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

• Literary Festival.  Fiction writer William Kennedy concludes the 14th annual Villanova Literary Festival with a reading on Thursday, April 26, at 7 pm, in the Connelly Center Cinema.  Previous readings: poet C. D. Wright on Feb. 1; poet Juan Felipe Herrera on Feb. 21; Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies Hugo Hamilton, a fiction writer and memoirist, on March 13; and fiction writer Téa Obreht on April 12.
  

English majors

• Alumna awarded Pulitzer Prize.  Eileen Sullivan, class of 1999, who covers counterterrorism for The Associated Press and is an expert on homegrown terrorism and domestic radicalization, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, along with three colleagues.
  
• Alumna wins script competition.  Megan Angelo, class of 2006, was featured in the New York Times article "Marketers, Seeking Family Show, Hold Script Contest" after winning a competition involving scripts for 30-minute situation comedies about modern family life. The contest attracted more than 235 entries.
• 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 3490 (The 18th Century Novel) and a graduate course, English 8420 (The Rise of the Novel in the 18th Century).
• 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 1050 (The Literary Experience) and two courses with the title Madness and American Modernism: English 4691 and English 9610 (a graduate course).