Dr. Marguerite Tassi
English professor, 308.865.8117
Five students will be presented top awards on Friday, April 13, at the University of Nebraska at Kearney Student Conference in Literature and Language.
The awards ceremony will take place at 3:15 p.m. in the second floor atrium of Thomas Hall. Outstanding award winners, who were selected by Department of English faculty members, will receive a certificate and monetary prize.
The Outstanding Work in Graduate Studies Award will be presented to Celeste Lempke of Wallace. The Outstanding Undergraduate Essay in Literary Criticism Awards will be presented to Amy Hadley of Kearney and Eliot Wondercheck of Orchard. The Outstanding Applied Research Award and the Outstanding Work in Creative Writing Award will be presented to Lacey McPhillips of Lindsay. The Outstanding Essay in Expository Writing Award will be presented to Danielle Cook of St. Paul.
The awards ceremonies will be the final event of the day-long conference. The UNK English faculty selected papers to be presented from among student submissions. Papers submitted by UNK English students were selected to be presented during five sessions at the conference. All sessions will be held in Thomas Hall.
The themes, locations and faculty chairs for each of the five sessions are listed below.
Session One: 9-10 a.m.
Heroes and Monsters in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Room 106). Chair: Dr. Marguerite Tassi, professor
Brittany Seawall of Grand Island, “Reap What You Sow”; Jami Scott of Belgrade, “True Anglo-Saxon Heroes”; Rochelle Bonner of Madison, “Grendel: A Species All His Own”; and Lacey Rogers of Kearney, “Grendel: That Was One Mysterious Monster.”
Madness, Dystopia, and Poverty (Room 107). Chair: Dr. Kathryn Benzel, professor.
Rachel Nozicka of Ravenna, “The Pertinence of Plurality”; Sarah Hoefler of Firth, “The Odyssey: Finding Justice Within the Epic”; and Amy Hadley of Kearney, “Gothic Themes in The Castle of Ontranto.”
Session Two: 10:10-11:10 a.m.
Session on the Holocaust (Room 113). Chair: Julie Flood, senior lecturer.
Sarah Maginnis of Odell, “Influences on the Holocaust”; Sydney Weber of Burwell, “Women in the Holocaust”; Tosha Foulk of Giltner, “The Evian Conference”; and Danielle Cook of St. Paul, “The Progression in Execution Style.”
Slaughter and the Supernatural in Classic Literature (Room 106). Chair: Dr. Marguerite Tassi, professor.
Laura McAtee of Wahoo, “Bedlam Onstage: The Mad Competition for the Elizabethans’ Pennies”; Celeste Lempke of Wallace, “Defying Genre: Foucauldian Subjectivity in Saunders’ ‘Jon’ and Palahniuk’s ‘Pygmy’”; Michelle Bixenmann of Grand Island, “Poverty, Drugs, and Consequences in the Works of Lins and Llosa.”
Session Three: 11:15 a.m.- 12:15 p.m.
Visual Storytelling: Picture Books and Graphic Novels (Room 107). Chair: Dr. Susan Honeyman, associate professor.
Kayla Kimberling of Fort Collins, Colo., “The Quest for Truth”; Jacob Sandman of Kearney, “Is Batman a True Superhero?”; Lindsay English of Summer, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”; and Lacey McPhillips of Lindsay, “More Than Words: Using Wordless Picture Books in Elementary Classrooms.”
Creative Writing (Room 106). Chair: Julie Flood, senior lecturer.
Lacey McPhillips of Lindsay, “The Voice of the Irish: Reflections of Irish Immigrants Through Poetry”; Katrina Rosberg of Plainview, “Umbrella Assassin”; Rachel Nozicka of Ravenna, “Broken Hearts”; Brittany Cudaback of Kearney, “Are You Thirsty?”; and Joel Cardenas of Kearney, “Family Matters.”
Session Four: 1:25- 2:25 p.m.
Transcendentalism to Modernism: U.S. Literature in Perspective (Room 115). Chair: Dr. Robert Luscher, professor.
Rochelle Bonner of Madison, “The Unattained Transcendence of Bartleby and the Lawyer”; Amy Hadley of Kearney, “From Alienation to Absolution”; and Celeste Lempke of Wallace, “The Underlying Balance of Imbalance: Structure in Willa Cather’s ‘The Professor’s House.’”
Fate, Hope and Love: Seeing Through Time in the Arthurian Legend (Room 106). Chair: Dr. Rebecca Umland, professor.
Ashley Leever of Bayard, “The Archetypal Mother of the Demise of Camelot”; Eliot Wondercheck of Orchard, “The Coming and Passing of Arthur: An Anagogical Account According to Geoffrey, Malory and Tennyson”; and Brittany Seawall
of Grand Island, “The Revival of Merlin.”
Session Five: 2:30- 3:35 p.m.
Sigma Tau Delta Parodies of Children’s and Adolescent Literature (Atrium, second floor). Chair: Dr. Susan Honeyman, associate professor. Five students will present the parodies. The five, listed in alphabetical order by hometown, include: Grand Island– Brittany Seawall, Kearney– Aaron Rothenberger and Shaye Champ, Omaha– Justin Zyla and Wallace– Celeste Lempke
