Department of English

Welcome to English at Villanova University!

Please enjoy browsing our web site. Here you'll learn about our faculty, undergraduate and graduate programs, and much more. 

 For questions about the undergraduate program, please contact Prof. Michael Berthold. For questions about the graduate program, please contact Prof. Heather Hicks.

News

• Spring courses.  Course descriptions for Spring 2012 are now available.  You can find them either by clicking on the Syllabus Available link which is below each course number in Novasis, or by downloading the Spring 2012 booklet link in the Downloadable Documents box on the right.
• Literary Festival lineup announced.   The writers visiting in spring 2012 for the 14th annual Villanova Literary Festival will be poets C. D. Wright and Juan Felipe Herrera, fiction writers Téa Obreht and William Kennedy, and visiting Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies Hugo Hamilton, who is a fiction writer and memoirist.
  

English majors

• Academic All-Americans.  English majors Sheila Reid and Matt Gibney were two of the three Villanova student-athletes named as Academic All-Americans in June 2011.  Both also earned All-American honors for their performances as runners in national meets.

Faculty awards and achievements

• Luckow Endowed Chair.  Prof. Lauren Shohet has been named as the first holder of the Luckow Family Endowed Chair in English.  Click here for the College’s full announcement.  Prof. Shohet has just returned from a year as Senior Research Fellow in Language and Literature at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, an interdisciplinary research institute housed at the University of Freiburg, Germany.
  
• New faculty book.  Prof. Hugh Ormsby-Lennon’s book Hey Presto! Swift and the Quacks was published by the University of Delaware Press.
• Ransom Center fellowship.  Prof. Megan Quigley has received a Research Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center for 2011-2012.  She will be using it to do research for her book project, Vaguely Philosophical: Modernist Fiction and the Challenge of Philosophy.
• NEH grant.  For the fourth consecutive year, Emeritus Professor of English Sterling F. Delano has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to direct a workshop for community college faculty on “Concord, Massachusetts: Fiery Feminists, Utopian Dreamers, and Social Reform in the Age of Emerson and Thoreau.”

New faculty positions

• New faculty member.  Prof. Joseph Drury is a specialist in 18th century British literature, especially the novel.  A native of England, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and also has an M.A. from Queen Mary, the University of London, and a B.A. from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University.  Prof. Drury previously taught at Wesleyan University.   He is currently teaching English 2250 (Ways of Reading) and English 3590 (The British Novel in the Romantic Era).
• New faculty member.  Prof. Kamran Javadizadeh is a specialist in American poetry of the 20th century.  He received his Ph.D. from Yale University, where he also received his B.A.  Prof. Javadizadeh previously taught at Pomona College and Connecticut College.  He is currently teaching English 2250 (Ways of Reading) and English 4605 (American Poetry, 1900-1950).