Student Bios

Alicia Sakers graduated from West Chester University with a BS in Secondary Education: English Literature and a Minor in Film Criticism. After graduation, she accepted a job in the Upper Darby School District where she currently teaches ninth grade. She finds that her enthusiasm for digging deeper with texts has been well-received by her students, and hopes to bring what she will learn at Villanova into her classroom. A course called "Criminality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature" fermented Alicia's decision that graduate school was a must. While writing for that course, she particularly enjoyed looking at gender, internal and external destruction, and power within the confines of crime literature and film. She wants to continue within this area of interest in addition to broadening her options/passions while at Villanova. Alicia spends her small amount of free time binge-watching TV, reading, going to small venue concerts, and walking her lovable puppy, Pippin.

Matthew graduated from the University of North Texas in 2016 with a BA in English, concentrating in Rhetoric and Composition. He moved to Philadelphia in June of 2017, and has been loving every minute of it. For the past two years, he has worked as a Technical Recruiter with various companies in Texas and Philly. It was reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a sophomore that convinced him to go to grad school. His senior year, he took classes in Victorian Literature and Modernist Literature, and he is particularly interested in studying those periods in graduate school, especially the latter. When he’s not reading, you can find him looking for new places to eat, or spending time at some of Philly’s best coffee shops. His favorite book of all time is WG Sebald’s Austerlitz .

Caitlin graduated summa cum laude from Drew University, double majoring in English and Environmental Studies & Sustainability. Her undergraduate work helped fuel her passion for 19th Century literature and themes of nature, the Gothic, and Romanticism. One of her favorite classes was an independent study she crafted to learn more about the Language of Flowers across time and culture. Her environmental capstone included a discussion of agriculture's influence on the honeybee population decline. The English major capstone resulted in her essay of authors' various uses of nature to express societal values and fears of the time. She worked at a number of places in her college town, including the local museum, as a research assistant, and in the municipal building, where she helped write the recycling grant for the town for three years, as well as directed the nearby nature camp. Her favorite activities include photography, baking, hiking, finding even more plants to fit on h

Tom Higgins received his BA from Temple University in 2017. While at Temple, he studied as a double major in English and Classical Languages, and wrote for Hyphen, the university’s undergraduate literary magazine. Since then, he has worked as a writer and editor on print and marketing industry magazines at a Philadelphia-based media company. In his free time, he plays guitar, travels, and goes to as many concerts as are physically and fiscally possible. He is also a poet, and regularly submits work to print and online publications. Some of his academic interests include poetry, nature writing, travel literature, postcolonial literature, and Caribbean and Latin American literatures. He looks forward to continuing his studies at Villanova.

Sarah Beth Gilbert received her BA in English Literature with a Minor in Spanish from Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, GA only a couple of hours away from her hometown of Augusta, GA and her favorite city Atlanta, GA. After graduation she moved to Newark, NJ to spend a year of service (that turned into two) for AmeriCorps working at Great Oaks Legacy Charter High School. At Great Oaks she began as an English tutor and Teaching Assistant and eventually transitioned to Lead ELA Tutorial Curriculum Writer and Coordinator. She hopes to continue to help make reading and writing fun (or at least bearable) by aligning her students’ interests with the nuances of studying Literature. In undergrad Sarah Beth wrote a thesis on Gender and Sexuality in  Doctor Who  which focused on the role of the companion and how it has evolved since the 2005 reboot in both terms of representation and character depth. She also served as  The Peacock’s Feet  Co-Editor in Chief for GCSU’s

Avni Sejpal received a BA in English from St. Xavier’s College in Bombay, India. Before coming to Villanova, she spent several years in New York working in scholarly and independent publishing as well as nonprofit media production. Most recently, she was an editor at  Boston Review , where she commissioned and edited critical essays on literature, race, and global feminisms. Her academic interests lie at the intersections of colonial and postcolonial literature, feminist and queer theory, and histories of South Asia. Beyond her academic pursuits, Avni is interested in food cultures, South Asian music, film, and popular genres of fiction. She is looking forward to calling Philly home for a while.

Daniella graduated  cum laude from Gettysburg College in 2018 with a Bachelors degree in English and Art History. During her time at Gettysburg, she served as the editor-in-chief of the award-winning student run newspaper, The Gettysburgian . Daniella also worked for the Women's & LGBTQA Resource Center, as well as the on-campus art gallery, Schmucker Art Gallery, where she assisted with curation, installation, and giving tours. Her love for both visual art and literature guided her academic pursuits throughout her undergraduate career.  Daniella's senior thesis focused on the poetry of Frank O'Hara and the ways in which his poetry works in conversation with the contemporary art movements of that moment: Abstract Expressionism, The New York School, and Pop Art. Working at the intersection between the two disciplines inspired her pursuit for graduate research, as she hopes to continue to study the ways literary and visual analysis work together. Daniella's liter