Alexandra Edwards won the English Department’s Margaret Powell Esmonde Memorial Award for Best Graduate Essay in 2012. Alex, a second year English master’s student and the Falvey Communication and Outreach Teams’ graduate assistant, wrote her winning essay, “Like Some Monstrous Stealthy Cat: Queerness and Felinomorphism in Charles Brockden Brown, Henry James, and H.P. Lovecraft”  for Dr. Michael Berthold’s “American Gothic” class during fall 2011. Alex, who recently defended her graduate thesis, will begin a PhD program in English at the University of Georgia in August.

Professor Esmonde, an English professor at Villanova from 1974 until her death in 1983, taught Early Modern literature, science fiction and children’s literature.