musings | Millersville University Department of English & World Languages

Read more about the professors in Millersville’s English department in this Professor Profiles series!

Professor Andie Petrillo

Professor Andie Petrillo is one of the new professors to join the English department this semester. She is currently teaching ENGL 110, Section 28.

Professor Petrillo’s education journey began at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, MD where she received her Bachelor of Arts. “While I was there, I was a member of the French Club and starred in two plays: The Eumenides (as a Fury) and Clybourne Park (Bev/Kathy)”

After her undergrad program, Professor Petrillo attended Millersville University as a graduate student in the Master of Arts in English Program. While at MU, Professor Petrillo worked in the English office as a graduate assistant, participated in University Theatre’s Fall Musical 2018 Production of Jesus Christ Superstar, and published two of her graduate essays in MUsings: The Graduate Student Journal, and much more. Her graduate essays focus on the “New Woman” in Victorian England and the success of multi-platforms like Pemberley Digital’s “Emma Approved,” respectively.

Elsa the guinea pig visits the English department office.

Professor Petrillo is especially passionate about British Literature (“Jane Austen & James Joyce are amongst my favorite authors”) and American Literature (“F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway are some other faves”). In the future, she hopes to earn her Ph.D. in British Literature and teach British Lit as a tenured professor.

When asked about her favorite aspects of the English major, Professor Petrillo said she loves how the English major creates opportunities for reading different genres of literature and writing creatively. If she could meet any writer, past or present, Professor Petrillo thinks “it would be a tie between Jane Austen (I wrote my grad thesis on Pride and Prejudice), James Joyce (just to pick his brain), or Ernest Hemingway (because he had such a colorful life/interesting personality).” Besides English, Professor Petrillo is interested in history and foreign languages. “Growing up I had an obsession with learning about the Civil War and the Holocaust, so I was pretty interested in history too. I’m also fluent in French so foreign languages interest me too.”

Some of Professor Petrillo’s favorite past-times include reading, watching Netflix, and snuggling with her two guinea pigs named Peanut and Elsa.

MUsings began at Millersville to showcase the research and creative work of graduate students here at the university. We have been publishing work online since 2016, and publishing in print for well over a decade.

All the English graduate assistants of Millersville work on the journal in the fall and spring semesters. Professor Joyce Anderson of English is the faculty adviser of the journal, and this year the English department’s head graduate assistant Maria Rovito is the lead editor. MUsings also collaborates and works with other faculty and staff in graphic design, university marketing, graduate studies, the McNairy Library, Made in Millersville, English, and social work.

If you are interested in getting your graduate work published, submit to the journal. A publication will impress future employers, and if you are interested in going into higher education, a publication helps establish your credibility as a scholar. The journal is both in print and online. If you are accepted into the journal you have the option to present at Made in Millersville in the spring of 2019.

All graduate students at Millersville can submit to the journal, no matter their degree program or discipline. We accept any work that is academic, creative, or artistic. Some examples include academic articles, fiction, poetry, artistic works, and personal essays.

The deadline for the spring 2019 issue is November 1, 2018. Right now we are finishing the spring 2018 issue, and we will start accepting work for the spring 2019 issue in November.

Here is where you can submit your piece and find more information.

Submission Criteria:

Maximum two prose submissions (scholarly or creative) or up to five poems or visual works or art
Less than 10,000 words in length

Please contact either Professor Joyce Anderson or Maria Rovito with any questions.

Thanks to Maria Rovito for her collaboration.

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