Undergraduate Forum

The Paradoxical Nature of Women Travel Writers: Transcending & Reinforcing Boundaries

This presentation will analyze the paradoxical experience of female German travel writers in the long 19th century, who were able to transcend gender boundaries through their travels but also reinforce stereotypes and entrenched ideas of other cultures in their writings. Through close readings of excerpts from Ida Pfeiffer’s Eine Frauenfahrt um die Welt and Ida von Hahn-Hahn’s Orientalische Briefe, I will analyze how the observations, actions, and language used by each woman are used to form her colonial identity. In particular, to what extent is she able to transcend the societal gender barriers of her time, and how do her interactions with and commentary on foreign peoples inform her identity? These women use the colonial sphere as a means to step outside conventional gender roles and form a hybridized individual identity, which is dependent on colonial ideas of Western dominance and superiority. As my reading of Wildenthal et al.’s article “The German Colonial Imagination” suggests, women who, like Pfeiffer and Hahn-Hahn, interacted in the colonial sphere were often champions of their own agency and autonomy, but did not extend this progressiveness to the native population. Hahn-Hahn and Pfeiffer’s writings about the foreign cultures and people they encounter largely focus on women, which appears to be both productive in forming their own identity and notably one-sided. Finally, I will examine these women’s writings in the context of Germany’s own unique colonial experience. The relative lateness of Germany’s colonial endeavor is significant in analyzing these narratives because German colonial consciousness informed beliefs about the colonial or Oriental “Other” long before Germany’s first physical colonies.

Across the Sea, Upon the Stage: Early Modern Depictions of Immigrants

The uptick in xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric by European and American leaders during the last decade has been mainly spurred by the horrific Syrian Civil War and the resulting influx of refugees and asylum seekers to European Union countries and the United States. But hostility towards refugees is certainly not new, nor is the public outcry against refugees simply a recent phenomenon spurred on by nationalist leaders. The roots of xenophobia may, as Stephen Greenblatt points out in a 2017 New Yorker article, be “quickened…by the same instinct that causes chimpanzees to try to destroy members of groups not their own,” an instinct of fear towards the other (July, 10th & 17th). Indeed, reactions against “alien” presences can be seen frequently in the history of literature, perhaps no more strikingly than the early modern drama Sir Thomas More, co-authored by William Shakespeare. That play opens with civilian riot, and was produced at a point when anti-immigrant tensions were alight in Elizabethan London, and the play was censored and probably never performed for fear of inciting further uprisings.

My presentation will focus on dramatic representations of xenophobia and immigrant experience during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I. In particular, I will examine the boisterous genre of city comedy, including Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, in order to highlight how Early Modern Londoners viewed these “aliens” as both threats to their forming national identity and assets to the burgeoning mercantile community. I will also take into account how, within the genre of city comedy, these foreign subjects are most often heard about instead of heard from, since the great majority of authors within the early modern dramatic record are, of course, English natives.

• Do Quyen Pho & Ha Vy Do Nguyen, Fulbright University Vietnam, “‘The Vacant Chair’ in Vietnam: Resilience, Silience, and Silence in Postwar Context”
• Mario Ulloa, University of New Mexico, “Recognition Discourses in Post and Neocolonial Films”
• Britt Cranmer, SUNY Fredonia, “Expressing Gender-neutral Identities in the Spanish Language Classroom”
• Claire Waldrop, Ohio University, “The Horrors of A Patriarchy: The Final Girl Trope and the ‘Finnsburg Episode’”
• Jamie Aciukewicz, University of Massachusetts Lowell, “Resilience in the Hispanic Immigrant Community of Lowell, Massachusetts”
• Madeline Crosby, SUNY Buffalo State College, “The Potential of Feminist Metaphysics for Trans Futures: Analysis Through Creative Non- Fiction”
• Kyra Krzywicki, University of Scranton, “Taylor Swift’s Lyrics: Catalyst for Adolescent Girlhood in America”
• Julianna Caskie & Connie Ulm, Lehigh University, “Creating Resilient Intergenerational Political Communities Through Regional LGBTQ+ History”
• Yuheng Deng, Haverford College, “Resilience through Trauma: Word and Image in Republican Era Propaganda Broadsheets in 1927”
• Marissa Traglia, Susquehanna University, “Consumption and Capitalism Within Women’s Bodies in Short Stories Written by Latin American Women”
• Martin Zwergel, College of Wooster, “Empathy in Practice: A Comparative Analysis of Audience Implication in STAMPED and Even the Rain”
• Hannah Krull, SUNY University at Buffalo, “Queered Appalachia: Rural Working Women and the Embodied Landscape”
• Sophia Ross, St. John Fisher College, “‘Girl Crimes’ Are Resilience and Rage: Zines as Modern Tools for Social and Political Action”
• Zanaya Hussain, SUNY University at Buffalo, “Female Factory Workers and the Push for a New Wave of Feminism in China”
• Aoife Clune, SUNY Buffalo State College, “The Prevalence of Book Bannings and How They Threaten Students’ Free Expression”
• Julia Platt, Ohio University, “Life Outside the Boundaries: The Resilience of Patriarchy Through Language”
• Victoria Canales, University of Texas at Austin, “‘Sick With Rot’: Memory, Control, and Haunted Houses in Wuthering Heights and Mexican Gothic”
• Hawa Saleh, Canisius College, “Oh the Melodrama!: Melodrama in Crane’s Maggie and Yezierska’s ‘Children of Loneliness’”
• Katie Koeppl, College of Wooster, “Revisiting the Indigenous Character Daniel and Themes of Discrimination in Even the Rain”
• Billie McClosky, St. Lawrence University, “Understanding the Iranian Women’s Movement: Mobilization and Advocacy for Gender Reform”
• Xiomara Jean-Louis, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, “The Haitian Crisis: Resilient Theologies and Applications of Postcolonial Thought”
• Ayesha Jilani, Forman Christian College, “Capitalist Metaphors in Parasite”
• October Heffner, Lake Forest College, “Analyzing Romantic Comedies from an Intersectional Feminist Lens”
• Le Nguyen, Fulbright University Vietnam, “Cinematic Language in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do and Nhã Ca’s The Mourning Headband for Hue”
• Andrea Tapia, St. John Fisher College, “The Rules of Writing: How the Standardization of Linguistic Expression Defined Black Feminism”

• Christopher Sac, “Resilience through the Forced Creation of a Black Male Street Identity in The Other Wes Moore” 
• Jubie Tan, “Creative Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic” 
• Glik Koffink, “Bleeding Out: A Trans-feminist Care Analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)” 
• Riley Kelfer, “‘Unguessed Kinships’: Reading Care Amid Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Novels” 
• Yuchen Lu, “17th Century Ephemeral Literature: Machine Learning in Understanding Ordinary Lives in London” 
• Amy Weng, Charlotte Lim, Heidi Smith, Dan Reznichenko, Ioana Lungescu, “Caring for a Corrupt Corpus: Ethical and Legal Standpoints on English Consumption (1660–1714)” 
• Abhishek Devarajan, “Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism” 
• Martin Dolan, “Questions of Canon in Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar Comics” 
• Madison Blair, “Gynecological Misrepresentations in Medieval Europe” 
• Alexander Paredes-Ruiz, “Imperial Exotification and Theatrical Ahistoricism in Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun” 
• Celene Sui, “Language of Care in Popular Narratives of Feminist Sexual Harassment Allegation in China” 
• Aymon Langlois, “Towards a More Social Social Model” 
• Arianna Robertson, “Representations of Language and History in Postcolonial French-Algerian Women’s Autofictions” 
• Julia LaPlante, “Trauma, Class, and Care in Wuthering Heights” 
• Aniyah Adams, “‘Une histoire tue est une histoire tuée’ : Unsilencing Haitian History in the works of Agnant” 
• Margaux Trexler, “The Pardoner’s Interruptions of the Wife of Bath: Three Explanatory Theories” 
• Ye Ram Kim, “A Language of One’s Own: Multilingualism in Amazigh Literature” 
• Elizabeth Lowney, “Madre Tierra: Identity and Voices in Afro-Diasporic Poetry” 
• Hannah Appelhans, “Friendship in Horace’s Ode 2.6 through German and English Eyes: Hölderlin and Conington” 
• Maria Smith, “The Effects of Racialization and Exoticization of Afro-Caribbean Women Immigrants in Spain” 
• Jillian Lunoe, “Those Who Live Behind the Walls: The Reflection of Care in the Physical Environment” 
• Grey Nebel, “The Construction of Gender Identity and Patriarchal Systems in Postcolonial Maghreb” 
• Lucia Wang, “Miss Castaway: The Anti-miscegenation In Anna May Wong’s 1920s Films”
  

NeMLA Board Choice Award

• JESSICA GOLDSCHLAGER, “Embracing an Interdisciplinary Approach within Disability Studies and Composition Theory” 
• Honorable Mention: MAXWELL AARONSON, “Dreams versus Reality: Representations of French Immigration Policy in Gomis’ L’Afrance”

Membership Choice Award

• (TIE) MILENA GERMON, “‘Big Mean Sweaty Dykes Looking for Trouble’: Working Class Lesbian Culture and Organized Labor” 
• (TIE) MARTINE FREDRICKSON, “‘What Makes a Monster and What Makes a Man’: The Victimology of Monster Fiction” 

Best Engagement with Current Trends/Global Climate

• MADELON MORIN-VIALL, “Grief, Mourning, and Remembrance: Reading Hamlet in the Age of Coronavirus” 
• Honorable Mention: OLIVIA FRISON DE ANGELIS, “Substituting One Imagined Community For Another: How Tourist Bait Damages the Essence of a Country” 
• Honorable Mention: MATTHEW NIEMIEC, “¿Bienvenides a todes? A Study of Gender Neutral ‘-e’ Adoption in Spanish-language Media” 

Best Use of the Conference Theme

• TAMMUZ FRANKEL, “An Unbodied Joy: Explorations in Ahuman Humanities” 
• Honorable Mention: CLAIRE CAI, “Class Alienation in Gerhart Hauptmann’s ‘Lineman Thiel’ (1888): An Economic and Literary Analysis “ 
• Honorable Mention: ALEX GUPTA, “Animal Talk: Theorizing Humanimal Literacy in Elias Khoury’s Yalo” 

Most Compelling Research in Women's and Gender Studies

• MILENA GERMON, “‘Big Mean Sweaty Dykes Looking for Trouble’: Working Class Lesbian Culture and Organized Labor” 
• Honorable Mention: CAL TURNER, “Codpiece Daughters and Good Men: The Social Life of the Virtuous Virago” 
• Honorable Mention: JULIA GRIFFO, “Transgressive Spanish Women and Their Agency through Film Industries in Spain and United States” 

Best Visual Presentation/Poster

• ZIJIA ZHUANG, “The Influence of Oscar Wilde’s Fairytales on the Birth of Chinese Children’s Literature” 
• Honorable Mention: REBECCA DINGLE, “The Linguistic Landscape of Korean Popular Culture” 

Best Oral Presentation of the Project

• JUSTIN GARIBOTTI, “Countering the Problem of Untranslatability in World Literature: The Case of José María Arguedas” 
• Honorable Mention: LIBBIE DEPASTINO, “Magical Realism: Exposing and Challenging Colonial Forces” 

Best Interdisciplinary Project

• ALBERT SUN, Donald Pepka, Daisy Zhan, and Andrew Scofield “Machine Learning and the Consumer Revolution” 
• Honorable Mention: JESSICA SALLER & JAY CARREIRA, “Investigating the Use of ‘To Have’ and ‘To Be’ Statements Within Mental Health” 
• Honorable Mention: HEATHER HARTMANN, “How Intellectual Property Rights Have Reformed the Idea of the Author” 
• Honorable Mention: SERENA LUCKHOFF, “Disembodied Cognition: Constructing a Barrier Between Language and Emotion” 

Best Use of Sources/Theory

• ALICE JACKSON, “Thresholds of Interiority” 
• Honorable Mention: ALEXANDRIA ROSS, “Slight of Hand Femininity: The Manipulation of Femininity in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl”

Best Use of the Conference Theme

• Caroline Lunt, Colby College, “Charlotte Brontë’s Juvenilia: Interpretations of African Land and European Presence"
• Honorable Mention: Olivia Klein, Simmons College, “India’s National Identity as an ‘Imagined Community:’ Magical Realism in Midnight’s Children"

Best Poster Determined by NeMLA Members

• Elia Agudo, Delaware State University, “My Guy Pretty Like a Girl: The Impact of Nonheteronormative Hip Hop on Urban Youth Identity"
• Honorable Mention: Alejandra Mena Serranía, Brown University, “Secondary Characters: Family Narratives between Autofiction and Memorialization"

Women’s & Gender Studies Caucus Most Compelling Research Award

• Cara Mackenzie, Simmons College, “It Is Time to Stop Forgetting: The Reenactment of Women’s Trauma in Irish Literature"
• Honorable Mention: Matt Nilsen, University of Connecticut, “Patriarchy and Sexual Stasis in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy"

Best Visual Presentation

• Azariah Kurlantzick, Clark University, “Dybbuks and Destruction: Explorations into a Yiddish Gothic"
• Honorable Mention: Riley Lampert, University at Buffalo, “Intimacy, or Friendship’: Sexual Identity in Victorian Vampire Fiction"

Best Oral Presentation

• Andrew Fleming, Wesleyan University, “Understanding the Role of Social Salience in the Dialectal Convergence of U.S. Spanish"
• Honorable Mention: Ashely Fenstermaker, Hunter College, “Workspaces for the Individual: Bloomsbury Rooms and American Office Design"

Best Source Integration

• Chris Connors, University of Missouri-Kansas City, “Oppression and Cultural Autonomy: Scalped and the Paradox of Owning Marginalization"
• Honorable Mention: Elvin Meng, Johns Hopkins University, “Paratextual Manchuness: Translation and the (Re)Construction of Identity"

Best Use of Interdisciplinary

• Kaetlyn Arant, Amherst College, “Zola et la Genèse de la Contagion: Women as Purveyors of Disease in Nana and Le Docteur Pascal"
• Honorable Mention: Sophie Call, Wellesley College, “Language Policy and the Integration of Alliance Israélite Universelle Schools into Thracian Society"
• Honorable Mention: Jose-Romarah Chery, University at Buffalo, “Eugenics in the United States from the 1900s-1970s"

Best Poster Determined by the NeMLA Board

• Amanda Judah, Boston College, “Censorship and Identity in 17th-century New England and New Spain"
• Honorable Mention: Parker Chase, University at Buffalo, “The American Melting Pot: How Language Use on Twitter Builds the ‘--- American’ Identity"

Best Poster Determined by Exhibitors

• Jake Pawlush, University at Buffalo, “Queen Elissa: The Roman Adaptation of a Carthaginian Deity"
• Honorable Mention: Kit Pyne-Jaeger, Cornell University, “My Own Body a Banquet: Dracula and the Necromancy of Appetite"

• Megan Conley, University of Maryland College Park
• Leah Headley, Hendrix College
• Alicia Maners, Harding University
• Emma Scheve, University of Portland
• Qingyang Zhou, University of Pennsylvania