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On the Books
Undergraduate Alumni Newsletter
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Letter from the Chair
Welcome to the first 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.
I’m happy to report that, despite the ongoing pandemic, we in Villanova English continue to enjoy our vibrant community of students and faculty. Highlights that you’ll find below include opportunities for all of you to be involved with the department.
The newsletter also introduces you to our newest full-time faculty member, Dr. Kimberly Takahata, who teaches indigenous literature. In addition, you can learn about two of our newest courses, one in which students study the entire Harry Potter series, and the other inviting students to develop a range of techniques for writing about the natural world. And no department newsletter would be complete without news about 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
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New Villanova English T-Shirts |
Want to support our students and bedeck yourself in the height of fashion at the same time? The Villanova English department is selling t-shirts with a cool design by current English student Carlos Antonio Alvarez '25 CLAS, and we’ll be using the profits to support current undergraduate students’ course book expenses. For more information or to place an order, please email michael.malloy@villanova.edu. We accept cash or check—through the mail or in person at our office on campus. |
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Villanova English Podcast |
The second season of our Villanova English podcast was recently kicked off with an episode about the new Harry Potter course with Evan Radcliffe, PhD. Check out the podcast. |
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Getting to Know Kimberly Takahata, PhD |
Master's student Alexander Matkowsky interviewed the English Department's newest faculty member, Kimberly Takahata, PhD. Dr. Takahata's field of study, “Early American Literature,” is quite broadly defined. She works primarily with Long Eighteenth Century texts from Massachusetts down through the Caribbean.
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Faculty Publications and Honors
Chiji Akoma, PhD, Oral Literary Performance in Africa: Beyond Text. Co-edited by Nduka Otiono. London: Routledge, 2021.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, PhD, Revolute, Albion Books, 2021.
Travis Foster, PhD, “The Effeminate Man,” Gender in American Literature and Culture, ed. Jean Lutes and Jennifer Travis, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Kamran Javadizadeh, PhD, “Can Rilke Change Your Life?” The New Yorker, 26 May, 2021.
Heather Hicks, PhD, "'Enough to Change a Planet': Feeling Extinction in Contemporary Literature." Reconsidering Extinction in Terms of the History of Global Bioethics. Ed. Stan Booth and Chris Mounsey. New York: Routledge, 2021. 1-26.
Lauren Shohet, PhD, “Mediation, Media, and Milton’s Eve,” Milton Studies 63.1 (special issue on “Milton Now”), 2021, 11-24.
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Harry Potter Enchants Students
The magic of Harry Potter first flew in (on a broomstick, of course) to homes everywhere nearly 25 years ago. Evan Radcliffe, PhD, associate professor and director of the English graduate program, taught ENG 3690 "Harry Potter: Quests / Questions" for the first time in fall 2021, and the course filled up within a day.
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Nova Students Write About Nature
Students in professor Cathy Staples’s nature writing course had plenty of close encounters with wildlife over the course of the semester. In addition, some of the budding writers in this course had their work published outside of Villanova. Congrats to Bailey Quinn '24 CLAS, for publishing " Sea Salt" in APIARY Magazine.
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Megan Quigley, PhD, and Mary Mullen, PhD, headed to Good Counsel Hall with candy and other goodies in tow to host a productive, somewhat scary creative writing hangout. We look forward to more creative writing hangouts ahead!
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Department Awards Ceremony |
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On April 30, 2021, the department held its annual awards ceremony to celebrate the members of our 2021 English Honor Society, the winners of our creative writing and essay awards, and the winner of the Medallion of Excellence.
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Alumni Profile: A Career in Consulting |
Jacqueline Ridberg Larabee '23 MA interviewed alum Deb Pfisterer '00 CLAS about her career in consulting. Pfisterer has found that you need passion to consult, which she feels is one thing English majors bring to the table. “It’s not so much a passion to be a consultant; it’s a passion to want to help, to want to create, to want to write... that’s what it really means,” says Pfisterer.
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We are so grateful to Kristy Wallace ’99 CLAS, CEO of Ellevate Network; Jill Kingsland ’05 CLAS, Internal Communications Administrator at Vanguard; Elizabeth Kreider ’07 CLAS, Corporate Responsibility Manager at QVC; and Colleen Francke ’15 CLAS, Publicist at ID-PR. These were the alumni who graciously agreed to share their time and their stories with us in 2021 for our first annual alumni career panel. These alumni were actually doubly generous, because they had agreed to do this panel in person way back in the spring of 2020, but the coming of COVID put that event on hold. Finally we were able to get together, via Zoom, a year later, and we recorded the panel for release as part of our podcast series. You can listen back to the whole event here. |
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