Department of English

On April 12, 2024, the Department of English hosted the English Honors Symposium, a special event that featured English majors who produced a substantial scholarly research project in close consultation with a faculty member through the Honors Program. Professor Dagmawi Woubshet (pictured at the podium) was the 2023–24 Director of the Program.

The following students completed Honors Thesis projects and presented at the event:

• Margaret Arfaa, “Mr. Wrong: George Eliot on Morality and Marriage” (Faculty advisor: Professor Pearl Brilmyer)
• Lyn Donnell, “Perseus to Percy Jackson: Adaptation of the Epic Hero in Oral Tradition, Literature, and Popular Media” (Faculty advisor: Professor Caz Batten)
• Janay Draughn, “When Her Haints & Bodies Are Blue: A Southern Black Feminist Poetic of Haunting in Bernice McFadden’s Nowhere Is a Place” (Faculty advisor: Professor Margo Crawford)
• Emma Herndon, “Intertexting: Relationality and Communication Technology in Modern Irish Literature” (Faculty advisor: Professor Jean-Michel Rabaté)
• Sunny Xiaoyang Hua, “Enclosed Spaces and (Un)successful Connections: The Politics of Psychoanalysis and Relationality in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Time of Michael K” (Faculty advisor: Professor Jed Esty)
• Cagney Kelshaw, “Dweorgas and Dvergir: Disease, Disorder, and Deviance in Old English and Norse Literature” (Faculty advisor: Professor Caz Batten)
• Allyson Nelson, “Going, Going, Gone? The Mutual Reinforcing of Family and Nostalgia within American Baseball Literature and Film in the 20th Century” (Faculty advisor: Professor Jean-Christophe Cloutier)
• Jean Paik, “Embodied Resistance: Collectivizing the Body in the Literatures of Korean Women Factory Workers” (Faculty advisor: Professor Chi-ming Yang)