Jenna Kosnick's Journey to their First Conference Talk

 

Jenna Kosnick '26, pictured alongside Dr. Mary Mullen and Julia Reagan '26

        I recently sat down with Jenna Kosnick, who’s in their second year of pursuing a master’s degree in English, to hear about their experience attending 2025’s North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA 25) conference last month. Hosted by Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., from November 13th to 16th, NAVSA 25 invited Victorian Studies academics from across the country to discuss how their work identifies and examines the ripple effects of and linkages between the Victorian period and today’s modern world. NAVSA 25 offered panels with focus ranging across disciplines, including “Urban Aftermaths: The Literary City,” “Art and Intimate Spaces in the Victorian Home,” “Cognition, Belief, and The Real,” and “Empire, Slavery, and The Gothic,” which was moderated by the department’s own Dr. Mary Mullen and featured Jenna’s talk, “The Gothic Reigns in Demerara.”

        Jenna explained how their talk worked with Harriet Martineau’s 1832 work Demerara, an argument for abolition through the lens of pro-capitalist critique from her collection of stories, Illustrations of Political Economy. Their analysis of Demerara explored how Martineau’s deployment of economic theory “actually uses different forms of gothic terror in order to get an assumed white readership on board with abolition [and] how it's unable to actually banish a lot of the uneasiness with the implied transition to capitalism because the future it starts to create is also unequal and imbued with gothic terror.”

        “The Gothic Reigns in Demerara” was initially developed as a seminar paper for Dr. Mullen’s “Victorian Publics and Populations” course last fall, but after Dr. Mullen informed Jenna of NAVSA 25, they decided to apply for a spot on a panel and develop the paper into a talk. “[Dr. Mullen] mentioned this conference, so I asked if I could be a part of it, and she was super helpful,” Jenna said. “She was the one who set up the panel I was on, and she was the moderator there…She got other people, she created a panel that I could actually present at, she looked over my abstract. And she was also super helpful when I condensed my seminar paper, reading over that as well and giving me some notes on it.”

        Jenna's application was accepted, which then led to the rigorous process of condensing a thirteen-page paper down to a brief presentation. They detailed how they went through their paper section by section to identify the overarching argument before trimming out most of their close readings to “distill it down to the bare bones of my general argument.” They also told me how they faced some initial nerves before sharing their work at NAVSA 25, as they’re “pretty good at public speaking, but [had] never done this kind of presentation before.” However, the talk was a resounding success, and Jenna received lots of supportive, constructive, and thought-provoking feedback from their audience. “People did bring up things that I hadn’t necessarily considered. One person was talking about how the transition from slavery to capitalism was not as clean as Martineau presents, or as I was necessarily discussing in my talk. I thought that was a really interesting and useful point, and it made me think more about how I could potentially address it.”

        After getting their panel out of the way early on the first morning of the conference, Jenna was able to enjoy listening to other speakers present their work and connecting with other guests over the rest of the weekend. They shared how they initially “never expected networking to be something I particularly did,” but with Dr. Mullen’s help, they made some valuable connections with their peers, including one speaker from their panel who’s “an alumnus at a university I’m looking at [for my Ph.D.], so I could definitely reach out to her again.” When asked what they had learned in developing, fine-tuning, and presenting their first conference talk, Jenna suggested some practical tips and tricks for graduate students new to navigating academic conferences. “I did not consider that you could use slides. It might have been useful for me if I could have prepared that in advance…also, when you print out [your talk], make sure you print it out in a much larger font size."  

      Finally, in reflecting on their experience, Jenna offered some words of encouragement for other graduate students who are considering submitting their work to a conference but still managing some initial anxiety around navigating a new social and intellectual infrastructure. “I’m a huge nerd, but I do want to say to the other huge nerds who will be in an English MA program that conferences are fun to be at. I went to a ton of panels on horror stuff, like horror and sexuality, and I was having a great time. It’s just fun to hear all these interesting papers, so I would say even if conferences are scary, they’re also really fun and rewarding, too.” 

                                                                                                                                     —Aria Gray '26