Friday April 5, 4:00 - 7:00 PM, Tawes Fine Arts Building
MFA/Creative Presentations
4:00 - 5:30 PM: Panel 1 - Imagined Realities - Room 1100
Moderator: Sarah Treadwell
1. “Sea Change,” Rachel Waugh, University of Maryland, College Park
2. “Polar Bear,” William Fargason, University of Maryland, College Park
3. “The Big Murk,” Taylor Adams, University of Maryland, College Park
4. Selected Poetry, M. K. Foster, University of Maryland, College Park
5:45 - 7:00 PM: Plenary Panel - Room 1100
Anguished Realities
Moderator: Taylor Adams
1. “Dislocation, Dismemberment, and (Dis)reality in the ‘Captivating Plays’ of Kia Corthron,”
Professor Faedra Carpenter, University of Maryland, College Park (Theatre, Dance and
Performance Studies)
Professor Faedra Carpenter, University of Maryland, College Park (Theatre, Dance and
Performance Studies)
2. Selections from The Man Who Walked Away, Professor Maud Casey, University of
Maryland, College Park (Creative Writing)
Maryland, College Park (Creative Writing)
7:00 PM: Reception - 3rd Floor Lobby
Saturday April 6,Tawes Fine Arts Building
8:00 - 9:00 AM: Breakfast / Registration - 2nd Floor Lobby
9:00 - 10:30 AM: Panel 1
A. Constructed Bodies - Moderator: Andy Black - Room 3248
1. “The Intersection of the Everyday and the Fantastic in Body Swap Fiction from 1882 to
1931,” Kara Wedekind, Johns Hopkins University
2. “Against Depth Hermeneutics: Describing the Performance of Subjectivity and Gender at
the Surface of ‘Circe,’” John Macintosh, University of Maryland, College Park
3. “Marvell’s Marvels: The Simulacrum of Gender and Sexuality,” Michele E. Reed,
Salisbury University
4. “Technology and Personhood throughout the Human Trajectory: A Survey of
Frankenstein as seen by Humanism, Transhumanism and Posthumanism,” Nimisha
Patel, Rutgers University-Newark
B. (Dis)reality through Broken Time - Moderator: Nate Underland - Room 3250
1. “J. Alfred Prufrock: A Modernist Re-Formulation of Reality,” Christian Detisch, Virginia
Commonwealth University
2. “Second Chances and Simulacrum in Jane Austen’s Persuasion,” Kelli Wilhelm, Salisbury
University
3. “Billy Pilgrim’s Flexible Reality,” Tatiana Cvetkovic, Rutgers University School of Arts and
Sciences, Camden
4. “Constitutive Subjectivity and the Redemption of History,” Sarah Snyder, School of Visual
Arts (New York)
C. Traveling Identities - Moderator: Christin Taylor - Room 3252
1. “A Ship Built to Scale in Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman,” Sara Burnett,
University of Maryland, College Park
2. “‘The Danger of the Single Story’ Revisited: The Resurgence of the Comic Negro in the
Contemporary Media and Cultural Imagination,” Christopher Allen Varlack, Morgan State
University
3. “‘Who Did That to You?’: Hypertext Thinking and Cultural Production in Django
Unchained,” Maureen Pearson, Howard University
10:30 - 10:45 AM: Coffee Break - 3rd Floor Lobby
10:45 AM - 12:15 PM: Panel 2
A. Transgressing Gendered Boundaries - Moderator: Rachel Vorona - Room 3248
1. “Constructing Alternate Realities in Chaucer’s Fabliaux,” Chelsea Lambert Skalak,
University of Virginia
2. “Modern Medieval Attitudes: Constructing Sexual Consent,” Nicole Sybesma, Rutgers
University-Newark
3. “‘Blessed Malelessness’: Transgressing Female Spaces in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,”
Shaunté Montgomery, Howard University
4. “Living Within the Paradox: An Analysis of the Effects of Binary Logic in Traveller
Communities of the United Kingdom,” Rhiannon Basile, Rutgers University- Newark
B. Fictive Spaces - Moderator: Kirk Greenwood - Room 3250
1. “The Urban Prairie: Terministic Screens and the Making of Place in Urban Land Use
Narratives,” Garrett Stack, Carnegie Mellon University
2. “A curious neutrality of perception”: V. S. Naipaul’s Nomadic Impressionism in The Mimic
Men,” Nathaniel Underland, University of Maryland, College Park
3. “Stevens’ and Williams’ Use of Containers Within an Imaginative Reality,” William
Fargason, University of Maryland, College Park
C. Shattered Realities - Moderator: Jeremy Metz - Room 3252
1. “Water as Death and Life: Traces of the Atlantic Slave Trade in New World Funerary and
Baptismal Rites,” Isabella Proia, Georgetown University
2. “An ‘Anti-Semitic Jew’? How Gertrude Stein Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Philippe
Pétain,” Alyssa White, Rutgers University-Newark
3. “Trauma and Witness / in a Body / of Writing: A Performance Theory Analysis of Carolyn
Forché’s ‘Letter to a City Under Siege,’” M. K. Foster, University of Maryland,
College Park
4. “Excavating the Real: How to Read Trauma,” Jeremy Metz, University of Maryland,
College Park
12:15 - 1:00 PM: Lunch - 2nd Floor Lobby
1:15 - 2:45: Plenary Panel - Ulrich Recital Hall
(Dis)reality: Past to Present
Moderator: Professor Lee Konstantinou
1. “Rhetoric Unlimited: The Medieval Greek Rhetoricians on Language and Reality,”
Professor Vessela Valiavitcharska, University of Maryland, College Park
(English/Rhetoric)
2. “To Be Born in Flames: Lesbian-Feminist Horizons at the Dawn of the Reagan Era,”
Professor Christina B. Hanhardt, University of Maryland, College Park (American
Studies/Queer/Gender Studies)
3. “What Was Digital Humanities?” Professor Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of
Maryland, College Park (English/Digital Humanities)
2:45 - 3:00 PM: Coffee Break - 2nd Floor Lobby
3:00 - 4:30 PM: Panel 3
A. Cyber-Reality - Moderator: Porter Olsen - Room 3248
1. “The House of Her: An Altered Text,” Charity Hancock and Kathryn Skutlin, University of
Maryland, College Park
2. “Kurzweil, the Cyberman,” Kevin Kilroy, Rutgers University-Newark
3. “Achievements as Personal Archives of Memory and Experience in Open World Video
Games,” Nigel Lepianka, University of Maryland, College Park
4. “Participatory Television: What is Meant by Access?” Eva Hageman, New York University
B. Deconstructing Orientalism - Moderator: Jonathan Williams - Room 3250
1. “Vathek with the Episodes: Erotic Utopia Imagined,” Travis Chi Wing Lau, University of
Pennsylvania
2. “Alterity in the Mughal Court: The ‘Firang’ Physician and the White Mughal Emperor,”
Sukshma Vedere, George Washington University
3. “A Doppelganger in Ottava Rima: Byron’s Beppo and the Metaphysics of Parody,” Frank
D. Simpson, Morgan State University
C. Discursive Realities - Moderator: Cameron Mozafari - Room 3252
1. “From Ovid to VOID,” Stephen Rojcewicz, University of Maryland, College Park
2. “Deconstructing the Urban Frontier: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Role of Media Discourse
in the Revitalization of Braddock, Pennsylvania,” Amanda Berardi, Carnegie Mellon
University
3. “The Birth of a Nation, The Birth of an Image: Post Emancipation Rhetoric, President
Obama, and the Language of the ’Other,’” Sherri M. Arnold, Morgan State University
4:45 - 6:00 PM: Reception - 2nd Floor Lobby
Best Paper Award Presentation
**This event is funded in part by your Graduate Student Activities Fee.**
Best Paper Award Presentation
**This event is funded in part by your Graduate Student Activities Fee.**