BYU's annual English Symposium will be held on March 19th and 20th, 2015. The symposium boasts student presentations in American and British literature, Rhetoric and Composition, English teaching, and Creative Writing. Come and celebrate with us the hard work that our students have put into their research and creative works in this past year.

In the spirit of this year’s theme, “englishx” we are looking towards the future of our discipline by adding new flash-presentation formats to enliven our event; and by preserving student work beyond the symposium through BYU's ScholarsArchive archive. Our symposium will live on beyond the event itself.

Our symposium has been expanded to a two-day event to allow for students to present complete (8-10 page) research papers or creative works of up to 15 minutes. Other highlights include

• A special keynote presentation by BYU English alumnus, Jonny Ebbert (creative director at Blizzard Entertainment)
• A 3MP (three-minute paper) competition, and
• a launch party for English+ (a preprofessional emphasis being added to the English program in 2015)

See a printable (PDF) version of the program here.

Thursday

Registration
8:00-9:00 B003 JFSB

----x----

3MP Competition

Session 01 - Undergraduate Students
9:00-9:45 B101 JFSB
Judges: Dr. Danette Paul; Dr. Paul Jamie Horrocks

1. Kennerley Roper, “You Grow This Way: An Analysis of Mother and Daughter Selves in Anne Sexton’s Poem “Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman””
2. Corinn Pratt, “American Masculinity as Presented by Walt Whitman”
3. Katherine Neish, “Intentionality and Rhetorical Leadership”
4. Brittany Strobelt, “Memory--Midnight’s Children’s Locus of Truth”
5. Pablo Tapia, “What of ‘Kuba Khan’?”
6. Conor Hilton, “The Castle of Otranto Within the Christmas Ghost Story Tradition”
7. Hannah Walker, “‘The Black Cat’: A Reflection of Pre-Civil War Slavery”
8. Melissa Morgan, “Principles of Poetics and Epiphany in ‘The Dead’: Using Edgar Allan Poe to Understand James Joyce”
9. Todd Workman, “Pervasive Parable: Christ and Ligeia”
10. Alan Hickey, “Seeing and Not Believing: A Critique of Post-Civil War America’s Loss of Faith Through a Spectral Medium”
11. Marissa Compton, “Black Intellectuals: The Transient Space of Cultural Translation”
12. Monica Allen, “Oz: A Reflection of America”

Session 02 - Graduate Students
9:00-9:45 B105 JFSB
Judges: Dr. Aaron Eastley; Dr. Paul Westover

1. Devon Cook, “Kenneth Burke and Obama as Poet”
2. Lauren Fine, “The Power of Speech: Speech-Recognition Software in the Writing Process”
3. Brittany Rebarchik, “Pushing the Boundaries of Nature: The Baconian Thread in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”
4. Gina Schneck, “The Blind Can See: Revisiting Disability in Jane Eyre”
5. Ian McArthur, “The Other Prisoner of Thornfield”
6. Jared Pence, “Searching for Ethics: the Flaneur, the Face, and the Other in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’”
7. Rachel Gilman, “Redefining Atonement in the Eco-Dystopian World of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake”

----x----

Keynote Speaker
Jonny Ebbert, Blizzard Entertainment
10:00-11:00 1060 HBLL

----x----

TRADITIONAL PANELS

Session 01 - Mothers and Masculinity
11:30-1:00 B114 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Kimberly Johnson

1. Corinn Pratt, “American Masculinity as Presented by Walt Whitman”
2. Wesley Turner, “A Holler to My Sisters on Welfare: Mothers in the Works of Shakur and Hughes”
3. Kennerly Roper, “You Grow This Way: An Analysis of Mother and Daughter Selves in Anne Sexton’s Poem ‘Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman’”

Session 02 - Scary Stories
11:30-1:00 B150 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Dennis Perry

1. Audra Coleman, “Images of Horror: Tracing Frankenstein’s fear-myth through comic books and graphic novels”
2. Conor Hilton, “The Castle of Otranto Within the Christmas Ghost Story Tradition”
3. Brittany Rebarchik, “Pushing the Boundaries of Nature: The Baconian Thread in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”

Session 03 - The Romantics
11:30-1:00 3082 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Jesse Crisler

1. RoseE Hadden, “‘That Lady, Sir, is Her Own Mistress’: Evelina’s Condemnation of Rape Culture”
2. Pablo Tapia, “What of ‘Kubla Khan?’”
3. Kandace Wheelwright, “The Mingled Traumas of Christabel”

Session 04 - Rhetoric
11:30-1:00 4186 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Kristine Hansen

1. Natasha Mickelson, “Religion in Young Adult Contemporary Realistic Fiction”
2. Devon Cook, “Kenneth Burke and Obama as Poet”
3. Katherine Neish, “Intentionality and Rhetorical Leadership”

Session 05 - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
11:30-1:00 4116 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Jill Rudy

1. Monica Allen, “Oz: A Reflection of America”
2. Isaac Lyman, "Pay No Attention to That Man: Government Crimes in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”
3. Camille Pay, “Baum’s Dorothy and the Power of Identity”

Session 06 - Fiction Reading: Undergraduate Contest Winners
11:30-1:00 B37 JFSB
Chair: Dr. John Bennion

----x----

Session 07 - The Brontes
1:15-2:45 B112 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Leslee Thorne-Murphy

1. Gina Schneck, “The Blind Can See: Revisiting Disability in Jane Eyre”
2. Andrew Doub, “‘I Could Do with Less Caressing’: Sexual Violence in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”
3. Ian McArthur, “The Other Prisoner of Thornfield”

Session 08 - Memory
1:15-2:45 B150 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Brett McInelly

1. Emily Kempton, “Memory, Forgetting, and Archive: The Reality of Sherlock Holmes’ Genius”
2. Brittany Strobelt, “Memory--Midnight’s Children’s Locus of Truth”
3. Marie-Reine Pugh, “A Man of This Time: Memory and Sheriff Bell’s First-Person Narratives in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men”

Session 9 - Poetry Reading: Undergraduate Contest Winners
11:30-1:00 4116 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Lance Larsen

Session 10 - Faith and Religion
1:15-2:45 4186 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Miranda Wilcox

1. Heather White, “The ‘Wonderment’ of Oz: Theosophy and Religious Leadership in Oz”
2. Alan Hickey, “Seeing and Not Believing: A Critique of Post-Civil War America’s Loss of Faith Through a Spectral Medium”
3. Todd Workman, “Pervasive Parable: Christ and Ligeia”

Session 11 - Race and Religion
1:15-2:45 3082 JFSB
Chair: Dr. David Fife

1. Marissa Compton, “Black Intellectuals: The Transient Space of Cultural Translation”
2. William Guajardo, “Evil Deity: How White Racist Christians Made God Bad”
3. Baylee Vasquez, “Politics and Theology of Flannery O’Connor: How They Coincide in ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’”

----x----

English+ Launch Event
3:00-4:30 B190 JFSB

----x----

Friday

TRADITIONAL PANELS

Session 12 - Teaching Composition
8:30-10:00 B103 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Dawan Coombs

1. Caroline Howard, “The College Writing Experience for High School Students on the Margins”
2. Lauren Fine, “The Power of Speech: Speech-Recognition Software in the Writing Process”
3. Tonya Vincent, “Peer Groups: Facilitating Knowledge Transfer in FYC”

Session 13 - Fiction and Poetry
8:30-10:00 B150 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Patrick Madden

1. Benjamin Blackhurst, “Collection of Poems”
2. Shelli Spotts, “Staged”

Session 14 - Utopia/Dystopia
8:30-10:00 B132 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Bruce Young

1. Nikkita Walker, “Timshel: The Monomyth in East of Eden”
2. Alyssa Devey, “The Failure of a Utopia in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and Thoreau’s Walden”
3. Rachel Gilman, “Redefining Atonement in the Eco-Dystopian World of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake”

Session 15 - Writing 150 Contest Winners
8:30-10:00 B60 JFSB
Chair: Lisa Johnson

1. Mary Mortenson "Gloria and the Bear"
2. Jenny Wilson "Intentionally Bare"
3. Marlene Schmidt "Stop the Brony Hate"
4. Hailey Payne "Don't Judge an E-book by Its Cover"

Session 16 - Nonfiction Reading: Undergraduate contest Winners
8:30-10:00 B135 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Joey Franklin

----x----

Session 17 - Selected Papers from the Forthcoming Issue of Criterion: Dostoyevsky, Poe, and Swift
10:15-11:45 B114 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Emron Esplin

1. Hannah Vinchur “Levinas’s ‘Face’ and ‘Other’ in The Idiot: Embodiment and Betrayal”
2. Chelsea Lee “The Treachery of the Persistence of Memory: An Analysis of the Manipulative Narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Ligeia’”
3. Tyler Moore “Urbanized Prostitution in Swift’s ‘Beautiful Nymph’”

Session 18 - Non-fiction
10:15-11:45 3082 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Jon Ostenson

1. Christi Leman, “In the Shallows”
2. Elizabeth Brady, “On Fear, Food, and Flight”
3. Mel Henderson, "On Virtue: What Bathsheba Taught Me About My Maligned Sisters"

Session 19 - Fairytale Fiction
10:15-11:45 4186 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Jill Rudy

1. Lauren Matthews, “The Red Path”
2. Jenna Cooper, “Of Embers and Glass: A Cinderella Retelling”

Session 20 - Linguistic Meditations
10:15-11:45 4116 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Phil Snyder

1. Cami Richey, “The Aesthetic Life View in Elliott Smith’s Either/Or”
2. Alexandra Harker, “Wild Tongues in Education: Anzaldua, Linguistic Oppression, and Power Culture”
3. Melissa Morgan, “Principles of Poetics and Epiphany in ‘The Dead’: Using Edgar Allan Poe to Understand James Joyce”

Session 21 - Religion Across the Centuries
10:15-11:45 *TBA*
Chair: Dr. Keith Lawrence

1. Megan Toone, “The Folks of the Postapocalypse: The Road, Religion, and Folklore Studies”
2. Rachel Gessel, “Religiosity in ‘The Jilting of Granny Weatherall’ by Katherine Anne Porter”
3. Katherine Nelson, “‘My wonderful less than’: The Inadequacy and Necessity of Metaphor in Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine”

----x----

Session 22 - Selected Papers from the Forthcoming Issue of Criterion: Milton and Shakespeare
12:00-1:30 B32 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Emron Esplin

1. Hadley Griggs “Can There Be the Ideal Coffeehouse?: John Milton as Proponent and Critic of the Public Sphere”
2. Brittany Strobelt “De-suturing Milton’s Eden: Navigating from an Althusserian Bipartite System to a Badiouian Set in Paradise Lost”
3. Adam Anderson “Signifier, Signified, and the Nature of Madness in The Winter’s Tale”

Session 23 - Fiction and Christianity
12:00-1:30 B62 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Zina Petersen

1. Emma Natter, “Ruth”
2. Madeleine Dresden, “His Waxen Wings”

Session 24 - Edgar Allan Poe
12:00-1:30 B103 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Dennis Perry

1. Jean Little, “Poe and Eternal Recurrence”
2. Jared Pence, “Searching for Ethics: the Flaneur, the Face, and the Other in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’”
3. Bethanie Sonnefeld, “Poe and the Will”

Session 25 - James Joyce
12:00-1:30 B132 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Paul Westover

1. Kimball Gardner, “James Joyce and His War With the Catholic Church”
2. Lesli Mortensen, “Is Literature Above Politics? James Joyce as an Author of ‘Political Enthusiasm’”
3. William Chandler, “Death and Irish Revivalism in ‘The Dead’”

Session 26 - Multi-Genre Reading: Graduate Contest Winners
12:00-1:30 B150 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Joey Franklin

----x----

3MP Competition

Session 03 - Undergraduate Students II
1:45-3:00 B192 JFSB
Chair: Dr. Danette Paul; Dr. Jamie Horrocks

1. Ariel Peterson, “Real Lord of the Dance: Males Dancing Despite Stereotypes”
2. Alison Siggard, “Wayward Sons: Modern Mythology in Supernatural”
3. Sarah Johnson, “Pain, Death, and Nazis: The Surprisingly Beautiful Function Death Plays as Narrator in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief”
4. Kimberly Austin, “Presence in Absence in Shakespeare’s King Lear”
5. Emily Sullivan, “Austen’s Persuasion and Sexuality”
6. Madeline Thatcher, “The Architect and the Poet: The Accidental Partnership of George Herbert and Carlos Borromeo”
7. Jillie Orth, “Eve Transcending Demeaned: The Construct of Female Gender in Paradise Lost”
8. Shane Peterson, “The Happy Warrior: Wordsworthian Poetics and the Georgian Tradition of Siegfried Sassoon’s War Memoirs and Poems”
9. Sarah Perkins, “The Feminization of Witchcraft”
10. Heidi Voss, “A Jungian Argument for Balance: Antony and Cleopatra in Dryden’s All For Love”
11. Catherine Hollingsworth, “The Friendship of Portia and Nerissa: Gender Representation in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice”

( 15 MINUTE BREAK )

1. Kaylee Brooks, “Motherhood and Nationalism in James Joyce’s Authorship”
2. Kirstie Bywater, “L. Frank Baum: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Has Fooled the Masses”
3. Jeffrey Wray, “The Modern Walden”
4. Alex Malouf, “Complacency and Convergence: ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’”
5. Samuel Turner, “Subversion and Containment in Adrienne Rich’s “Aunt Jennifer Tigers’”
6. Jordan Wright, “There’s a Moral Here: Emerging Ethics in The Things They Carried”
7. Abigail Pace, “Doubt and Compulsory Heterosexuality”
8. Chelsea Lee, “The Treachery of the Persistence of Memory: An Analysis of the Manipulative Narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia””
9. Rachel Pullan, ““A Revolutionary Act”: Investigating the Draw of Dystopia in Young Adult Literature”
10. Scott Hill, “Calamus: Homoeroticism or Brotherly Love?”
11. Linea Kemsley, “Metatextual Rape in “The Fall of the House of Usher””

----x----

Awards Ceremony
3:00 B192 JFSB

----x----

Comments/Questions: contact byuenglishsymposium@byu.edu