Photo credit: Paige Critcher.

Villanova University’s 2023 Literary Festival will be featuring Tsering Yangzom Lama, who will read from selections of her works on Thursday, March 16, at 7 p.m. in Falvey’s Speakers’ Corner. Tsering Yangzom Lama was born in Kathmandu, Nepal, and earned an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a BA in Creative Writing and International Relations from The University of British Columbia. She currently resides in Vancouver, Canada.

Her debut novel, We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies (Bloomsbury, 2022) is a New York Times Summer Reads Pick and a finalist for The Scotiabank Giller Prize. It is also longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and The Toronto Book Award. She is a co-founder of Lhakar Diaries, an English-language blog for Tibetan youth in exile. Her other works have made appearances in The Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review, Grain, Kenyon Review, Vela, LaLit, and Himal Southasian. She is also a 2018 Tin House Novel Scholar.

Dig deeper and explore the links below for more on her work:

• Tsering Yangzom Lama’s official website
• Tsering Yangzom Lama’s Twitter and Instagram
• We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies (2022)
• Lhakar Diaries 
• “Q&A with Tsering Yangzom Lama” (Victoria Festival of Authors)
• “Tibetan author Tsering Yangzom Lama opens up about immigrating to Canada” (The Globe and Mail)
• “Tsering Yangzom Lama on Cultural Appreciation Versus Cultural Engagement” (Literary Hub)
• “Tibet Talks: A Reading and Conversation with Author Tsering Yangzom Lama” (International Campaign for Tibet)
• “Tsering Yangzom Lama: We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies w/ Jay Neugeboren” (Books Are Magic)

Julia Wagner ‘26 CLAS is a Communication major from New Hampshire (Go Patriots!). She works as a Communication & Marketing Assistant in Falvey Library.

How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol

Alice Dailey, PhD.

Please join us on Wednesday, Nov. 9 from 7:30-8:30 p.m. in Falvey Library’s Room 205 for an event titled “Alice Dailey’s How To Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol, A Conversation and Celebration.” You can also REGISTER HERE to join virtually on the evening of the event.

Together Alice Dailey, PhD, Professor, Department of English, Villanova University;  Peter Holland PhD, McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies, University Of Notre Dame; and Melissa Sanchez, PhD, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania will discuss Alice Dailey’s recently published book, How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol (Cornell University Press, 2022).

How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol studies human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. Dailey takes as her principal objects of inquiry Shakespeare’s English history plays, describing them as reproductive mechanisms by which living replicas of dead historical figures are regenerated in the present and re-killed. Considering the plays in these terms exposes their affinity with a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and interacting with dead things—technologies such as literary doppelgängers, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imaging, glitch art, capital punishment machines, and cloning.

This ACS-approved event is co-sponsored by the Department of English and Falvey Library. Light refreshments will be served.

Drama and Civility: James Shirley in the Age of Charles III

Please join us for the 2022 Outstanding Faculty Research Award Lecture featuring recipient Lauren Shohet, PhD, on Tuesday, Nov. 15 at 1 p.m. in Falvey Library’s room 205.

Dr. Shohet, Professor, Department of English, will give a presentation that highlights the extensive research that led her to win the coveted Outstanding Faculty Research Award in 2022. Her talk is titled “Drama and Civility: James Shirley in the Age of Charles III.”

Lauren Shohet, PhD.

James Shirley (1596-1666) was a dramatist who lived through much drama. Working first in the opulent orbit of King Charles I and in Ireland, then in civil spaces after the king was beheaded, then in the revival of London playhouses after the Restoration of Charles II, Shirley consistently explored ways that writing, performing, and reading plays could promote inclusive, good-humored conversation across sometimes bitter social, economic, and political divides.

Following the talk there will be short Q&A and light refreshments. This ACS-approved event, co-sponsored by Falvey Library and the Office of the Provost, is free and open to the public. Be sure to join us to honor this remarkable awardee!

You can learn more about the Outstanding Faculty Research Award here: https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/provost/awards/research.html

Speaker Information:

Lauren Shohet, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of English at Villanova University. She earned a BA at Oberlin College, a BMus at Oberlin College Conservatory, an MA and PhD at Brown University.

Dr. Shohet’s teaching areas include Early-Modern poetry and drama, Milton, Shakespeare, History of Material Texts, Digital Humanities, Adaptation and Genre Studies.

Some of Dr. Shohet’s recent publications include: “Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and the Idea of the Interface.” (Routledge Companion to the Interface, ed. Paul Budra and Clifford Werier, 2022); “Mediation, Media, and Milton’s Eve” (Milton Studies 63.1, 2021); Gathering Force: Early Modern British Literature in Transition 1557-1623 (co-editor with Kristen Poole, Cambridge University Press, 2019); and Temporality, Genre, and Experience in the Age of Shakespeare: Forms of Time (ed., . Bloomsbury/Arden, 2018).

See Dr. Shohet’s Website for a full listing of her publications and other accomplishments: http://laurenshohet.com/

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

In 1922, The Dial magazine published a strange new poem called “The Waste Land.” Join us on Wednesday, Nov. 16, from 4-5:30 p.m. in Falvey Library’s room 205 to celebrate 100 years of T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece. Villanova English professors Kamran Javadizadeh, PhD, and Megan Quigley, PhD, will give the poem a dramatic reading and toast it with tea and sheet cake! Tarot readings, games of chess, and existential angst will be served.

This ACS-approved event is co-sponsored by the Department of English and Falvey Library.

Please join us on Friday, Nov. 4 from 2-3 p.m. in Falvey Memorial Library’s Room 205 for a Scholarship@Villanova event featuring Alan Drew, MFA, associate professor of English, and director of Villanova University’s Creative Writing Program. Drew will be talking about his recently published book, The Recruit: A Novel (Random House, 2022) in conversation with Jean Lutes, PhD, Professor of English, Luckow Family Endowed Chair in English Literature.

The Recruit follows Detective Benjamin Wade and forensic expert Natasha Betencourt as they try to connect a series of strange and unsettling crimes in Rancho Santa Elena, Southern California, in 1987. Ben soon discovers that a gang of youths may be responsible for the crimes and focuses in on their latest recruit, hoping that he will lead to uncovering the leader and mastermind of the operation. Ultimately, what they uncover is an extensive and powerful network of white supremacists and so much more.

The Recruit is Drew’s third book. His other works include Shadow Man (Random House, 2017) and Gardens of Water (Random House, 2008). Drew received his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. In addition to teaching English classes and directing Villanova University’s Creative Writing Program, he is the director of the Villanova Literary Festival.

This ACS-approved event is co-sponsored by the Department of English, the Creative Writing Program, and Falvey Memorial Library. Light refreshments will be served.

In recognizing Black History Month, here is a list of four rising Black authors who have recently released their debut books. I recommend adding these to your reading list for 2021 and maybe even picking one up to read this month.

Regina Porter’s The Travelers

Regina Porter’s The Travelers is a novel looking at family and race relations between two families over the course of 50 years. With a background as a playwright, Porter published this, her debut novel, in 2020. The novel was named one of the best books of the year by Esquire and was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. 

Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age

Published in late 2019, Kiley Reid’s debut novel Such a Fun Age explores themes of what it means to be family, the complex reality of adulthood, race, and privilege. When Emira Tucker is accused of kidnapping the 2-year-old she is babysitting, both Emira and the girl’s mother’s lives are turned upsidedown. Such a Fun Age was the winner of the African American Literacy Award and a finalist for many other awards.

Robert Jones Jr.’s The Prophets

Robert Jones Jr. has written for many publications, although The Prophets is his debut novel. The Prophets is a piece of historical fiction following two young men on a Deep South plantation. Jones’s novel has received many accolations thus far including The New York Times Book Review‘s Books to Watch for in January and one of O, the Oprah Magazine’s 32 LGBTQ Books That Will Change the Literary Landscape in 2021.

Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks

Nadia Owusu’s first memoir, Aftershocks, is a mix of memoir and cultural history, as Owusu switches between talking of her childhood growing up to a daughter of a United Nations official and of her adult life in New York. Aftershocks explores themes of identity, the meaning of home, and emotional trauma. Owusu’s book was selected as one of 13 new books to watch for in January 2021 by the New York Times, one of Oprah.com’s 55 most anticipated books of 2021, and is the current Read with the Other Jenna book club pick for February.

Jenna Newman is a graduate assistant in Falvey Memorial Library and a graduate student in the Communication Department.