The 14th Annual Thesis and Field Exam Symposium was held in SAC 300 on Wednesday, May 8, 2024, and featured research presentations by Megan Hayes MA '24, Sarah Gregory Herr MA '24, Matt Villanueva MA '24, and Eva Wynn MA '24.
Megan Hayes MA '24 presented her field exam, "Gothic Modernism: Exploring Race, Gender, and Sexuality Through Haunted Women." She described gothic modernism as a relatively new field, and fictional women as the topic where gothicism and modernism meet. She addressed questions such as: what constitutes haunting, and how are women haunted differently from men?
Megan also provided advice for future students considering field exams. She said that she made her own syllabus at the beginning of her field exam, pairing one or two books per week along with secondary readings, and assigned herself response papers and summaries. Megan then spent three or four weeks in April writing. She found this structure extremely helpful in completing her exam.
Our next presenter was Sarah Gregory Herr MA '24, who presented her thesis, "Reimagining 'Human': Anthropocene Small-Scale Readings of Inter- and Intra-Species Relationships in the Work of T. C. Boyle,' and who described her thesis as "a lot of little ideas smooshed together." Sarah spoke about climate change and the interactions between humans and animals. She asked, "Are human solutions enough to dismantle human problems, and what is 'human,' anyway?"
Sarah gave the following advice to first-year students: "You are not writing your thesis or field exam alone."
Matt Villanueva MA '24 presented his thesis, "A Work in Progress: Recovering the Filipino Literary Voice of Survival." He was inspired by a mentor with whom he spoke, who told him that "A Filipino is always a work in progress." Matt told his fellow students and faculty that he intentionally put himself in his thesis and employed a degree of snark, as part of a larger effort to "find myself in the literary and scholarly archive." Matt touched upon aspects of Filipino cuisine and language (employed without italicization or translation) as elements of contemporary Filipino literature. He also touched upon the challenges of recovering marginalized historical events, especially those suppressed in mainstream American discourse, mentioning in particular the incident in Balangiga, Samar in 1901 where American troops left a village as a “howling wilderness.”
Matt mentioned as well that he relied upon personal communication and interview at times for his thesis. He even quoted his mom a few times!
Our final presenter, Eva Wynn MA '24, presented her thesis, "Literature for the Common Woman: Reading Early Novels, Penny Journals, and Fanfiction." Eva considered the contemporary genre of fanfiction in conversation with the historical forms of early novels and penny journals. She noted that all the forms in question emerged as serialized, as more widely and economically accessible than other forms, and that all the forms were particularly popular among marginalized groups such as women and the working class. Eva examined the ways that negative reception of all these forms mirrored each other over the years, and concluded that "Anything can be literature if we treat it as such." She also noted that "When men write fanfiction, we call it pastiche or post-modernism."
We are grateful to all the students and faculty who presented at and attended this event. It was interesting to hear the results of our students' research, and it was fun to watch the ways that these projects echoed and spoke to one another over the course of the symposium.
You can read about previous symposia
here (11th),
here (12th), or
here (lucky 13th!).
Comments
Post a Comment