FACULTY AND STAFF
The faculty of the Villanova English Department is committed to teaching excellence, as demonstrated by the many teaching awards we have won or been nominated for in recent years. We are also deeply engaged in shaping the field of English studies, as reflected by our recent book publications.
Full-Time Faculty
I teach and do research in the areas of post-1945 American and global Anglophone fiction, apocalyptic literature, feminist fiction and theory, postmodern theory, science fiction, and contemporary film.
My field is Romantic literature, and my main focus is on the relation of this literature to the controversies around the French Revolution—in particular, the ways in which Romantic literature reflects and responds to the political and moral-philosophical debates of the 1790s.
My field is contemporary Anglophone African and African Diaspora literatures, including African oral performance studies. I’m particularly interested in Caribbean folklore and literary traditions, African oral literature, drama, fiction, and postcolonial studies.
My primary field of study is early modern literature, with a secondary field in literature of the Middle Ages. My research coheres around a broad set of questions about how stories of violence are told and retold.
My scholarly research and critical writing focus on Latinx literature, Latinx studies, poetry and poetics, poetry of the Americas, and Appalachian studies.
I teach creative writing workshop courses within the Program in Creative Writing, focusing mostly on the writing of the short story and the novel. I also direct the Villanova Literary Festival and run the Writing Through Conflict embedded travel course to the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University, Belfast.
I teach courses on Restoration, eighteenth-century, and Romantic British literature. I have a particular interest in the history and theory of the novel, gothic literature, the history of science, medicine, and technology and its intersections with literary culture, material culture, and the history of sexuality.
I teach courses in American literature and culture as well as gender and queer studies. My research focuses on nineteenth-century U.S. literary histories, with a particular focus on white supremacy and antiblackness, genre and genre criticism, and gender and queer studies.
I direct the Cultural Studies Program. My research projects have included discursive analyses of wikileaks cables and the TPP Treaty, the relationship between new forms of media and social activism, and the history of gendered discursive practice.
My teaching and research focus on medieval literature and the reception of philosophical ideas in the Middle Ages. My interest in how cultural fantasies about the past and the present shape reception histories informs the courses I teach on Medieval Romance, The Fabulous Middle Ages, and Chaucer.
My teaching and research focus on modern American poetry, though my interests often lead me out from that center—both horizontally (into twentieth-century American literature and culture) and vertically (into the long history of poetry and poetics).
I teach, research, and write on post-1945 and contemporary U.S. literature with an emphasis on Asian American literature and history, coming from a framework of critical race & ethnic studies.
I specialize in Irish Studies, and my research generally follows the influence of colonialism and its effects in Ireland, Britain, and India.
I teach 19th and 20th century African American literature, including fugitive slave narratives, contemporary novels of slavery, works of the Harlem Renaissance, the African American short story and the works of Toni Morrison and August Wilson.
I specialize in American women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Inspired in part by my first career as a newspaper reporter, I have always been fascinated by the dynamic exchange between journalistic practices and literary work.
I teach and write about nineteenth-century English and Irish literature, drawing on critical race theory, colonial studies, queer and feminist theory to question assumptions about institutions, representation, and public politics.
I write both fiction and nonfiction, though my courses at Villanova focus on creative nonfiction, editing and publishing, adaptation, and translation. In 2020, I received the inaugural Elizabeth Alexander Prize in Creative Writing from Meridians journal. My work has been published in Copper Nickel, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. I'm currently working on a novel.
My classes at Villanova focus on literary modernism, 20th-century British and Irish Fiction, and the relationship between philosophy and fiction. I am currently fascinated by the fact that James Joyce thought it was a good idea to translate a section of Finnegans Wake into Basic English.
My focus is on contemporary poetry and poetics, both as a scholar and practitioner. In the graduate program, I teach courses on 20th century poetry movements, contemporary poetry, contemporary women poets, critical theory, and feminist theory.
My fields of teaching and research interest are early-modern poetry and drama (especially in England, and especially Shakespeare and Milton); adaptation studies; the history of material texts; intersections of media philosophy and literary study; and genre studies.
I work at the intersection of early American literature and Indigenous Studies, examining how we can use analytic reading and writing to break apart the colonial projects of eighteenth-century texts.
I teach courses in creative writing and contemporary literature that address exile, noncitizenship, and mobility. My fields of research and writing are exile, Tibetan nationalism, Literature of the Himalayas, and postcolonial literature and theory (with a focus on South Asia).