2008/2010 Predoctoral Teaching Fellow
Jacquilyn Weeks
Jacquilyn Weeks is a Ph.D candidate in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame also working towards a minor in Gender Studies. She completed her undergraduate work at the University of Western Maryland in Budapest, Hungary and the University of Aberdeen in Aberdeen, Scotland where she received her First Class M.A. in English in 2005. While at Aberdeen, she received the Meston Prize and the Lucy Fellowship for her academic work, the Margaret Dougherty Prize for her essay on Geoffrey Hill’s “The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz,” and the Walter Kier Memorial Prize for her M.A. dissertation “‘Literary Sins’: Aesthetic and Cultural Subversions in the Poetry of Robert Service.”
She arrived at Notre Dame in 2005 with a Mellon Fellowship and a Diversity Fellowship, where she is currently affiliated with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and the Gender Studies Program, and has worked as an editorial assistant for both The Notre Dame Review and Religion & Literature from 2005-2008. Her dissertation The Whole Enchanted String: Fairy Tales in 20c. British Women’s Poetry describes the way in which a century of female poets from Anna Wickham and Charlotte Mew to Grace Nichols and Carol Ann Duffy have made use of the fairy tale genre as an empowering imaginative space in which to “make new myths” and reframe the possibilities of imagination, but also as a historically rich frame of reference from which to speak about trauma and exclusion, the sense of being walled up alive in glass and towers.
In the last four years, Weeks has been awarded eleven travel and research grants; this semester she will be presenting papers at international conferences hosted by Duquense University: “Making New Myths?: Archetype and Prototype in the Fairy Tale Poetry of Anna Wickham and Denise Levertov,” and Melbourne University in Australia: “The Grotesque and the Sublime: (Re)forming the Mythic Female Body in The Water Horse and The Fifty Minute Mermaid.” Last spring, she won the Kenneth Davis Award for Folklore Studies for her paper “‘The North Wind of the Fairy Stories Ringing in My Ears’: Fairy Tales in the Poetry of Anne Sexton and Susan Howe.”
Weeks currently holds the Gender Studies Predoctoral Teaching Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, and is acting as the Study Abroad and Academic Internship Advisor for all undergraduate Gender Studies majors and minors. While at Notre Dame she has taught two sections of a composition course titled “Barbie and Ken, or Rambo and Lara Croft? Representations of Gender in American Culture,” from which one of her students won the prestigious McPartlin Award, and a literature course for non-majors, “Reinventing the Fairy Tale” which will shortly become the first course designed by an ND graduate student to be posted on Open Courseware. She is currently enjoying the opportunity to teach an advanced seminar titled “Fairy Tale Metamorphoses: Damsels in Shining Armor and Knights in Distress?”
She contributed an article titled “Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man: A Critique of the Troubles Thriller and the Historical Text.” to the collection Beyond the Anchoring Grounds: More Cross-currents in Irish and Scottish Studies, and published another article titled “‘Blithe Dislocation’: The Spectacle of Metafiction in John Banville’s Birchwood.” in the British journal métier.