English Department
Undergraduate Research Conference
Monday, 30 April 2012
9am – 4pm
HUM 354
Session I
9am-10am
Operations of the Personal
Michael Monescalchi, “On Virtuous Persons: Phillis Wheatley with Jonathan Edwards”
Brian Deinhart, “Poetry and the Eradication of Despair in Rilke’s “Duino Elegies” and
Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death”
Matthew Weiss, “Manic Thought in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own”
Melissa DuQuette, “The Fact”
Chair: Jennifer Greiman
Session II
10am-11am
Broken Systems / Ailing Institutions
Samuel Karpp, “Blade Runner & The End of Biopolitics: Hyper-Immunity, The Camp as
Paradigm, and the Nexus-7”
Jeffrey Izower, “The Postmodern Crisis of the Occupy Wall Street Movement”
Blane DiGiacomo, “Biopolitical Representations of the FLN in Battle of Algiers”
Casandra Mungo, “Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: Identity, American society, and one’s
relation to others”
Chair: Kir Kuiken
Session III
11am-12pm
Master Narratives / Resistant Genres
Grace Hobbs, “Aeschylus’ Tragedy of Law: Kinship, the Oresteia and the Violence of
Democracy”
Martin Cahill, “The Role of Magic in Fantasy Literature: Bridging Reality and Fantasy”
Kate Dias, “Form and Firm: The Role of Responsibility in the Buddenbrook Decline”
Chloe Pfendler, “The American Absurd: Possessive Reason and the Aesthetics of Madness
in the Art of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey”
Chair: Helene Scheck
12pm
Lunch
12:30-1:30pm
Keynote Address
Professor Paul Stasi
University at Albany
“‘Making the Unreal Real’:
Modernism, Imperialism & the Mediated Autobiography of Literary Criticism”
Session IV
2pm-3pm
Twisting Traditions
Sydney Faught, “Going Through Dark to Get to the Light: Enlightenment Doesn’t Care if
You’re Rich or Poor”
Ashley Sperbeck, “ John Donne’s ‘Elegy Nineteen: To His Mistress Going to Bed’ and
gender relations in Renaissance England.”
Danielle Pierre, “These Kinds of Nights… Usually end at Midnight: Nicki Minaj, Taylor
Swift, and Cinderella”
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, “Cardigan Blues”
Chair: Ineke Murakami
Session V
3pm-4pm
Inscribing the Social
Julie Bingham, “Old Smoke: An Irish- American Gangster's Journey from Common Thief to
Senate Seat”
Mohua Chakraborti, “Lahiri’s Custom House: Literary Cosmopolitanism and Community”
Antonia Moy, “The Invisible Man’s Identity Crisis”
Kassie Sarr-Dietershagen, “The Selfness of the Body in a World of Ideas: Hawthorne,
Thoreau, and the Social Context”
Chair: Derik Smith