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On the Books
Undergraduate Alumni Newsletter
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Letter from the Chair
Happy New Year from the English Department! Please enjoy the latest installment of our annual newsletter, On the Books.
Since I stepped into the position of department chair in June, I have found myself more grateful than ever for our students, who continue to cherish books, to ask hard questions, and to demonstrate the value of creative expression on a daily basis. I’m especially proud of the hard work of our department’s AI committee, which has been helping to lead our college’s response to this unprecedented transformation.
We hope you’ll enjoy reading about what’s happening with current students and alumni, faculty members and the department overall. We would love to know what you’re doing and thinking about. Contact me or Mike Malloy if you have any items for our next edition. Please stay in touch!
Jean Lutes, PhD
Professor and Chair of English
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Villanova English Merch
Want to support our students and bedeck yourself in the height of fashion at the same time? The Villanova English Department sells apparel and uses the proceeds to support current undergraduate students’ academic needs. For more information or to place an order, please email Mike Malloy. We accept cash or check—through the mail or in person at our office on campus. And please consider our latest merch addition, the Villanova English beanie, modeled by our new chair, Dr. Lutes!
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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!
| | | | Three Villanova alumni, two of them English majors, presented Robots in the Workplace: Friends or Foes? Alumni Perspectives, as part of a series of three fall AI panels organized by the English Department’s AI committee. The alumni (pictured left to right) were Ryan Zalla ’17 CLAS, Economics, quantitative trader at Vanguard; Nicole Marie Gill ’02 CLAS, English, chairman and managing member of CODISCOVR; and Olivia Martel ’00 CLAS, English, author of How to Fly. | |
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English Alumna Publishes Debut Novel
Olivia Martel ’00 CLAS, MA ’03, 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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English Alumna Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship
Marie-Helene Bertino '99 CLAS was granted a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. According to Yale News, fellows were "selected from a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants to be part of the 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows." They were selected based upon "prior career achievement and exceptional promise" and were awarded a monetary stipend to pursue their work.
Bertino, 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 this fall!), 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.
Read more about Bertino and her work on her website.
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English Alumna Named Poet Laureate of Middlebury, Connecticut
Bailey Quinn '24 CLAS, who graduated with a BA 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 in The Creekside Magazine, Breath and Shadow, and Grande Dame Literary Journal.
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Alumni Activities
James Harvey ’66 CLAS released a memoir of his childhood in Ireland and London, Grappling with Ghosts. “Although I wound up writing speeches for American presidents, cabinet officers, and members of Congress, I had a rocky start, including time in an orphanage in London," Harvey explains.
Kylie Horan '24 CLAS was published in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany (on Woolf's birthday, no less), with her paper "Woolf, Will, and the War Bride: Cymbeline and The Figure of Fascist Italy in Mrs. Dalloway." Horan's paper, which won the Angelica Garnett Undergraduate Essay Prize, is featured in Issue 102 of the Miscellany (p. 32).
Joe Orazi '72 CLAS spent a great deal of time in theater as well as writing for television and film after graduating from Villanova. In 2018, he released a novel of historical fiction called L’America, which follows the stories of three Italian families who emigrate to the US on the same steamship in 1915. It is currently in development for a film.
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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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Student Spotlight: Will Corliss '25 CLAS
"If I had to only pick one major to go to law school, it would be the English major."
Will Corliss ’25 CLAS completed a long journey from being a prospective Biology major to becoming a pre-law, Psychology and English double major. Along the way, he gained professional experience through English that contributed to his path to law school and to his burgeoning interest in the law.
Read more about how Will's journey with English contributed to his professional development on the blog.
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Taught by Literature Conference Presentations
Ben Marcoulier ’27 CLAS, Julia Reagan ’26 MA, and Crystal J. Lucky, PhD, presented together on Nov. 7 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, which works to honor the legacy of Black author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Taught by Literature was founded by Jean Lutes, PhD, Denise Burgher, and Brigitte Fielder, PhD, 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.
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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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