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Inaugural Undergraduate Conference a Success
The Department of English’s Undergraduate Conference was billed as an opportunity for the students to take the reins for one day and show the professors what they could do. On the afternoon of April 13th, the students certainly displayed their abilities, along with their enthusiasm for discussing literary texts.
The conference did more than just give the students a chance to show off in a relaxed environment. Participants received valuable public-speaking and leadership experience (not to mention that extra gleam on their resumes because of their efforts being purely voluntary). The conference also gave students and faculty a chance to get to know each other. The conference, organized and run by twelve graduate students, featured an astounding forty-eight presenters, an amazing number of participants for an inaugural year. The presenters ranged from First-Year Writing students to seniors who had just graduated.
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The students addressed topics such as race, religion, colonialism, creative writing, gender, young adult literature, twentieth-century poetry, film studies, and narrative theory. After the conference, Dr. Hill, professor and chair, said, “In one afternoon the packed-house audience was able to see a living cross-section of our program at its best.”
The conference would not have been a success without the wonderful presenters of the 2006 conference. Their courage, presence, hard work, and enthusiasm ensured the life of the conference, enabling future presenters a venue to showcase their work. Look forward to this conference becoming a tradition, an annual event in which we temporarily leave behind the distraction of grades so that every level of our department can come together in order to share with each other our enthusiasm for literature.
—Josh Grant |
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2006 Undergraduate Conference Participants
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Developmental Adventurers
Chair: Jessica Wise
Cassandra Lewis Atilla the Bun: Peter Rabbit, Epic Adventurer or Fable Character?
Jenny Baggett Nontraditional Journey: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony
Donyetta Grimes An Idol of Nature: Anne Bradstreet’s Religious Pilgrimage
Colonization and Race
Chair: Deborah Brons
Jonette Larrew “Troubling Riches”: Comparative Economics in James Baldwin’s “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon”
Andrew Crowe The White Man’s Totem: Language as an Industry of Empire in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Stephanie Fields Dismantling the Puritan/Indian Binary in Mather’s Narrative of Hannah Dustan’s Captivity
Creative Writing: Critical Preface
Chair: Jesse Bishop
Amanda Stevens
Katie Hogan
Amanda Watson
On the Margins
Chair: Jade Kierbow
Kim Allred A Room of One’s Own Yellow Wallpaper: Examining the Relationship between the Narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Virginia Woolf’s Judith Shakespeare
Melanie Beal A Dream Deferred: America and Our Marginalized People
Errica Cooper Only Connect: Patriarchal Oppression and Personal Trauma in Carol Shield’s Unless
Kasey Breedlove Toni Morrison’s Paradise: Writing the Female Body in Marriage Narratives
Foundations
Chair: Jessica Wise
Chris Alexander Life without Father: Paternal Absence in Death of a Salesman and Fightclub
Denise Slavinski Breaking Tapu: A Study of the Correlations between Destiny, Identity, and Tradition in Niki Caro’s Whale Rider
Janey Keene A Portrait of the Artist as a Black Man: Contrasting Joyce’s Stephen to Ellison’s Invisible Narrator
Creative Writing: Fiction
Chair: Jesse Bishop
Casey Pope
Trystan Sheppard
Will Winchester
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Young Adult Literature
Chair: Nancy Blair
Jennifer A. Ragan Conflict in Charity: Moral Complexity in Virginia Euwer Wolff’s Make Lemonade
William North Entwicklungsroman, Bildungsroman, and Cormier’s We All Fall Down
Melody Hart
Twentieth-Century Poetry
Chair: Ted Smith
Rachel Dunn The Signifying Quilt in Kathryn Stripling Byer’s Poetry
Phil Fowler Reconciling Time in the Poetry of Jeffrey Skinner
Heather Lyda Happily Never After: The Fairy Tale of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sleeping Standing Up”
Creative Writing: Poetry
Chair: Jesse Bishop
Nick McRae
Bill Chesser
Patrick Whittier
Trickster Narratives
Chair: Amelia Lewis
Alaina Jobe Through the Looking Glass: Trickster Reflections in The Bell Jar
Laura Sonderman Tricksterism of a Spanish Transvestite: Challenging Notions of Gender and Genre in Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother
Twentieth-Century “Realities”
Chair: Crystal Shelnutt
Megan Payne Doubting Thomas: The Modernist’s Reality in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American
James Robert Saint Finding God: Wind and Chapel Perilous Imagery in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
Margaret Griffin The Mao Factory: Don DeLillo, Andy Warhol and the Mass Image
Alternative Angles
Chair: Paul Johnson
Emmanuel L. Reddish “The World in which I Struggle”: A Gay Man’s Society
Courtney Calvo We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Over It: Homosexuality in The Handmaid’s Tale
Trickster Motifs
Chair: Alaina Jobe
Amelia Lewis Double Binds around Their Feet: Culture, Identity, and the Chinese Woman
Tamara Daniel Tapestries of the Past: Truth & Perception in Eve’s Bayou |
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