English Socials
You can follow the up-to-the-minute adventures of our department on our blog, as well as on our departmental Instagram.
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English Alumna Publishes Debut Novel
Olivia Martel ’00 CLAS, ’03 MA, published her debut novel, How to Fly. The novel is described as "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."
Learn more about Martel and her new book on her website.
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Recent Alumni in Doctoral Programs
Theo Campbell ’23 MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Sam Covais ’22 MA, Binghamton University
Matthew Edholm ’20 certificate, University of St. Andrews
Em Friedman ’22 MA, University of Pennsylvania
Sarah Herr ’24 MA, University of Delaware
Matthew Ryan ’20 MA, Catholic University of America
Caitlin Salomon ’23 MA, University of Delaware
Avni Sejpal ’20 MA, University of Pennsylvania
Kristen Sieranski ’21 MA, University of Notre Dame
Olivia Stowell ’21 MA, University of Michigan
Matt Villanueva ’24 MA, Temple University
Jonathan Weiss ’22 non-matriculated, Temple University
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Alumni Activities
Franki Rudnesky ’22 MA got a new job as an English teacher at Hammonton High School in Hammonton, New Jersey.
Jeanbry Torres ’25 MA is now working as 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit Adjutant in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
Laura Tscherry ’17 MA was published in the Print Plus edition of Modernism/modernity on “Queer Domestic Architectures: Theorizing Kinship and Communal Modernism.”
MaryJo Yannacone ’90 CLAS, ’94 MA is the superintendent of the Springfield Township School District in Montgomery County. After teaching high school English for 13 years, she became a high school administrator at Strath Haven High School in the Wallingford Swarthmore School District, where she later served as principal from 2005-2018. In July 2018, she moved to the School District of Springfield Township in Montgomery County as assistant superintendent and was promoted to superintendent in December 2020.
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Recent Graduates
Congratulations to our recent MA graduates!
Spring 2025:
- Rebecca Amrick
- Mahtab Chaudhry
- Melody Gleason
- Ariel Hooks
- Isobel McCreavy
- Margaret McGill
- Annabella Nordlund
- Jaxon Parker
- Samantha Philipps
- Karina Renee
- Jeanbry Torres
Fall 2024:
- David Kennedy
- Carson Schatzman
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Student Publications & Honors
The Spanish Tragedy, which incorporated the work of English graduate students Jeanbry Torres ’25 MA, Karina Renee ’25 MA, Mahtab Chaudhry ’25 MA, David Kennedy ’24 MA, Rebecca Amrick ’25 MA, Samantha Philipps ’25 MA, and Annabella Nordlund ’25 MA, won honorable mention for the Shakespeare Publics Award from the Shakespeare Association of America.
Alexis Atwood ’26 MA earned a 2025 Graduate Summer Research Fellowship.
Carly Johnson ’26 MA received an honorable mention for the Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award for her paper “Neoliberalism and Emotional Detachment in My Year of Rest and Relaxation.”
Maggie Jones ’26 MA presented on “Matilda’s Mythical Predecessors: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Two ‘Female Kings’ and their Placement within Hegemonic Male Lineage” at Villanova’s Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference in October 2025.
Jenna Kosnick ’26 MA earned a 2025 Graduate Summer Research Fellowship and presented on “The Gothic Reigns in Demerara” as part of the panel “Empire and Colonialism 11: Empire, Slavery, and the Gothic” at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference in November 2025.
Ashley Lee ’26 MA earned a 2025 Graduate Summer Research Fellowship.
Jaxon Parker ’25 MA received the Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award, recognizing the best graduate essay, for his paper, “Progeny and Productivity: The Libidinal Economy of the Irish Population in Castle Rackrent.”
Samantha Philipps ’25 MA presented “Forbidden Delicacies: an Analysis of Wine and Revenge” at the Pacific Modern Language Association.
Natalie Pititto ’26 MA presented “Butch Bostonians and The Well of Loneliness: Remarrying The Bostonians with Lesbian Literature” at the Lesbian Lives conference in New York at the CUNY Graduate Center in October 2025.
Julia Reagan ’26 MA had her article, “‘You Can Never Work Facts as You Would Fixed Quantities’: Political Economy’s Failures in Thomas Malthus and Mary Barton,” published in Concept 2025.
Reagan presented “The Monster Child Turned Theorist: Queer Childhood in Dorothy Allison’s Cavedweller” at the American Literature Association Annual Conference in Boston, Mass. in May 2025. In October, she presented on “Political Economy’s Failures in Thomas Malthus and Mary Barton” at the North American Victorian Studies Association Conference. Reagan also served as a panelist on “Recentering Black Women Intellectuals: A Public Humanities Collaboration in Anxious Times” at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers and presented “Political Economy’s Failures in Thomas Malthus and Mary Barton” at the North American Victorian Studies Association in November.
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The Great Catsby Roars Back
By Katy Kessler ’26 MA
The English Department’s recent 100 Years of The Great Gatsby celebration brought nearly 150 undergraduate students together for a festive evening of jazz, trivia and literary community. Organized by second-year English graduate student Julia Reagan '26 MA, the event kicked off with a spirited trivia game where students guessed whether a line was a Taylor Swift lyric or a Gatsby quote. “That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool,” was a particularly challenging one: who would’ve known that Swift’s “Happiness” lyric, “I hope she’ll be a beautiful fool,” was inspired by Fitzgerald!
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15th Annual Thesis and Field Exam Symposium
The 15th Annual Thesis and Field Exam Symposium was held on May 7, 2025. Read about the research presentations by Ariel Hooks '25 MA, Nosike Okafor ’25 MA, Jaxon Parker ’25 MA, Samantha Philipps ’25 MA, and Jeanbry Torres ’25 MA on the YAWP!
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New Book by Tsering Wangmo, PhD, Reexamines Tibetan Exile and National Identity
Associate Professor Tsering Wangmo, PhD, a scholar of English and Tibetan diasporic studies, has published a new 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,” Dr. 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, Dr. 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, Dr. 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.
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Michael Dowdy, PhD, Offers Candid Take on Fatherhood in New Collection of Essays
What does it mean to care for someone in a world that so often feels broken? In his new collection of essays, Tell Me about Your Bad Guys: Fathering in Anxious Times, (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), English Professor Michael Dowdy, PhD, turns this question into a deeply personal and literary exploration of fatherhood. Blending memoir, creative nonfiction and the lyric essay, Dr. Dowdy invites readers into a candid reckoning with the joys, uncertainties and moral complexities of raising a child—and being changed by them in return.
Written over the course of seven years, Dr. Dowdy’s essays were inspired by his daughter, who was five years old when he began the project. Now twelve, she remains at the heart of the book’s inquiry into what it means to raise, protect and be transformed by a child in a world marked by violence and uncertainty. The title itself comes from her: at just three years old, she began asking her parents at bedtime to “tell me about your bad guys,” sparking a profound reflection on morality, storytelling and identity that threads through the collection. Guided by his daughter’s unruly questions and his desire to avoid common traps in fatherhood literature—false modesty, antic ineptitude and defensive clowning—the essays follow an interrogative mode.
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Lauren Shohet, PhD, Publishes New Edited Collection
The English Department is proud to share the release of Dr. Lauren Shohet's new edited collection, Queering Early Modern Death in England: Figuration, Representation, Matter. This new collection, edited by Dr. Shohet and Christine Varnado, PhD, of the University of Buffalo, analyzes a variety of celebrated texts, including The Duchess of Malfi, The Alchemist, The Spanish Tragedy, The Winter's Tale, Richard III, and A Midsummer Night's Dream using queer theoretical methodologies to offer fascinating insights regarding early modern conceptualizations of humanity, embodiment and temporality, among others. Dr. Shohet and Dr. Varnado utilize queer logics to suggest poignant understandings of early modern death as non-dualist, non-linear, a-teleological, and fruitfully muddled, showcasing the fascinating expansiveness of death through a queer lens.
| | | Faculty Publications and Honors | | |
Alice Dailey, PhD, and Associate Professor of Theatre and Studio Art Chelsea Phillips, MFA, PhD, were jointly honored by the Rev. Peter M. Donohue, OSA, PhD, during commencement with the 2025 Faculty Award for Innovative Teaching.
Pictured left to right: Chelsea Phillips, MFA, PhD, the Rev. Peter M. Donohue, OSA, PhD, and Alice Dailey, PhD.
| | | Michael Dowdy, PhD, published a collection of essays, Tell Me About Your Bad Guys: Fathering in Anxious Times (2025), and won Honorable Mention, Dembo Prize for the article “‘Mexican or Something’: Reading the Novels of Mexicanesque Appalachia” published in Volume 64 of Contemporary Literature (Fall 2024). | | Michelle Filling-Brown, PhD, co-wrote a three-part series in Inside Higher Ed on the closing of Cabrini University and its subsequent acquisition by Villanova. Dr. Filling-Brown served as chair of the English Department at Cabrini and went on to serve as Chief Academic Officer/Dean for Academic Affairs. Following Cabrini’s closure, Dr. Filling-Brown joined Villanova as associate vice provost for Integrated Student Experience and as a teaching professor in the Department of English. The articles were: | | | |
Drinan, Helen, Michelle Filling-Brown, Richie Gebauer, Erin McLaughlin, Kimberly Boyd, Melissa Terlecki, and Lynda Buzzard. ”Closing with Dignity” Inside Higher Ed. February 19, 2025.
Drinan, Helen, Michelle Filling-Brown, Richie Gebauer, Erin McLaughlin, Kimberly Boyd, Melissa Terlecki, and Lynda Buzzard. ”No Good Time to Close a University” Inside Higher Ed. February 26, 2025.
Drinan, Helen, Michelle Filling-Brown, Richie Gebauer, Erin McLaughlin, Kimberly Boyd, Melissa Terlecki, and Lynda Buzzard. ”Lessons Learned from a College Closure” Inside Higher Ed. March 5, 2025.
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Travis Foster, PhD, presented “Too Good to Live: Trans Feminine Childhood and the Sentimental Death Trap” at the American Literary History Now symposium at UCLA in October 2025. He also has a new role as the Special Features editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.
Heather Hicks, PhD, completed a highly successful nine-year term as department chair.
Kamran Javadizadeh, PhD, presented on “The National Poetry Crisis” on June 5, 2025 at the American Literature Research Seminar in Oxford and on the poet Robert Lowell at a conference on “The Aesthetics of the Clinic” in Cambridge on June 11, 2025.
Yumi Lee, PhD, is the co-editor of Prehistories of the War on Terror: A Critical Genealogy (The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).
Mary Mullen, PhD, published the following work over the last year:
“The Aesthetics of Interest and the Irish Question: William Carleton’s and Anthony Trollope’s Famine Novels.” Victorian Literature and Culture. 53.1 (Spring 2025): 84-111.
“Public Humanities, Then and Now.” Public Humanities. (2025). doi:10.1017/pub.2024.51.
“Realism and Ireland,” Realism and the Novel: A Global History. Ed. Paul Stasi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. 314-26.
“Ireland, the Act of Union, and Blighted Becoming,” The Irish Bildungsroman. Eds. Gregory Castle, Sarah L. Townsend and Matthew Reznicek. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2025. 35-59.
2024 “Young Monsters, Old Ghosts: Dickens and Memoir.” Dickens Universe, University of California-Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz, California.
Megan Quigley, PhD, was featured on the Close Readings Podcast with our own Kamran Javadizadeh, PhD, in July 2025 discussing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Dr. Quigley also presented the following:
“Hallucinating Modernism.” Modernist Studies Association. Boston, MA. October 2025.
“Mrs. Dalloway in Love.” International Conference on Virginia Woolf. University of Sussex. July 2025.
“Refined Out of Existence: Eliot, AI, and Impersonality,” T. S. Eliot Society Annual Meeting. Trinity College, Dublin. July 2025.
“Why We Need Eliot Now.” Symposium on Modernism Now. Queens College, CUNY. April 2025.
Evan Radcliffe, PhD, completed a highly successful eight-and-a-half-year term as graduate director.
Lauren Shohet, PhD, published the article “Adaptation, Hypermediation, and Feminine Subjectivity: Paradise Lost and The Fall” in Milton Studies, vol. 67 no. 2, 2025: 266-296. Dr. Shohet is also the co-editor of Queering Early Modern Death in England: Figuration, Representation, and Matter (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Kimberly Takahata, PhD, published the article “Witnessing Otherwise in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition” in American Literature, vol. 97, no. 2, 2025: 363–389.
Tsering Wangmo, PhD, contributed to Forms of Awakening: Tibetan Art from the Jack Shear Collection, Tang Museum / Delmonico Books, 2025. Dr. Wangmo also presented in June 2025 on “The Politics of Sorrow: Shifts in views of the nation” at the conference “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. In addition, Dr. Wangmo published The Politics of Sorrow with Columbia University Press.
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