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 pupp...

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 .