Department of English
On the Books
Graduate Alumni Newsletter
Letter from the Director

Welcome to the latest electronic edition of the newsletter of the Villanova Graduate English Program! It’s meant to keep you in touch with what’s happening with individual faculty members, current students and alumni, as well as within the program as a whole.

The pandemic has made this a trying year; we’ve included some reflections on it from both faculty and students. Still, as you’ll see, we had a number of highlights in the program, including the scholarly successes of our students, faculty and alumni; indeed, Anne Marie Jakubowski ’17 MA and Kamran Javadizadeh, PhD, each won awards for their work.

You can also see in this newsletter some ways in which the English department responded to the racial justice issues prominent during the past year.

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 this newsletter or for the YAWP. The YAWP, of course, is always a way you can keep up with what’s going on—subscribe, and you won’t miss a thing! And don’t forget to check out our new podcast “In Theory,” described below.

Best,
Evan Radcliffe, PhD,
Director, English Graduate Program
Get Involved
The VU English Podcast: We have a brand-new podcast! This season, “In Theory,” interviews English faculty members on their area of theoretical expertise. We are also featuring special episodes based on departmental events, such as the Plague Literature, Then and Now panel. Subscribe and review.
LinkedIn Group: Our graduate LinkedIn group features more than 130 alumni of the Master’s in English program. It is a great place to catch up with former classmates, as well as an excellent tool for professional development. Request to join on LinkedIn or contact Michael Malloy.
Faculty News
Reflections: Responding to COVID

2020 was a remote year for many of our students and faculty. Villanovans wrapped up the spring semester remotely, stayed distanced during the summer and returned to campus for the fall semester. Still, some courses were online or hybrid, and interpersonal contact was minimized to the greatest extent possible.

Many of our faculty members reflected on the pandemic and its accompanying lockdowns in print. Here are some excerpts from their work.
By Kamran Javadizadeh, PhD

Dr. Javadizadeh reflected in April on how the pandemic was impacting his reading life. “I find now that what I want out of reading is both contact and distance, an object both for concentration and (how else to put it?) spacing out. I want something that makes me feel like I do when I listen to those lunar audio loops. Which is to say, both close to a voice and far from its source; securely connected, as though by an invisible cable, to a distant but steady point in space. I’ve always been partial to the function of language that the linguist Roman Jakobson called ‘phatic:’ ‘messages serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works (“Hello, do you hear me?”), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention.’ For Jakobson, the phatic function was ultimately less interesting than the one he was really trying to define, the ‘poetic,’ but I find myself drawn to that tug at the end of the line. Here I am. Can you hear me?

By Heather Hicks, PhD

In April of 2020, Dr. Hicks, whose second book was on contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction, was busy working on an essay that turned out to be more topical than she had anticipated.

Dr. Hicks wrote, “I just wrote a whole article on ‘Disaster Response in Post-2000 American Apocalyptic Literature’ for a Cambridge University Press volume on Apocalyptic Literature in American Literature and Culture. Now of course I wish I could write a post-script. But the point of the article is that Disaster Studies as a field indicates that most people are highly cooperative and compassionate during disasters, rather than taking up cudgels as per many post-apocalyptic visions. I think most of what has happened reflects this tendency for people to be mutually supportive, though the vigilantism toward wealthy people trying to hide out in their vacation homes is an interesting and complicated exception. And the way nations and states are turning on each other is also a wrinkle in the theory ... But there certainly hasn’t been a lot of individualized, opportunistic crime.”
Black Lives Matter Reading List and More
Students and faculty participate in the BIPOC writing group.
The department has sought for ways to respond to the growing calls for racial justice that were heard throughout 2020. In the summer, the faculty put together a suggested reading list for self-education on racial justice topics. The list includes works like James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, among others.

In addition, Adrienne Perry, PhD, and Yumi Lee, PhD, helped found the department’s BIPOC writing group, which is for Villanova community members (including alumni) who identify as people of color and who wish to write together. The group meets on Zoom and provides prompts as well as opportunities to share work. For more information, reach out to Dr. Lee. For information on additional departmental diversity initiatives, you can visit our guiding principles page.
Faculty Publications and Honors

Joseph Drury, PhD, “Forum Introduction: The Postcritical Eighteenth Century.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 49, 2020, pp. 299-302.

Travis Foster, PhD, Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Heather Hicks, PhD, “Disaster Response in Post-2000 American Apocalyptic Fiction.” Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture, edited by John Hay, Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Kamran Javadizadeh, PhD,
  • “How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters.” The New Yorker, 8 July 2020.
  • William Riley Parker Prize, 2019, for an outstanding article published in PMLA, for his article “The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject” in the May 2019 issue.

Yumi Lee, PhD, “Repairing Police Action after the Korean War in Toni Morrison’s Home.” Radical History Review, Volume 2020, Issue 137, pp. 119-140.

Jean M. Lutes, PhD, editor, Gender in American Literature and Culture, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Adrienne Perry, PhD, “Lamaze.” Meridians: Feminisms, Race, Transnationalism, 2021.
Student News
English MA Student Elected to Graduate Student Council
Congratulations to Carson Schatzman ’21 MA, who was elected Vice President for Academic Affairs on the Graduate Student Council Executive Board. He has worked on the council throughout the 2020-2021 academic year.

“I decided to run,” said Schatzman, “because I am interested in the administrative side of education, want to continue developing leadership skills, and have been looking for a way to invest and contribute to a community—what better than the one right in front of me?”

When asked about what he hopes to accomplish, he said, “I’d personally like to help promote inter-departmental discussion, work and relationships. My thought is, connection between departments will encourage a graduate student culture—providing an avenue for social connection, which many grad students feel is lacking (regardless of school, this isn’t just a Villanova issue). More than this personal aspect, I think conversation with students/faculty in other disciplines is an essential part of formal education. Many of us are interested in subjects outside our specialization, and those interests should be fostered to help us become well-rounded thinkers. The best way to do this is by talking with passionate people.”
Reflections: VU Grad English Students on the Plague Year

COVID-19 forced some English grad students to abruptly change their plans. Many of our students reflected in writing on their experiences. Here are a few of their reflections.
By Matthew Ryan ’20 MA

Spending the first month of the COVID-19 quarantine finishing my MA thesis on post-Good Friday Agreement Northern Irish women’s coming of age narratives provided an outlet into which I could sink all of my pent-up, isolation-induced emotion. More than just that, however, it also reinforced the importance of collectivity and community in a world where such forms of togetherness are often hard to come by. Two of the texts I read for my thesis lend themselves particularly well to this end: Anna Burns’s Milkman, and Lisa McGee’s television show, Derry Girls. They both, directly and indirectly, make the case for community.

Writing about these texts in particular during this time made me think about my research much more holistically than just as a personal intellectual project. Milkman is a story of a young Belfast woman being stalked by a member of the IRA, and as a result, her deepening isolation and estrangement from her community. While it’s fairly clear the novel is set in Belfast during the Troubles, nevertheless, there are no names of people or places. Thus, it manages to speak to both the particularities of “those days” and “that place,” as the narrator often remarks, while maintaining a universalist impulse, so that any reader could pick it up and identify with its themes and problems. Derry Girls is Milkman’s total opposite. It’s a show where Derry itself is the centerpiece, just as much as the girls themselves: Erin, Orla, Michelle, and Clare (plus James, the “wee English fella”). Either way, they both point to the same value: the importance of being present with those you love and care for, whether they’re friendships, family, or even the company of strangers.
Anne Jones
By Anne Jones ’21 MA

I remember being in Dr. Lutes’ class at Driscoll Hall the day we got the email. Suddenly, the gray tablet armchair I usually sat on for class didn’t seem too bad. The fact that my laptop, books, and notes were in constant danger of falling off for want of space became, at that moment, an inconsequential matter. In fact, on the first day of class, my laptop had actually spectacularly tumbled off. Astonishingly enough, it had survived this near-death experience. Distance approximation was never my forte, but that traumatic moment had made me an expert, at least when it came to the boundaries of a tablet arm. That evening, as I settled in, I realized I had formed a bit of history with that chair. It was tied to my engagement with the world of immigrant narratives and histories. With characters, ideas and nations across time. With my professor and my classmates.

Earlier that day, my inbox revealed what everyone knew was coming: classes were going to move online because of the coronavirus. In other words, a rectangular piece of glass (or plastic?) was poised to replace the unobstructed view that I had had of my classmates and teachers. That strange intimacy afforded by simply sharing the same bounded space week after week was to morph into something more … formal. From now on, it wouldn’t do to merely look at the person you were addressing—because what meaning does eye contact hold when you have a whole bunch of faces on a screen? Also, no more tablet arm chairs, which should have been a comforting turn of events.

Maybe we miss the trivial things because those aren’t the only things we miss. These little things are a proxy for the thousand other intangible, hard-to-pinpoint experiences that now seem fixed in an irretrievable past—experiences as mundane as physical proximity and conversation unmediated by technology. It’s a kind of longing that the body itself feels. A kind of ache, even—which is ironic, given that the past is rarely as divine as the present would have us believe.

How else to explain my silly nostalgia for an uncomfortable gray chair?
First Lady is a Villanova English Alum
Jill Biden speaks at Villanova's Commencement in 2014.
Please join us in congratulating our new first lady, Jill Biden ’91 MA, EdD. Dr. Biden was the Villanova’s 2014 Commencement speaker, and in her remarks, she reflected on her time here. “During the time I was earning my master’s degree ... I was also teaching full-time and raising three small children... It was a lot at once. I remember so clearly the hour-long drive each way a few nights a week—this was before the Blue Route—to get to classes. It was a lot at once. But I loved what I found here—the intellectual rigor of the classes, the supportive values of the community. And even though it took me 15 years to earn two master’s degrees and eventually my doctorate, I kept at it because I knew teaching was my passion.”

Heather Hicks, PhD, the current department chair, had the chance to meet with Dr. Biden while she was serving as second lady. Dr. Hicks noted that Dr. Biden was “gracious, pleasant and warm,” and that she was keenly interested in the English program.

A lot has changed in the English department since Dr. Biden graduated in 1991. She would have been among the last cohort of students to complete an exam—hand-written in blue exam books, no less—rather than a thesis or field exam to graduate.

Dr. Biden plans to continue teaching English while serving as first lady.
Student Publications, Honors and Conference Presentations
Publications and Awards

Caitlyn Dittmeier ’18 CLAS, ’21 MA published “Networks of Foam: Becoming through Relation in Marianne Moore’s Shoreline Poems” in Concept.

Samantha Dugan ’21 MA published “Des Excuses” in Concept.

Em Friedman ’22 MA earned a summer research fellowship from Villanova and published “‘Another Skie’: Eve’s Eden and Feminine Cosmologies” in Concept.

Anne Jones ’21 MA published “Tracing the Missing Letter: Reassembling Nonhuman Agency in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake” and “The Vexed Position of the Secret-Bearer: Concealments and Revelations in Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative” in Concept.

Nicholas Keough ’21 MA published “‘Boys Will Be Boys: Constructions of Toxic Masculinity in Dramatic, Metaphorized, and Real-Life War Spaces” in Concept.

Amanda Piazza ’22 MA published “A Joke Without a Clear Punchline: Joker as a Supervillain to Linearity” in Concept.

Franki Maria Rudnesky ’22 MA published “‘All Influence is Immoral:’ Actor-Network Theory in The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

Christoforos Sassaris ’22 MA earned a summer research fellowship from Villanova.

Olivia Stowell ’21 MA published “A Form of Work We’d Rather Not Do Alone: Chen Chen, Poetics of Relationality, and the Intersubjective Lyric I” in Concept and “From Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift’s Evermore: History as Metaphor” in Post45, 23 Dec. 2020.
Presentations

Alex Liska ’21 MA presented at Northeastern Modern Language Association, “Synthesize, don’t Censure: Towards a Balanced Model of Critiquing European Mythology.”

Christoforos Sassaris ’22 MA presented at West Chester University Special Collections and the West Chester University Center for Book History, “Transcribing the Letters of William Darlington;” The Library Company of Philadelphia, “Deja Vu: We’ve Been Here Before: Race, Health, and Epidemics;” Brief Intermission (from the East Central/American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies), “Yerasimos Vlachos’ Dictionary and the Hellenic Diaspora of Eighteenth-Century Venice;” and the University of Maryland’s Graduate English Conference, “‘The First That Ever Scotland in Such Honour Named’: Primogeniture, Patriarchy, and Anglicization in Macbeth.”
Alumni News
Congratulations to our 2020 Graduates
  • Michelle Callaghan ’20 MA
  • Edward Dold ’20 MA
  • Eric Doyle ’20 MA
  • Thomas Higgins ’20 MA
  • Brendan Maher ’20 MA
  • Catherine Mooradd ’20 MA
  • Caitlin Phillips ’20 MA
  • Matthew Ryan ’20 MA
  • Jesse Schwartz’20 MA
  • Avni Sejpal ’20 MA
  • Kristen Sieranski ’20 MA
  • Daniella Snyder ’20 MA
  • Michelle Wrambel ’20 MA
  • Hannah Wright ’20 MA
Recent Alumni in doctorate programs

  • Kristen Sieranski ’21 MA, University of Notre Dame
  • Olivia Stowell ’21 MA, University of Michigan
  • Matthew Edholm, ’20 certificate, University of St. Andrews
  • Avni Sejpal ’20 MA, University of Pennsylvania
  • Joseph Alicea ’19 MA, UC Santa Cruz
  • Angeline Nies-Berger ’18 MA, Rutgers University
  • Stephen Reaugh ’18 MA, Washington University in St. Louis
  • William Repetto ’18 MA, University of Delaware
  • Casey Smedberg ’18 MA, University of Connecticut
  • AnneMarie Jakubowski ’17 MA, Washington University
  • Laura Tscherry ’17 MA, Indiana University
Other Alumni Activities

Lydia Browning ’14 MA has been teaching Continuing Education classes at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland, for the last several years. She teaches the literature offerings, which means she has been able to put her degree from Villanova to good use.

James Butler ’17 MA is working as a senior managing editor in scholarly publishing at J&J Editorial in Cary, North Carolina, where he manages the editorial process for a variety of academic journals that cover science, medicine, and the humanities. In other news, in December 2019 he had an essay published in Bright Lights Film Journal and one of his poems appeared in the 2020 issue of Poetry South.

Cynthia Estremera Gautier ’14 MA published a short meditation on Kanye West in the Journal of Hip Hop Studies. Her piece, titled “Losing Kanye,” is a short reflection on Kanye West’s fall from hip hop’s grace and the ideological manifestations of his personal and political struggles.

Ann Marie Jakubowski ’17 MA, a doctoral student in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, won the 2020 T. S. Eliot Studies Annual Prize for “‘Never anything anywhere’: Whiteness in Eliot’s Literary Imaginary.” The prize is awarded annually to the best seminar paper presented by an early-career scholar at the Annual Meeting of the International T. S. Eliot Society. Ann Marie’s paper was presented as part of a peer seminar on “Eliot and Racial Others.”

Daniella Snyder ’20 MA is now working for the Woodmere Art Museum. She is in charge of social media management, event promotion, member communication and occasional web editing. Daniella got the job in part through a connection she made while working on her PRO, which was on Museum Communications and Marketing.
If you have a story, publication, conference presentation or job update you would like to share in a future newsletter, please reach out.
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