11th Annual Thesis & Field Exam Symposium

The eleventh annual Thesis and Field Exam Symposium was held on Monday, May 10th, over Zoom. This event was an opportunity to celebrate our spring and summer 2021 graduates, and for them to share excerpts and summaries of their work with friends, family, and colleagues. Completing theses this spring and summer were Mary Cordisco, Caitlyn Dittmeier, Alex Liska, Zac Richards, and Olivia Stowell. Completing field exams were Sarah Beth Gilbert, Catherine Bialkowski, Kathryn Corona, Josh Hsu, Anne Jones, Nick Keough, Carson Schatzman, Shea Szpila, and Lauren Wilke.

During the symposium, Caitlyn Dittmeier spoke about women and gender in Irish poetry and folklore. Catherine Bialkowski spoke about manifestations of motherhood in classic children’s novels (in particular, why are there so many absent mothers in classic children’s books?). Josh Hsu spoke about science fiction and post-human concepts, beginning with Frankenstein and leading up to the present day. Lauren Wilke will be working over the summer about eco-feminism and outlined her project for the group, as well as her motivations for undertaking it. Olivia Stowell wrote about Top Chef (the reality TV program), and how the program depicts and contributes to the performance of race. Sarah Beth Gilbert wrote about feminist and queer science fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, touching on theoretical concepts like cyborg theory and glitch feminism. Finally, Shea Szpila spoke about incarceration writings in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and how they demythologize prison, countering notions of prisons as places of rehabilitation or as necessary evils.

The titles of the theses and field exams that were presented are as follows:

Caitlyn Dittmeier: Hands Well-Earthed: Re-reading Nature in Medbh McGuckian’s Ecofeminist Poetry

Catherine Bialkowski: The Missing Mother: An Exploration and Analysis of Maternity in 18th and 19th Century Children’s Literature

Josh Hsu: New Bodies and Enhanced Software: Constructing the Posthuman in Science Fiction

Olivia Stowell: We Want to See You on the Plate: Power, Race, and History in Top Chef

Sarah Beth Gilbert: 20th and 21st Century Queer and Feminist American Science Fiction

Shea Szpila: Prison Witness Literature: Challenging the US Prison System and Conventions of Readership